I’ll be writing more about the eclipse in the next day or two, and I’ll be discussing it on my radio show Sunday morning. (Look! Beliefnet gave me a box for my radio show in the sidebar.)
All New Moons mark a beginning. They are great for timing prayers and rituals, per the ancient premise that declaring our intentions at the start of a cycle determines how the rest of that cycle will play out. This summer’s Big Beginning was the June New Moon that served as the template for the whole season. July’s New Moon is sort of a back-up beginning, giving us a shot at incorporating what we didn’t know at the Solstice… but we do know now.
The July 21st Eclipse has extra power for other reasons, too. Because of its unusual proximity to the lunar nodes, mundane astrologers expect more from it (especially in Asia, which receives its arc of visibility). And it is the longest Eclipse so far this century.
This is not a prompt to duck under the covers and hide. I do hope we have banished from our worldviews that kind of superstitious thinking; although astrologers ourselves tend to lapse into it especially where eclipses are concerned. We may joke, “Oh man, I’m staying in bed that day” with an apologetic giggle that signals we know it’s a cop-out to make bogeymen out of planetary configurations.
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