February 24: Virgo Full Moon
Mercury enters Pisces at 2:29AM ET on February 23, in time to flip the Virgo Full Moon upside down. There is an unusual exchange between the Pisces and Virgo areas of your life so check your chart for where this mutable magic is making manifest during Pisces Season from February 18-March 19.
Our empathy is heightened when Mercury transits Pisces from February 23-March 9, 2024. We’re drawn to express ourselves creatively and find the metaphorical more engaging than the literal. Mercury in Pisces is an emotional thinker who’s concerned with how things feel rather than whether they are absolutely accurate. This is a signature of poets and geniuses like James Joyce, Aretha Franklin, Johann Sebastian Bach, Diana Ross, Vincent Van Gogh, Billie Holiday, and Smokey Robinson. It is in the describing of the personal, honoring the impulse to communicate something deeply meaningful, that we connect to the universal.
This is a strange song for Luna to find herself singing in such a traditionally practical placement. Virgo is the harvester, the analyst who crunches the data and issues a policy recommendation. The Virgo Full Moon usually passes out notes about what's good, what's better, and what's best; but the agenda is quite different with the opposition from Mercury, the Sun, and Saturn in Pisces. The usual Virgo fact-checking and data worshiping is upended for an exploration of the emotions that underlie your beliefs. We’re building up to the intense Sun-Mercury-Saturn conjunction that culminates in stages on February 28. We’re gathering information about how the Virgo-Pisces areas of life interact and support each other. A verdict of one form or another will be issued on February 28.
The Virgo Full Moon at 7:30AM ET on February 24, asks us to consider what tangible steps we can take to improve the quality of life emotionally and spiritually. Pisces season opens us to the totality of human experience. Compassion can feel like an eternal heartbreak as we consider the suffering of the world. The entrance of Mars into Aquarius and conjunction with Pluto has increased violence and brutality. From the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza and attacks on Rafah, to the murder of non-binary teenager Nex Benedict in Oklahoma in their own high school bathroom. It is easy for the caring hearts of the world to fall into despair. The Pisces waters are the unending tears that we cry at the pain of millions of innocent people that we are powerless to end. But Virgo reminds us there is always something we can do. However, small and humble that action goes into the whole and is always worth taking.
The Full Moon at 05°23 Virgo finds joy in the details and increases our capacity to make sustainable change by taking on manageable tasks towards a definable goal. The harvest maiden archetype is concerned with purity and health. How do we fulfill basic needs–water, food, shelter, healthcare–so that everyone can thrive? Ask a veteran nurse in any major hospital and they will give you five tangible suggestions for how to improve the delivery healthcare for providers and patients. We’re encouraged to ask the people impacted by the problem to weigh in on the solution at this lunation. The conjunction of Mars and Venus in Aquarius is increasing our motivation to come together.
The square with Venus and Jupiter at 10°31 Taurus at 11:01PM ET on February 24, brings support wherever you need it most if you’re willing to ask for it. This Moon has a mystical component, so engage in mutual aid and give from your excess, but let other people support your essence so that you have the capacity to seek out hidden realms of possibility. Taurus is the Hierophant card in the tarot Major Arcana. What kind of spiritual practices or teachings can support you in moving through the highs and lows? What parables stay with you and which slogans pop into your consciousness at exactly the moment you need to be reminded? The balance of earth during Pisces season reminds us that we need to ground so we don’t get carried away by every fast moving stream of life.
Virgo asks us to evaluate what is suitable and what is true but the Mercury-Sun conjunction at 09°15 Pisces at 3:43 AM ET on February 28, is going to show us what really matters. A fact is defined as something that can be proven. Its content is objectively verifiable and not based on opinion. A belief is something we hold because it makes sense to us on both an emotional and intellectual level. Its easy for Virgo to get pedantic but this Full Moon asks you to give equal credence to the truth of your heart. Spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle advises that when there is a conflict between the head and the heart, is it the heart that will hold the truth. Not the absolute truth of who we are on a spiritual level, but the wisdom of the body and experience of our younger and wiser selves resides in the chest and not the head.
This Full Moon enables us to dissolve the pedantic nature of Virgo through connecting to Oneness. A worthy exercise is to consider your intellectual position on a topic. Something that you feel firm in your understanding and unshakable in your belief. Now try to imagine where the people who inhabit “the other side” are coming from emotionally. What are the feelings that drive their actions? What fears motivate their cruelty? Often the worst of human behavior comes down to fear, but we can usually identify 2-3 common sentiments that we share. This universal recognition breaks down binary barriers and allows us to stay anchored in the heart as we carry out our individual tasks.
This compassion building exercise is not to excuse, or even forgive, but to keep our own ego from hardening our hearts so that we stay open to the healing that’s possible during Pisces season. Keeping love and gentleness flowing through our own internal pipeline will make it easier to access and offer comfort when we need it the most. It is a practice that can keep our heads above water when despair threatens to sink us. Love you.