Hi everyone,
Lots of new subscribers — thrilled you’re here. As a quick note, the paid version of the newsletter is where you get the day-by-day guide to the month’s astrology!
As always, your writing prompt horoscopes are at the end if you’d like to skip down!
Xx,
Jeanna
A new moon often heralds a new beginning. The moon, representative of the physical body and our emotional selves, invites us to reconsider and recommit to the union of the body and soul, to remember that we aren’t just cogs in a capitalist system only valued for our labor. Of course, a new moon in the systematized, highly intellectual air sign of Aquarius might feel a bit odd — but the great Aquarius Audre Lorde gave us a thesis for this kind of energy:
“Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.”
This moon arrives with a great blessing. Venus, the lover-artist of the cosmos, and Jupiter, our healer-teacher — the two “benefic” (or helpful) planets of traditional astrology — are on top of each other today, having the kind of glow-up conversation (or makeout session, probably) that will help whatever you’re planting really grow. Also in Aquarius, they especially encourage unconventional, fuck-the-system, break-all-traditions approaches to beauty, love, connection, sex, and how we teach and heal our relationship to those things.
Today’s moon, then, is inflected with a healing erotic — the kind that Lorde advocated for in her famous essay “The Uses of the Erotic.” (It must be noted that Lorde’s chart ruler was Venus in Aquarius.) The essay begins,
There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply… spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling…. We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered.
She goes on to say, “We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.”
For Lorde, the erotic is craving. The erotic is purpose. The erotic is motivation for living (which… again: cannot stress enough how on the nose this is, given that Venus in Aquarius in the fifth house was literally her chart ruler). Part of Lorde’s argument is that the erotic has been corrupted through white supremacist capitalism’s disconnecting people to the feeling within themselves.
If we refract this through an astrological lens: the planets that represent our cravings, our longings, are the moon and Venus — traditionally degraded and devalued archetypes within patriarchy. Those planets deal with our emotions. Our capacity for and desire for love and relationship and connection — the platonic, the sexual, the romantic, the familial, all sorts. Venus governs what we value, outside of capitalist striving. The moon says that what our body wants and needs is valuable and should be paid attention to — a direct contrast to the Enlightenment devaluation of woman as unthinking body, since man is the intellectual “head.”
Within astrology, artistic creativity and the erotic live in the same part of the birth chart. To tap into one is to tap into the other. Lorde is exhorting us to value feeling and erotic instinct and motivation — the basis of our creativity.
With this new moon, it is vital that we begin or continue the process of shucking off the old lessons and messaging, that we examine the deeply internalized systems that put us on autopilot when it comes to our relationship with our own bodies and desires — and what we think we’re capable of. But there is an absolutely vital, second component to this essay that is often forgotten. The erotic is to be claimed, recognized, but — perhaps most importantly — shared. How deeply communal and community-oriented. How Aquarian. Lorde continues,
The erotic cannot be felt secondhand. As a Black lesbian feminist, I have a particular feeling, knowledge, and understanding for those sisters with whom I have danced hard, played, or even fought. This deep participation has often been the forerunner for joint concerted actions not possible before.
But this erotic charge is not easily shared by women who continue to operate under an exclusively European-American male tradition. I know it was not available to me when I was trying to adapt my consciousness to this mode of living and sensation.
Only now, I find more and more women-identified women brave enough to risk sharing the erotic’s electrical charge without having to look away, and without distorting the enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange. Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.
When we dance together, play together, and even fight together, our erotic, creative energies magnetize and grow into “joint concerted actions not possible before.”
Let us not, as Lorde says, settle “for a shift of characters in the same weary drama” — let us plant seeds, individually and collectively on this new moon, working together toward the pursuit of genuine change.
Happy New Moon.
Writing Prompt Horoscopes for the New Moon in Aquarius
Horoscopes are written in the style of writing prompts for your own individual use. Each horoscope also includes an astrologically relevant quote selected from Audre Lorde’s collected works for continued reflection.
Aries & Aries Rising
“Without community, there is no liberation… but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”
When you think of the word community, what comes to mind?
How are you creating community? How do you want to do so in the coming six months? In the coming year? What does this look like, structurally, to you? Who do you want to be involved with?
What friendships are particularly sustaining for you in this moment? What relationships feel most abundant and even healing?
Taurus & Taurus Rising
“I am my best work — a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.”
What is your relationship to being public? Is there something about your roles, reputation, and/or career that you’d like to shift or grow in the coming six months?
What is your relationship between your sense of self and the work you’re known for?
What relationships feel particularly abundant in your career and professional life right now? Is there anyone you’d really like to reach out to and connect with right now? (Do it!)
Gemini & Gemini Rising
“The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.”
What are you learning about the beliefs that have governed your life up until now? What is being dredged up from your subconscious, perhaps coming into friction with the lived reality of your long-term plans?
What new ideas are you seeding for your future? What excites or challenges you about this?
What relationships feel key to your intellectual developments, particularly around spirituality, education, or publishing? Who are you learning from? Who are you teaching?
Cancer & Cancer Rising
“What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?”
What new processes and collaborations are you committing to that integrate the intellectual with the emotional?
What opportunities do you have to develop and share resources with others, particularly from communities you’re already a part of? How is your ego responding to this?
Which of your collaborators are bringing the most abundance and support? How are you also bringing these gifts to others, perhaps at difficult moments in their lives?
Leo & Leo Rising
“You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order for us to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.”
What new beginnings are you committing to in, with, and through committed partnerships? What relationships do you want to invite into your life, or further enrich, whether with personal, romantic, or business (e.g. agent/editor) partners?
How do your relationships create, sustain, and challenge the systems you’ve built your life upon?
How do you want to be manifesting with committed partners right now? If you’re looking for an agent or an editor or a partner, what qualities are you looking to invite in?
Virgo & Virgo Rising
“Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.”
What are you learning about your relationship to the work you do every day? About your ideas about the value of your own labor?
What new beginnings are you ready to plant in your daily work environment? How does this impact your health and wellness?
What relationships feel especially supportive around your work and wellness right now? What connections with people you work with feel especially generative right now?
Libra & Libra Rising
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.”
What new beginnings are you reaching for in your relationship to pleasure and play in your artistic life?
What do you intellectually know that you are integrating into the body, heart, and soul — and what is a struggle to bring into mindful and emotional alignment?
What creative and/or romantic relationships feel especially nourishing, healing, and abundant?
Scorpio & Scorpio Rising
“We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding. We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves. We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about — survival and growth.”
What systems at the very roots of your foundations are you beginning to unearth or come to a better understanding of?
What new seeds are you planting at the base of your life around your home or conception of family, natal or chosen? What are you renovating? What are you allowing to stay?
What close, familial or familial-like relationships are supportive right now? What feels like a source of abundance and “yes”? What or who feels healing?
Sagittarius & Sagittarius Rising
“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language."
How have you felt newly intellectually energized when it comes to language and communication, to writing projects or teaching over the last few months? What systems need to be in place to support this?
What new beginnings are you ready to seed in your daily writing routines — and daily routines, generally — to support these efforts?
What relationships feel especially connective, like sources of abundance and co-creation? Are close friends, extended family, or local communities (even neighbors) a part of this support system?
Capricorn & Capricorn Rising
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
What, historically, is the relationship between money and creativity like in your life? What is coming up for you around this right now?
What new seeds do you want to plant when it comes to your income streams? How is your shifting definition of value informing where you’re putting your energy?
Who and what are you investing your time in right now in ways that feel abundant and generative?
Aquarius & Aquarius Rising
“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
What are you in the process of becoming? What are you scared to let others witness about you? What are you frightened to admit to yourself that you want?
What seeds are you planting when it comes to the person you want to be and this life that you are building, having gone through such a deeply intense shedding period over the last few years?
What relationships are you building that feel the most nourishing? Which people in your life really see you?
Pisces & Pisces Rising
“Life is very short, and what we have to do must be done in the now.”
What behind-the-scenes systems are you upgrading in ways that sometimes feel hidden, even to you? How are you stripping away the unnecessary cogs to make room for new wealth and abundance?
What new beginnings are you seeding when it comes to your dreams and your own inner healing? What feels emotionally and even intellectually generative about this?
How is your relationship with yourself at the moment? What abundance can you invite in? What healing are you making space for?
Can anyone help to make the connection between the Pisces Rising quote and the 12th house? It kinda feels like you’re gonna die soon, so get to it. Any other Pisces Risings feeling that?
But I absolutely relate to the behind the scenes stuff. Most of my homework is spirit-based. I am committed to seeing the world through loving eyes. I feel connected to Source and I steadfastly work on releasing the tapes that don’t serve. One Belief At a Time. My efforts have improved familial relationships which is awesome. I am still working on my relationship to myself.
Has anyone watched the S-Factor yet on Netflix? Women Empowerment via learning to dance on the pole. I want to do that! I burst into tears about 13 seconds into the special. Yes, I have a lot of 12th house activity nataly and I have always been a healthy cryer. But I could feel the deep power of freeing up those lower chakras, you know? I know that’s more of an 8th house theme but Covid Dating slash perimenopause slash major dental work has had me feeling unsexy AF, and I am hella sexy. It’s like I know it but don’t really believe it. Belief. There’s a 12th house word. What do I believe REALLY?
As for stripping away cogs to make way for abundance, I have been undoing my bad financial habits for some time now. I still have student loans but I have excellent credit and a retirement fund and I just started investing. I recently took a weekend webinar called Healing Your Relationship to Money and some deep shame stuff was revealed. OK. More work to do there. I believe in prosperity and I tend to my gratitude lists daily. I know there is more work to be done. Why are there so many layers?