The Journey of a Goddess & the Virgo Lunar Eclipse

The first lunar eclipse in Virgo in 17 years is just a little over 24 hours away. Late tomorrow night or early Friday (that 11:53 pm Pacific Time tomorrow and 2:52 am Eastern Time and 6:51 am GMT on Thursday), we're all going to experience the Deep Mind time compression known as a total lunar eclipse. In just a few hours, the moon will appear to our outer eyes to go from full to new to full again -- something that usually takes 29 1/2 days.

We're so deeply connected to the Moon that even when we don't know with our conscious minds that a total lunar eclipse is happening, our lives can change forever when she moves deep into Earth's shadow. Something in our emotional reality dies -- so that our lives can go to a new level.

A total lunar eclipse is a massive clearing out of the Virgo part of our lives and our birth charts. Because this is the first Virgo lunar eclipse since 2008 -- shortly after Pluto entered Capricorn and began his 16-year reality transformation mission -- there's a lot to release. Think about all the ways your life, and our world, have changed. Virgo is the sign of the fractal cosmos. "As above, so below" is the truth of the zodiac's only human -- the Virgin: when the world changes, so do we. And when we change, so does the world.

More than any other sign, Virgo rules the bodymind. Everything that happens in the Virgin's sign is guided by Mercury (which is why you're never going to meet a dumb Virgo). And Virgo is an earth sign, that rules the gut -- the part of the body neurologists call the "second brain," because it has more emotional neuroreceptors than the cranial brain. If any archetypal period imprints us with the truth of the bodymind connection, it's that virgnal time when we're passing from childhood to adolescence.

That passage is an evolutionary leap. Remember how turbulent and confusing it was? It's even more so now -- for many young people, a life-or-death crisis. The skies are telling us that's what's happening for all of us now. We're all in a life-or-death evolutionary crisis.

Astrologically, the sign of Virgo is one of the oldest, and since astrology's beginnings in ancient Sumeria, it's always been associated with that crucial time when a girl leaves childhood behind. To the Sumerians, though, it wasn't called Virgo, but Ab Sin, which translates as "the Moon God's daughter" -- who was Inanna, as Venus was called long before she was known as Astarte, or Aphrodite, or Venus.

 Is it a random coincidence that this first total lunar eclipse in Virgo comes as Venus, for whom the sign of Virgo was named at astrology's beginnings, is retrograde in Aries, the first sign, where everything begins? This month, I find myself thinking of her constantly, with a new level of resonance and devotion.

So I recorded another passage from Inanna, Emily H. Wilson's virtuosic re-telling of the world's oldest story -- Inanna's. Here is an introduction to Inanna's uniqueness among the Anunnaki, as the Sumerian gods were called, and to her relationship with her grandfather Enki, one of the two sons of the great An, king of the gods. In this chapter, Inanna shares an experience that imprinted her in a primal way.

In this lunar eclipse field, I can understand some of the reasons it resonates so deeply with these times -- and I can feel that what I understand is only the tip of the iceberg. I think it will be true for you as well. Listen in here and see for yourself.

Inanna's daring -- and reality-changing -- journey of transformative self-discovery is foreshadowed here. Each time I read it (this is the third since it was published 17 months ago), I feel at a deeper level than before that her journey foreshadowed ours. For her story is the first to be written.

From the first time I read it, I found it compelling beyond words. With each successive reading, I begin to understand at a deeper level  that she was mapping the quest of our civilization -- not the Hero's Journey, but that of the Goddess. I'm beginning to decode the message on those ancient clay tablets -- that when we too can live her journey of death and regeneration consciously, the evolutionary leap will occur.

That's what I believe tomorrow's lunar eclipse is all about -- along with Venus' retrograde, and the massive sign changes that will begin on March 30. That's why our world is falling apart. It's time to let Inanna live in us.