A necessary prelude to rebirth
The Incantations 55 (January 1917) from Carl Jung's Red BookIt was 2009, and I had just entered ninth grade. The adults around me were facing the crumbling of the global economy, but I too—a young high schooler—was experiencing my own collapse. My entire friend group had been destroyed by a fight I can no longer even remember. In an instant, it felt like I had lost everything.
I went to see the school counselor, and as I sat in her florescent-lit office, I cried: "I can't concentrate on anything. I am hurt. I am stressed." Now, I don't consider myself a cynical person but the corridors of my mind still hold files of heartbreaking words and gestures that have crushed me. So I'll never forget what she said: "That's not stress. Stress is what a starving child in Sub-Saharan Africa feels."
She was, in one sense, stating a fact. But her total disregard for my reality pushed me further into the abyss. I spiraled so deeply that I made the instinctive decision to leave the school. I was fifteen. For years afterward I carried shame, believing I had run away, that I was weak.
Now, as an astrologer, I see it differently. I was going through my first Saturn opposition, a universal initiation around age fifteen, when Saturn in the sky opposes (180º) Saturn in one's birth chart. It is a time when young people often feel negated or tested but only because they are being forged, stepping into greater autonomy and authority. Every initiation requires a death. The ego must release what has been, so that what is becoming can emerge.
I share this story because I wonder what might have happened if I had known then what I know now. Would I have stayed? Would I have endured the pain differently? Perhaps. But this much is clear: had my counselor understood the deeper pattern, she might have held my suffering as an initiation rather than dismissing it.
Today, I find myself in a similar passage, what Jungians call the Night Sea Journey. The difference is that now I have a language, a mythic framework, a trust in the process. This allows me to surrender to the unconscious without fearing I'll drown in it. For it is precisely in these dark waters that rebirth occurs. The ego dissolves its old structures, and a deeper Self begins to take form.
Like the lotus that blossoms through the mud, the pain we endure is the prelude to the flowering of the soul. If you are in this realm right now...know this: you are not alone. You are on the greatest adventure of your lifetime. Deepen into it.
These are the words I wish I could have spoken not only to my fifteen-year-old self, but also to a dear classmate who recently took his own life, despite being a rising star in his industry. Had he known he was in the depths of his Saturn return—an initiatory passage for those who are entering their 30s—he might have chosen differently. This is perhaps my deepest reason for pursing the path of astrology: to share the teachings of the unconscious, so that each soul may live with greater clarity and depth.
In Mystery,
Somya Desai
In the Sky
Lunar Eclipse
We are stepping into eclipse season, the weeks when the Sun nears the lunar nodes. The nodes are two invisible thresholds where the Moon’s orbit crosses the Sun’s path. Normally the Moon passes a little above or below the Sun, which is why we do not have eclipses every month. But when the Sun and Moon line up with these crossing points, shadows fall, and an eclipse is born.
Ancient astrologers saw the nodes as the dragon’s head and tail, swallowing the light and casting the world into shadow. In modern terms, they are where the cycles of Sun, Earth, and Moon intersect.
Eclipses are never one-off events. They belong to a larger cycle that lasts about 18 months to 2 years. Each eclipse season is another chapter in the same story, building on what came before. The current cycle began in September 2024 and will continue until 2027.
Key Dates:
Sept 17, 2024 — Lunar Eclipse
October 2, 2024 – Solar Eclipse
Mar 13, 2025 — Lunar Eclipse
March 29, 2025 – Solar Eclipse
Sept 7, 2025 — Lunar Eclipse
Sept 21, 2025 – Solar Eclipse
Notice:
Sudden entrances and exits
Heightened emotional tides
Old patterns resurfacing
Participate:
Create space for yourself
Track what echoes from last September
Name and release what has run its course
Eclipses remind us that we move within cycles larger than our own will. Each one is a turn of the dragon’s head and tail, another passage through the shadows, and another chance to let the old fall away so the new can take form.
Mythic Wisdom
Joseph Campbell on the "Belly of the Whale"
Jonah in the whale, that's a standard motif of going into the whale's belly and coming out again. The whale represents the personification, you might say, of all that is in the unconscious. In reading these things psychologically, water is the unconscious. The creature in the water would be the dynamism of the unconscious, which is dangerous and powerful and has to be controlled by consciousness. The first stage in the hero adventure, when he starts off on adventure, is leaving the realm of light, which he controls and knows about, and moving toward the threshold. And it's at the threshold that the monster of the abyss comes to meet him. And then there are two or three results.
One, the hero is cut to pieces and descends into the abyss in fragments to be resurrected. Or he may kill the dragon power, as Siegfried does when he kills the dragon, but then he tastes the dragon blood. Let's say he has to assimilate that power. And when Siegfried has killed the dragon and tasted the blood, he hears the song of nature. He has transcended his humanity, and re-associated himself with the powers of nature, which are the powers of our life, from which our mind removes us. You see, this thing up here, this consciousness thinks it's running the shop. It's a secondary organ. It's a secondary organ of a total human being. And it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body.
– Joseph Campbell, from the 1988 series Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers.
