The Scorpio Full Moon is exact tonight at 9:42 pm MDT, so tonight is the brightest and most luminous Full Moon of the three-day window for ceremony. It also happens to be the closest Full Moon to Beltane between 2012 and 2020.
Add to that the fact that this Full Moon is square Jupiter, meaning that we have Jupiter at the top of sky when the Sun sets tonight and the Moon rises. The Full Moon occurs at 13 Scorpio, nearest to the star Alphecca in the Corona Borealis (Northern Crown) Constellation.
Then consider that this is the “Buddha Moon” the moment where Siddhartha attained enlightenment.
So you see: tonight’s Full Moon is the peak of high ceremony, to set a tone of magic and possibility for the next two weeks to come.
Celebrating Lunar Beltane Tonight
Though we celebrate Beltane May 1 true Solar Beltane is when the Sun is at 15 degrees Taurus, halfway between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice. This year Solar Beltane is exact Tuesday evening May 5.
Historically, Lunar Beltane was often celebrated at the Full Moon closest to the exact date. This year we have the rare event of a Full Moon right between the official holiday and exact Solar Beltane.
High Magic Beltane Full Moon
All this to say that if you have not yet found or made time for Full Moon/Beltane Ceremony, tonight or tomorrow night is the perfect time! Don’t let the idea of ceremony intimidate you, truly there is no “wrong” way for ceremony.
Fires are perfect for both Beltane and the Full Moon, as a means of purifying, protecting, clearing and releasing.
With Jupiter at the top of the sky in the sign of Leo, I suspect what most of us are needing to release and surrender are any beliefs or energies that hold us back from a full and radiant acknowledgement of our inherent perfection, our inner light, our God Nature.
With the Moon in Scorpio and the Sun in Taurus, it is time to drop down out of busy mind, doing addiction, or any other way of being that takes us out of our bodies and the present moment. Scorpio Full Moon adds the energy of release, of letting go, of falling away.
La Petit Mort: Climaxing Full Moon in Scorpio Invites “Little Death” Through Surrender
At this Beltane Full Moon the Sun in Taurus illuminates the face of the Moon in Scorpio. These two signs, like all which are opposite or polar resonant, generate a great deal of energy between the two of them. Taurus and Scorpio are the Tantric Lovers, generating heat and magnetic attraction, creating new life in the fertile soil of previous endings.
We are invited to embrace both light and shadow, with Taurus creating a sense of abundance, of freshness, newness, and eternal spring, and Scorpio raising the energy, maximizing life-force energy-often through the release or clearing away of what has reached its prime and is ready for ending.
The French know a thing or two about love and sensuality, and it is no mistake that “la petit mort,” a French idiom referencing orgasm means literally, “small death.” It is no mistake that Taurus, symbol for eternal spring, new life, sensuality and fecundity is most powerfully invoked through the energy of Scorpio, associated with sexuality and the death process.
When we climax, as will the Scorpio Full Moon tonight, we surrender to an encompassing energy, we die to our old, restricted, controlled self. Death and orgasm both demand that we surrender our ego’s need for control and separation.
Ceremony for the Beltane Scorpio Full Moon
Daily, middle world life, which so often can feel like a big push, an effort, a requirement to manage and control our surroundings-must be balanced with surrender to the organic, earthy, life-force energies beneath the surface, the throbbing, ecstatic wildness that pulses beneath our civilized skins.
As you open to receive clear insight and will to know what it is that must be surrendered, what must die, what is ready for complete transformation, slow down, be in your body. Stop in your tracks.
See that beloved in front of you… whether that is your intimate lover, your own image in the mirror if you are alone, your beloved kitty.
Open to the aliveness, to the ecstatic experience of being in a physical body. Know all that stands in the way of your full sensual enjoyment of these next two weeks is now burning away, is now melting away, is now falling away, with ease, with grace.
As your literal or figurative Beltane fires blaze tonight, what is it that you would like to surrender, to die away, so that the energy these small deaths release can generate more heat, more aliveness, more passion and a generous and radiant experience of self-love?
Tonight might be a good night for a luxurious bath with essential oils, salts and candles, where you surrender and release through toning, chanting, visualizations.
Tonight might be a good time to dance with wild abandon, to shake off any and all burdens you have accumulated that do not grow your soul, but rather deplete it because they do not belong to you.
For example, have you succumbed to the false belief that you are not beautiful because of your age, weight, or other externally projected ideals of beauty that did not emerge from your own true vision?
Tonight as the organismic energies of the Scorpio Moon and Taurus Sun rise to meet each other and climax in the fullness of this Beltane Moon, how can you dance, burn, sweat, or sweetly, silently release any and all armor you have accumulated that has dimmed your sweet, divine, precious light?
How can you tenderly fiercely shake free any and all old self-loathing, self-rejection, not big enough, not pretty enough, not just-so enough?
Can we end tonight panting, exhausted, surrendered to the reality that we are beautiful beyond imagining, that we are good to our core, that we are radiance in human form, we are the dirty and thirsty and divine creatures made of soul that every angel is astonished by in our courage to inhabit a body, our willingness to grow, our utterly foolish, gorgeous imperfectly perfect humanity?
Night Sky Magic May 3 to May 17
More Moon Magic: From tonight through the Taurus New Moon on May 17 the Moon is in waning phase, growing ever smaller as it activates stars, constellations and planets on its journey through the signs. On Tuesday, May 5, the Moon passes 2.2 degrees NNE of Saturn exact near midnight. The Last Quarter Moon in Aquarius is visible Monday night, May 11.
Mercury is rarely visible, but these first two weeks of May are a good time to look for it near the horizon. Tomorrow night, May 4 Mercury is opposite Saturn, setting in the evening sky after sunset when Saturn rises in the east.
On May 1 the small planet was conjunct the Pleiades at the edge of the Sacred Hoop before moving into the sign of Gemini, and it now follows Venus across the Sacred Hoop as it prepares to station retrograde on May 18.
Venus, still gorgeous and bright high in the west after sunset,is at the center of the Sacred Hoop at 0 Cancer by this Thursday, May 7 the same exact point where the Summer Solstice Sun will rise.
This magical point is where the ecliptic, or the path of the Sun, Moon, and planets across the sky, intersects with the plane of our Galaxy at Galactic Edge, creating what the ancients understood to the a Great Cross.
Mars remains in the glare of the Sun as it moves across the sky, invisible to the human eye and thus “in the Underworld” undergoing its Sun Dance Death and Rebirth Ceremony.
Jupiter remains to the side of the Lion Constellation, near the top of the sky at sunset as demonstrated so powerfully tonight at the Full Moon, as it is in an exact square to the Sun.
Saturn rises about an hour after sunset in the east, still within the head of the Scorpion Constellation.
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