The Virgo Full Moon Knows What We Want Before We Want It

When we talk about Pisces and Pisces season, we often speak of the dissolution of borders and boundaries. The Pisces archetype dream hops and time travels, feels itself a part of everything and belonging to no one. Yet Pisces season is also a season that casts Virgo influence in stark relief — Virgo being the sign of inventory, of category, and by extension, critical separation.

What is one to make of a Virgo full moon that it hasn’t already made of itself? Tireless, the Virgo full moon gathers the dispersed reflections of the Pisces Sun, trying to make meaning where meaning dissolves. This duality isn’t a fixed one — how could it be when neither sign stays fixed? Rather, they live and flow, one energy complementing the other in a synergy that is also found in the Two of Cups Tarot card and, above that, the Lovers.

It just so happens that the Lovers card is associated with 2022 and, so, the theme of the Lovers feels particularly potent. When it comes to lunations and the Tarot, few people are of better mind than Sarah Faith Gottesdiener, author of The Moon Book and publisher of the Many Moons Planner and Workbooks. In her Moonbeaming podcast episode detailing the theme of the Lovers, Gottesdiener helps recontextualize the work that the Lovers card does within us.

“The different archetypes we try on are all connected and we can loosen our grip and not have such a narrow gaze,” she says. “It’s about taking those boxes you will put yourself in — it’s about really trying to deconstruct and dismantle these boxes.” She speaks to the ways that the Lovers card encourages us to see how dualities exist together, how new combinations, new unions, are a form of intervention and innovation.

The Virgo full moon loves boxes, she loves to acquire them, give them a purpose, and a place. With this full moon making a trine to Pluto in Capricorn, whatever fills these boxes also burdens them. There’s a sense that the information we’re working with, the things that have come up and seek attendance, are older than the present moment and outside time. Neptune's loose conjunction to the Sun and sextile to both Pluto in Capricorn and The North Node in Taurus only serves to stretch time farther, into many worlds and countless iterations. The future is present, the present is past, the vibes are psychic, and everything within us is looking for a release.

If the valve opens under the stars of Virgo then the valve is a tight opening and tight openings — we know — are quick to rupture. The influence of this lunation is persistent, knowing what we want before we know it, giving us what we want before we’re sure we’re ready for it. Under the Virgo full moon’s perceptive light and the two weeks that recover from it, it’s likely that in the search for a release, we might find ourselves returning to old habits, old haunting grounds, and old coping mechanisms unconsciously.

It’s important to remember that any form of return, including relapse and repatriation, is an opportunity to recognize difference: You are different from who you were, it is different from what you remember, and nothing stays the same. The past self you meet at these places of rupture has been waiting for you. It means to integrate. It wants you to know that all your selves are necessary where you are going and none of them (not even the one you feel you are now) knows where it is you’ll end up.