Coming Home to One's Self: The Cancer New Moon
Plus a reminder of July's extraordinary astrology
On Tuesday 14th July at 10:44 am BST we have a nourishing New Moon at 21 degrees of Cancer. Ruled by the Moon, Cancer is a cardinal sign, meaning it initiates action; however, it is feminine in nature, so it is receptive and intuitive, and, being a water sign, is related to the emotions — how we feel. It signifies nourishment, care and security, home and family- our foundations.
The Moon is our feminine luminary, a planet who reflects the light of the Sun (our spirit). She is nourishing and caring in nature, and represents the mothering principle and women in general. Our Moon is also the environment in which we live: our emotional self, our feelings and our intuition.
Combining the sign of Cancer and her ruler the Moon, we can see that a New Moon in Cancer represents an opportunity to seed new beginnings (New Moon) and set intentions around nourishment, care and security, home and family. It also provides the ideal fertile soil from which we can intentionally heal our emotional wounds and come into balance with our feelings over the coming six months cycle.
My question to you is, how well do you look after yourself? Taking care of our own needs and healing is not selfish, it’s quite the opposite. If we are unable to provide ourselves with the nourishment, safety and care that we need, we are unable to provide it for others in a healthy, balanced and whole manner, perpetuating unhelpful patterns within all our relationships — with ourselves, lovers, family, friends, co-workers, our wider community and environment.
What I have personally experienced is that healing my own unhealthy emotional patterns has allowed me to expand my capacity to nurture and care for others as I better care for and nurture myself. Our natal astrology chart gives us clues as to what our emotional needs are, important if we are emotionally numb to them. This New Moon I will be setting intentions around my need to give and receive emotional warmth and security within relationship and my hidden blocks to this (natal Venus in Cancer, 12th house). I will then open myself up to receive any help and resources that come my way to help me achieve any necessary healing and integration.
Whether our unhealthy patterns and wounds around nourishment, care and safety are our own or inherited ancestral trauma, our attempts to heal and integrate such wounds or patterns benefit not only ourselves, but future generations as well as our ancestral lineage. Family wounds, past and present, shape how we and future generations relate — and relationship is everything. How we relate is core to our life experience because, whether we realise it or not, we are in (some level of) relationship with everything we encounter.
Therefore right relationship is necessary not just for ourselves, but for humanity as a whole — it is rarely emotionally healthy and stable individuals who wage war, are consumed with greed and lust for power, or harm others through violence and abuse. It is not an exaggeration to state that our emotional health and wellbeing is essential for a healthy society. For practical guidance on working with emotional patterns, I would thoroughly recommend Emotional Intimacy by Robert Augustus Masters or Mark Wolynn’s , It Didn’t Start with You; both are accessible and practical books, with Augustus’s being the more comprehensive.
Journal Prompts for New Moon Intentions:
What does nourishment, care, security, home and family look like for me?
How do I receive and provide nourishment, care and security?
What makes me feel emotionally secure and cared for?
What thoughts and feelings do the above questions bring up for me?
Can I identify areas of concern, patterns, lack, wounding or trauma that I wish to work with?
Use any identified issues for setting your New Moon intentions, then remain open to resources, pathways and resolution.
The Main Event: July’s Extraordinary Astrology
An edited text from my June 9th article
The Cancer New Moon is the perfect segue into the main astrology of July, as we will see as we explore its meaning and potential.
The famous French astrologer André Barbault described July’s astrology as “the most beautiful configuration of the 21st century”. I’ve taken my thesaurus off the bookshelf to help me come up with a list of words to describe it adequately: phenomenal, sensational, incredible, astonishing, wondrous, astounding, mysterious, breathtaking. I opted for extraordinary as the most encompassing word I could use for this planetary line-up and its potential, because it is!
While the chaos and antics of the governing classes and elites will probably continue to hold sway for the time being, individually this configuration provides an unparalleled opportunity for us to step into our power, claim our sovereignty and fulfil our dreams — and the more we do that, the less power the aforementioned have over us.
The Basket
The basket configuration involves the outer transpersonal planets of Neptune, Uranus, Pluto and the personal planet of meaning and purpose, the great benefic, Jupiter. We will all be feeling this, we will all be impacted by this incredible astrology. And for those of us with planets, points or angles in the early degrees of Aries, Gemini, Leo or Aquarius within our natal chart, dramatically so.
Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus and Pluto are sitting at four degrees across the fire and air signs of Leo, Aries, Gemini and Aquarius. That there is no earth or water in this line-up is itself significant; this is an entirely visionary configuration — ideas, inspiration, revolution and collective awakening — which perhaps explains both its extraordinary creative potential and the reason the nodes, with Virgo’s discernment and Pisces’ depth of feeling, feel so necessary as quiet anchors. But we will get to that later, when we discuss the nodes.
At the heart of the basket sits a single opposition — Jupiter in Leo facing Pluto in Aquarius — the creative tension from which everything else flows. This is the fundamental question of our age configured into celestial geometry: how does the individual sovereign heart expand and express itself authentically, whilst simultaneously serving collective transformation? Leo and Aquarius are always negotiating this polarity — the personal and the universal, the creative self and community — and here they carry the full weight of Jupiter’s expansive generosity and Pluto’s relentless, non-negotiable transformation.
Held within that opposition, two flowing trines do their quiet, powerful work. Neptune in Aries — the new spiritual impulse, raw and initiatory, heralding a fresh beginning of our relationship with the numinous — trines Jupiter in Leo, bringing inspired, visionary energy directly into the heart’s capacity for joyful expansion and creativity. Meanwhile Uranus in Gemini — the great awakener in the sign of ideas, communication and the curious, restless mind — trines Pluto in Aquarius, suggesting that the revolutionary ideas now streaming into our collective consciousness are not in conflict with the deeper transformation underway but are, in fact, its very vehicle. Change of this magnitude needs new language, new ideas and new ways of thinking — and Uranus in Gemini is precisely the energy to provide them.
Three sextiles complete the basket’s geometry, offering opportunity at every turn — between Neptune and Pluto, between Uranus and Jupiter, and between Uranus and Neptune — weaving the whole configuration into something cohesive and mutually supportive. Sextiles require conscious engagement; they offer the gift but ask us to reach for it. The invitation here is unmistakable: lean into the new spiritual impulse, give voice to the awakening, let the heart lead, allow what is dying to die, create what demands to be created, ensuring that it’s in service to the whole. The aspects themselves are doing everything possible to smooth the path.
What emerges, when you hold the whole picture, is a configuration that is simultaneously radical and harmonious — revolutionary in its intent, elegant in its geometry. A genuine inflection point. While it may not signpost the end of difficulty, it is the structural beginning of something genuinely, measurably new.
The Goddesses Join the Dance
To my knowledge, the one important element of this basket that Barbault did not consider was the involvement of the planetary bodies we call dwarf planets and asteroids; when we look at the chart with these in mind, our understanding increases significantly. Each of the planets involved now has a dance partner, and the basket is centred within a larger sacred circle dance. We have Uranus conjunct Sedna, Jupiter conjunct Psyche, Pluto conjunct Juno, and Neptune conjunct Borasisi (a masculine energy, the inclusion of which I will explain below).
We also have the Hawaiian creator goddess Haumea, and Toro (named after a real woman rather than a mythological goddess, though no less powerful for that) in Scorpio at 2 degrees, Panacea at 2 Libra, Medusa at 4 Taurus and Hekate at 4 Pisces, ensuring that all the elements — fire, air, earth and water — are represented by a goddess, present with their dance cards.
What strikes me most about this goddess line-up is how it mirrors the deeper work of transformation. Sedna in Gemini speaks to the reclamation of the abandoned feminine and our soul voice. Psyche in Leo, to the soul’s hard-won journey towards love. Juno in Aquarius, to the restructuring of our most sacred bonds and social contracts. And Borasisi — the one masculine figure, and a fictional one at that — as Neptune’s partner in Aries, embedding the warning of illusion.
The Bigger Picture
If we step back and look at what the goddesses are collectively saying as they dance around this basket, we see that Haumea-Toro provides the primal, unstoppable force of rebirth. Psyche tells us the soul must go through its trials to reach divine love. Juno demands the restructuring of our sacred bonds and social contracts. Sedna calls us to reclaim our soul voice. Panacea offers the possibility of genuine healing whilst warning of the false cure, and the need for relational balance. Medusa brings the long-suppressed wound of the feminine directly into the axis of transformation in an earthy and material form. And Hekate stands at the threshold in liminal Pisces with her torch, guiding us through the dark.
The only planet without a goddess dance partner is Neptune, his companion a fictional masculine god whose religion is built on lies. The truth that the sacred without the divine feminine is a lie, writ large across the sky. Sit with that for a moment.
The cosmos, it seems, has left nothing to chance. This basket signifies a global change that affects humanity as a whole, whether or not it touches a sensitive point in your own natal chart (and the chances are that when you add in the asteroid/dwarf planet dance partners, your chart will be impacted somewhere).
The nodes at 0 degrees Virgo (South Node) and Pisces (North Node) seem to be saying: bring your rigour, your sovereignty, your capacity for discernment, then surrender it all into the oneness that awaits. Neither polarity alone is sufficient. It’s the integration of both that navigates this threshold. The North Node here is specifically leading us towards compassion, letting go of fear, and trust in what is unfolding.
The other striking polarity at play here is, of course, the divine masculine and feminine — energies that we all possess no matter our biological sex. My personal view (gained from esoteric study, contemplation and personal experience) is that it is the imbalance of the divine feminine and masculine in our world that is the root cause of so much pain and injustice. It’s my sense, formed through years of esoteric study and lived experience, that wherever the divine feminine has been suppressed or erased, that imbalance shows up in the wider culture — often as domination, control, or violence. I don’t offer that as settled fact, only as the pattern I keep seeing.
“Without the feminine nothing new can be born, nothing new can come into existence — we will remain caught in the materialistic images of life that are polluting our planet and desecrating our souls. We need to return to the core of our being, to where the sacred comes into existence. And the mystical feminine holds the key to this work of redemption and transformation.” — Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee¹
Conclusion
What I find so powerful when sitting with all this is how complete the astrology feels, as though nothing has been left unaddressed. The basket itself carries the bones of something genuinely new being built, while the goddesses, in their dance around it, tell us precisely what that building requires of us.
Together, each individual one of us forms the collective we call humanity, and it is up to each of us to heal, integrate and reach for our highest potential if we are to bring about the change we wish to see in our world. In the words attributed to Gandhi, “Be the change.”
The power structures that keep us divided and in fear understand our collective power. We are many, and all it takes for a tipping point to occur is the participation — not of the majority, as we might assume, but of a committed few. Research into how social norms shift found that once around a quarter of a group holds firm to a new way of being, that new way can rapidly become the way of the whole — the old norm simply cannot hold against it. Studies of the great nonviolent movements of the last century tell a similar story on a civil and political scale: campaigns that drew active, sustained participation from as little as 3.5% of a population succeeded in bringing down entrenched regimes that had stood for generations.
If a committed minority can shift what a society does and how it governs itself, is it so great a leap to imagine the same dynamic at play in what a society believes, values, and how it heals? I don’t have hard data proving this extends to matters of consciousness — that claim belongs more to faith and lived experience than to peer-reviewed science. What I have is a growing felt sense, shared by so many of us walking this path, that our own healing ripples outward, further than we can measure. This, together with my understanding of how we create our reality, gives me hope that we are, as the astrology points to, within reach of that tipping point, and that we are being fully resourced in our efforts.
Nothing about this moment is accidental. Everything is in its place. And the divine feminine is calling us into balanced relationship with ourselves, each other, and the divine — masculine and feminine united once more in balance and harmony. The invitation is loud and clear. A new world awaits, yet it needs our participation, and you are being called to join the dance.
May you find the courage to release what is already leaving. May you have the wisdom to recognise Hekate’s torch from Borasisi’s seductive glow. May whatever has been scattered within you be gathered back into wholeness, and may your heart — like the basket itself — be wide enough to hold both the darkness and the extraordinary light that is being born through it. We are, all of us, midwives of the new world, a world in which we honour both the divine masculine and feminine equally, within and without. Come join the dance.
Love and blessings, Linda 💜
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¹ See the work of Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee and his book The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul for a beautiful account of the divine feminine and the need for her reintegration into our world.
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The Turning of The World! Oh! I better get to work! 😁😉
Great post, Linda! 💚