The New Moon in Virgo arrives mere hours after Virgo season begins, at 0 degrees, at 2:06am Eastern, on Saturday, August 23rd.
Applying to a tight square with rebellious Uranus, this is an opportunity for the kind of self-expression that disrupts hierarchies and empires, that breaks away from internalized systemic oppressions.
This is a New Moon that encourages us to say our piece/peace. To write the thing that might anger your natal family. To clear your throat and sing. To know that you have a right to be here, and you have a right to speak.
Virgo is virginal, but not in the purity culture way. Virginal as in belonging to one’s self. Virginal as in self-possessed of one’s own authority. Virginal as in sovereign. This is the archetypal energy of Ancient Rome’s Vestal Virgins, of Queen Elizabeth I’s hagiography, of Saint Teresa’s ecstasy, of Audre Lorde’s erotic.
This is the energy of a woman who belongs to herself. But the process of becoming someone who belongs to yourself is as catastrophic as the cocoon. As I wrote in my hybrid memoir Heretic: A Queer Revolt Against Evangelicalism, Empire, and the Lies We Are Sold,
I dyed my hair red, I screeched like an owl, I wandered in the wilderness until I created myself anew.
Back home, back at church, among my college friends and the folks who had known me — known him — to them, I became a Lilith, a terror, a nightmare, a demon wife: a woman possessed of herself, bereft of God and country, lost to all hope; a woman who had fled righteousness, whose example must be kept from your children and most especially your daughters. Hang charms around their necks and pray over them before they go to sleep lest their mdreams take them to some faraway place where they, too, are inspired to flee the confines of the cross, where a strange redheaded woman, beautiful of face but snake of body, lures them away from the light of God and towards the shadows of themselves.
In many ways, committing to oneself (like Edna in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening: “she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself”) is the foundation of a creative life. How difficult to create authentically — to write, to dance, to sing — when still under the weight of internalized systemic beliefs. How impossible to make art when trying to please one’s father or mother or spouse; how shallow the result is when we can’t even lift the curtain to see our own puppet Wizard of Oz, spinning insecurities and doubts and fears.
How vital, to unapologetically be oneself and speak one’s truth. How essential to a truly creative life.
As someone who has written publicly about alcoholism and addiction, domestic violence and rape, my abusive ex-husband and my complicated parents, let me tell you that the freedom on the other side of telling your story is like nothing you’ll ever experience. It’s not immediate, but over time, amidst all the bad reviews and judgmental emails, there grows a true sense of: nothing can touch me. Not literally, of course, but that inner sense of integrity — it becomes unshakeable. You survived the living of it and the telling of it.
This New Moon in Virgo, I encourage you to say the damn thing. May we all screech like an owl, announcing ourselves to the world.
ICYMI
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