Hey friends, happy New Moon in Taurus. We’re 2 weeks out from that potent full moon in Scorpio… how are you all doing out there? How did that lunation show up for you?
This new moon is conjunct the Medusa Star and happens on the same day that Mars meets Chiron. So while it’s not necessarily gentle, it’s still exalted in Taurus, and the gate that it’s falling in is a deep reminder of the power of our personal agency, care, and contributions.
Listen to the full episode in the player above, or wherever you find podcasts! Thanks for liking, sharing, and reviewing Living the Spiral- it truly helps me to reach more people and continue writing and recording this labor of love on a regular basis.
The podcast goes into the depths of this new moon, but here’s a synopsis if you’d prefer to read <3
This new moon, happening on Saturday May 16th in the sign of the Bull, is truly one of the more layered lunations I’ve tracked in a while. We have a super moon conjunct communication planet Mercury, sitting right on the fixed star Algol (the Medusa star), which could bring to the surface themes of betrayal, power dynamics, and how we stay with ourselves after something unjust happens. The new moon is also conjunct Ceres, the asteroid goddess of nourishment and tending what we care about. All of these are meeting in the Gate of Contribution, Gate 8, calling us in to consider what we are bringing from our hearts and souls to the larger collective.
And on the same day as the moon, Mars is moving into exact conjunction with Chiron in Aries, in Gate 3, the Gate of Ordering, known as Difficulty in the Beginning in the I’ching. This conjunction may bring up a collective wound around feeling like we’re in a chaotic void- with a Martian urgency to speed things up, but no idea how to. The underlying gift that this transit could bring is a deep remembering that order always rises out of chaos, and that new beginnings, while chaotic, are filled with raw potential.
The through-line of this lunation is: Your wounds are here to teach you something, your voice is needed more than ever, and only you can decide how to share your offerings with the world.
The Path that led to the New Moon
To feel this new moon you have to feel the gates that the sun and moon moved through before landing here. A couple weeks ago the sun was in Gate 2, Receptivity, the Beltane gate. This was the energy of the fully open flower, one with no strategy, no protection, just wide availability to what wants to move through it. Then, over the past few days, the sun has been moving through Gate 23, Assimilation or Distillation, where the receptivity of Mayday concentrates into something that can be offered, like a bee bringing the nectar back to the hive. The radiance of the bloom becomes a single drop, and the excess falls away.
Gate 2 to Gate 23 to Gate 8 is the pathway we’ve walked through Taurus season, with the blossoming flower, the distilled essence of the fragrance and the pollen, and then the offering back to the hive. You cannot skip to Gate 8, Conribution, without living through the other two. This is true for any gate or sign or seaonal progression, but it’s felt especially palpable to me over the past few weeks.
The Spaniard serenading his señorita is the Sabian symbol for 26 degrees Taurus, where this new moon lands, and this image captures the essence of what Gate 8’s contribution really means. The guitarist is standing under a window singing his heart out, not knowing if it will open or stay shut, not caring which way the tune blows on the wind. He sings because the song is what he has in his heart, and withholding it would be a disservice to humanity. His style and his flair and his devotion is his contribution- it’s not a measurable, productive achievement, but it’s a gift from the heart.
That’s Gate 8, Contribution when it’s not whittled down into a narrow capitalist framing. That’s what we’re working with this new moon.
Rethinking “Contribution”
The title of this Gate holds a charge worth examining, because I noticed what it brought up in my body as I recorded this episode. In the world that most of us were raised inside, contribution is productivity-coded. It means output, achievement, and the finished product you can point to and measure and put a gold star on.
But I watched a video recently about research into the female nervous system, and it moved me. This research barely existed at all until the early 2000s. Before that, our entire understanding of stress and regulation was built on studies done almost entirely on male bodies. When researchers finally started studying female nervous systems specifically, what they found is that women regulate through oxytocin, not dopamine. Men tend to feel grounded and whole through succeeding, through accomplishment. Women regulate through touch, relating, and genuine connection.
The part that really hit me was that excess dopamine in a female body actually depletes oxytocin. The harder you push toward productivity, the more you deplete the very neurochemical that makes you feel loved and connected and like yourself. The “the harder I try the worse I feel” spiral is not a personal failing, it is physiology. It is what happens when a female nervous system runs on a fuel it was not built for.
So the shame that comes when you need to rest, or tend a relationship, or just be present with someone instead of producing something, that shame makes sense inside a system that was only ever measuring one kind of contribution. But the relational labor and the emotional tending is, to me, more what Gate 8 is all about.
The gift of this gate in the Gene Keys is Style, and I think Style here is the irreducible specific way you nourish, relate, and tend. The siddhi is Exquisiteness, a word that means pressed out, as from a flower, the most essential thing offered whole. That includes things like a text you sent at the right moment, or the meal you made for someone, or the way you listened to someone’s story without trying to fix it.
Medusa’s Head at the Point of the New Moon
Algol, the star in the constellation Perseus that’s associated with the severed head of Medusa, has one of the fiercest reputations in the lore of fixed stars. For centuries astrologers have called her malefic, a star of violence and calamity.
But that reading belongs to the people who feared Medusa.
In another telling, Medusa was a brilliant priestess. Her power was so genuine, her presence so real, that the only story the culture around her could hold was the monster story. When she was assaulted by Poseidon on the steps of Athena’s temple, she was the one turned to a snake-headed monster and exiled away. She, not the god who wronged her, was demonized, contained, and eventually beheaded. Some say that Athena turned her into a monster to protect her from men, from gods, by giving her power to turn them to stone. Some only see the awful truth that the goddess turned on one of her own in order to please the gods. Either way, after all of the exile and victim-blaming that Medusa went through -and even after being beheaded- her head still held magic.
That’s the part of the story I want to pay attention to on this new moon in the realm of Medusa’s severed head.
What the myth almost buries is that from her severed neck sprang Pegasus, the winged horse. And when Pegasus’ hoof struck the earth on Mount Helicon, it opened the Hippocrene spring, the waters the muses drank from. Every poem, every song, every piece of art that cracked someone open and let light into their souls, that lineage runs back to Medusa. Her destruction created the conditions for the dispersal of her power. She became, at the end, not a monster, but a source of creation.
We are living inside a Medusa moment collectively. The voices being silenced right now are not random. Funding is being cut from universities, arts organizations, public health infrastructure, and pretty much anything that asks people to think critically or feel deeply. Look at what’s being made monstrous by the powers that be, at what’s being exiled to an island like Medusa was. It is the gaze that sees clearly, that looks into your soul and doesn’t avert her eyes. Medusa represents a deeper, cthonic type of power that does not ask for permission. When we have been wronged, our very gaze has the power to remind the world of unjust systems that are in massive need of reinvention.
That strong gaze is a contribution to the world, in and of itself.
And this is what the star Algol conjunct this new moon reminds us. Medusa’s power did not die with her. Almost any goddess myth will remind you that true power never dies. Even more, the goddesses and female demons of old myth that remind us that life itself does not end with death- it is all part of a larger cycle.
The question this new moon is asking, of you, personally, in your body, is whether you are willing to keep seeing clearly and speaking from a place of deep feeling and personal truth, especially now, when the stakes are high.
Chiron and Mars
On Saturday, the same day as the new moon, Mars and Chiron are meeting in exact conjunction in Aries Gate 3. This is the gate of ordering, representing the seed in the dark or the spark in the night before it knows it will become anything.
In the myth of Chiron, the wounded healer asteroid, the centaur archer was immortal and took an accidental strike from a poisoned arrow that he could neither heal nor die from. He carried that wound for as long as he lived and became the greatest teacher in the Greek world because of it. The thing that could not be fixed in him was exactly what gave him access to what others needed.
Medusa and Chiron are both major players at this new moon. Both of them were transformed by a world that could not hold their power without distorting it. Both became sources of wisdom, art, philosophy, and creativity, in spite of everything.. and likely because of everything. The “difficulty at the beginning” that you might be confronted with during this new moon is not a sign you have taken a wrong path. It’s the void before something truer begins. Remember, as the sword of mars activates the wound of the centaur healer, cracking open is how anything gets in, and how anything gets out.
An Invitation
In honor of the Gate of Contribution from the Heart, I wanted to let you know that I’m opening a small number of spots for 1:1 coaching, a container called Tending Your Flame. It’s three months, six sessions, with your Human Design chart and astrological transits as the map, breathwork and voicework as tools for coming back into your body, and voice notes between sessions for when insight can’t wait for the next call.
This offering is for people in transition and folks who are done waiting for the world to calm down before they come home to themselves. If this sounds interesting to you, I offer free 30-minute consultations to talk about specifics and see if it’s a good fit for where you’re at right now. A real conversation is always the best place to start! You can always email me at alison@hearthandspiral as well.
One more announcement: I’m moving Your Heart Is a Compass, my course mapping Inanna’s Descent to the Wheel of the Year and the Heart Center, to the fall, where the energy of descent and return feels much more at home. To those of you who signed up and supported this framework while it was still finding its shape, thank you. Your curiosity means more than I know how to say.
A short practice for the new moon
Put both hands on your chest. Feel the warmth there, your own heat, your own life still burning.
Three slow breaths into that warmth, and ask your body, not your mind: what in me needs tending right now? What contribution have I been discounting because no metric could measure it or it didn’t seem ‘productive enough? What contribution wants to come through me, from my gut to my heart to my voice, that is a pure expression of whatever in me can’t be held down? Where do I refuse to be demonized for my true power and style?
The flame in you is real. The relational, the devotional, the stylish and exquisite parts of your being- all of these are like tributaries feeding a nourishing lake from the surrounding mountains.
If this podcast resonated with you, share it with someone who needs it, leave a five-star review wherever you listen, and subscribe if you haven’t yet. Every share helps this work find the people it belongs with.
Happy New Moon in Taurus. 🌑
xo
Alison
Questions about this moon or my offerings or anything else?
Write me at alison@hearthandspiral.com or DM me at @hearthandspiral on Instagram.
