11 Mar Heart of the Ocean ~ New Moon in Pisces – March 13th, 2021

On March 13th, 2021 the New Moon in Pisces will arrive, illuminating a romantic dreamworld that will carry you all the way into the equinox. Venus and Neptune will add a diaphanous aura to this New Moon, making it supremely fortunate for artists, lovers and dreamers. New Moons refresh and replenish your creative and emotional energies. But rather than setting sail for a specific destination, this New Moon in Pisces asks for total surrender into a half-lit dream world. It is time to float, yielding to the currents and trusting that you will be carried to wherever you need to go. 

As the last sign in the zodiac, the New Moon in Pisces has an elegiac quality, the melancholy of something beautiful coming to an end. Thus, your dreams will dissolve into visions and voices of eternity.

“Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t even a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off…”

–Joseph Campbell

Since last March, the Sun has made its way through the entire zodiac, becoming the first born ruler in Aries, the divine king in Leo, and the wandering exile in Aquarius. By now, the Sun has grown weary of becoming and surrenders to the bliss of sleep.

At this New Moon in Pisces, you may also feel weary of becoming. Now is the time to be guided by a power greater than yourself, letting go of worldly ambitions to discover what lies beyond all the fear and hustle and noise. 

Everyone is exhausted now with long-suffering confinement, isolation and alienation. It has been a year since “two weeks to flatten the curve”. Just like when Titanic first hit the iceberg, flattening the curve was imagined to be only a moderate disruption. But things escalated quickly. Primal panic, the weakness of science and the cruelty of class systems intensified into a tragedy that has wounded millions of people all over the world. 

But no matter troubles may befall you, the oceans of Pisces have a heart whose love is infinite, smoothing the pain of the past into compassion and dissolving grief into deeper love. In Pisces, your personal drama seems only a tiny ripple in a vast ocean of much bigger waves. Immersed in this eternal place, your heart aches with centuries of tragedy, sacrifice and great love. 

“Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain.” 

The symbol of Pisces, the fish, is a primal image of the collective unconscious: the prima materia of the dreamworld. The power of myth and magic emerges from these waters. And with the added influence of Venus and Neptune on this New Moon, the most blissful and romantic dream images will emerge. 

Falling in love under these influences will be a deep dive into the fathoms below. Venus and Neptune in Pisces will inspire a heartfelt devotion to the beloved. Beyond seeking a lover or a muse, there is a deep yearning for intimacy with the Soul of the World whose love and wisdom is the source of all love and wisdom.

The ocean gives and it takes away. For as much as this New Moon fills you with inspiration, you may also encounter the darkness of oblivion. Under the Neptunian influence, you can become lost at sea as forms dissolve and time slips away.

This Neptunian New Moon will carry you away from mundane reality through the power of imagination. This quality of transcendence is why Neptune is associated with trance states: from dreaming, to hypnosis, to the art of cinema. 

You can think of cinema as being a gift from Neptune. No other art form captures the time/space fluidity of dreams the way that movies can. Graced by the Neptunian power of inter-dimensional travel, movies lure the audience into a world of pure imagination. This is the essence of magic, where image is impregnated with emotion to birth a powerful meaning.

Like the ancient cave paintings that our primordial ancestors used to envision a successful hunt, a darkened movie theatre opens a mythic dimension where images and emotions stir the currents and momentum of culture. For great good and for great evil, popular film has engendered more than a century of magic for the masses, drawing images from the collective psyche to produce thought forms of great power.

At this Venusian-Neptunian New Moon in Pisces, the images floating through the collective psyche are oceanic, romantic, sentimental and devastating. Here at the end of the zodiac lies the deepest love and the greatest pain. Drawing from the history of popular film, there is nothing quite like James Cameron’s Titanic to evoke the mood of this time. 

Considering the tremendous power of cinema to open the mythic dimension and the power of myth itself to inspire humanity in its evolution, it should be no surprise that James Cameron’s Titanic was one of the most popular and highest grossing films of all time. 

But long before Cameron’s blockbuster, the story of Titanic inspired countless books, films, research projects, and exhibits. It has always been a wildly popular artifact in the collective psyche, for nothing in recent history illumines the spectrum of human drama in such a grandiose manner as the sinking of Titanic. 

Plotted like a Greek tragedy, full of hubris and senseless death, the sinking of the Titanic became a modern myth that revealed the fragility of the scientific age. In 1912, the 20th Century had gotten off to a wild start, lit up by a vision of perpetual scientific progress. The Titanic was the pinnacle of this paradigm: an unsinkable ship that could conquer the ocean with unprecedented luxury and speed. 

Eternal Father strong to save
Whose arm has bound the restless wave…

As the “Ship of Dreams”, the sinking of Titanic seemed an omen of doom, not just for shattered utopian dreams, but for the ensuing decades of World War. The mythic resonance of this story emerges from the fact that its warning of the perils of unbridled technological progress, greed and hubris have not yet been learned. 

The arrogance that led to this tragedy is constantly repeating itself. The captains of industry in the 21st Century have no more humility or common sense than their Edwardian counterparts did. Fueled by a utopian arrogance, technocrats have built the world upon an increasingly feudal economic system that was bound to meet with disaster and tragedy.

Who bids the mighty ocean deep
It’s own appointed limits keep
O hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in Peril on the sea…

The sinking of Titanic contains all the best and worst of humanity. In addition to many individual acts of great heroism and sacrifice, there was a cruel class system that prioritized the lives of first class passengers. This is similar to how when the pandemic hit, the people who lived paycheck to paycheck were put in immediate danger while those on the higher decks of society enjoyed their time off. 

The meager stimulus checks did not save any lives. And death became imminent for many small businesses, service jobs, and contracts. Since then, the waves have taken many lives and livelihoods. 

As a mythic symbol, Titanic draws us into a cathartic exploration of the deepest elements of what it is to be human. The story of Titanic quickly strips away illusions about life and death, inviting a catharsis. 

In the twilight language of symbols, the Ship of Dreams swallowed by dark waters seems to be an outpouring from the shadow of the “collective unconscious”. This term was articulated by Carl Jung in Psychology of the Unconscious, published the same year as the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. 

Jung believed that the unconscious was not a personal phenomenon, but was something inherited from the collective experience of humanity. He perceived that just beneath the surface, everyone had access to the vast oceans of eternity. This is where the myth of Titanic truly resonates from, calling humanity to make peace with its darkness and become reborn into deeper compassion and love.

As an apocalyptic romance, James Cameron’s Titanic is the deepest and most effective film version. It is a technical masterpiece, accurately recreating every historical detail, set in motion by the pathos of a decidedly un-ironic love-story. 

Though cynical viewers discredited the film for its sentimentality, there is nothing like its fever pitch of Hollywood romance to evoke the Venus/Neptune conjunction in Pisces, where sentimentality inspires a desire for spiritual transcendence. Aboard a sinking ship, all that matters is love. And in love, the dreamer dreams their way to eternity. 

The narrative of Titanic relies on the memories of an old woman named Rose, whose recollection of surviving the wreck is a reverie of romance, self-discovery and divine sacrifice. 

James Cameron’s narrative highlights how the masculine excesses of the era drove the feminine wisdom of nature, (symbolized by Rose, the heart, and the ocean) to descend into darkness. And in the spirit of a fairy-tale, just as light shines brightest in the darkest places, love grows stronger in times of great struggle. 

The sinking of the Titanic was a symbol for the end of the modern age. And the film, released at the end of the 20th Century, reinforced this elegiac quality in the priest’s reading from the Book of Revelation as the ship is sinking: 

“for the former world has passed away”.

Myths inspire humanity’s understanding of the mystical, cosmological and social realms. And so, Cameron’s apocalyptic romance birthed a powerful meaning for any end of the world scenario, including the one that is happening now. In Cameron’s own words, the lesson of Titanic is that “life is uncertain, the future unknowable…the unthinkable possible.”

Titanic answers the angst of apocalyptic times with the declaration that love is the true master of the universe. So at this New Moon in Pisces, let yourself merge with the waters of eternity, feeling everything that needs to be felt at the tragic end of an era. The wisdom of Pisces will guide you to yield to all of life’s joy and sorrow, for even during storms and shipwrecks, the ocean has a heart whose love is infinite.

Much Love,

Rachel