THE SHAMAN
Sun-Moon Phase Angle: 225 °-270 °
Pagan Holiday: Lammas

Key Concepts:

• Deep inner work.
• Acceptance and Surrender.
• Caring.
• A poignant sense of life’s brevity.
• Psychic intervention in others’ lives.
• Assistance around death, dying, and crisis. Loving Relationships.
• Attunement to “primitive” wisdom.
• Death and rebirth.
• Gratitude.
• The loss of self-importance.
• Mature perspectives.

The Mood

The wealthy, perpetually over-extended Chief Executive Officer of a major corporation learns that his doctor “found an anomaly” in the results of his physical examination. He is called in for further tests. The physician expresses serious concern— and also regret that the follow-up laboratory results will take a week to arrive.

It is a hard few days for our hero. He is dealing with the possibility that he might have only months to live— and that leads him to face the reality of death in general. His perspective is altered.

The results come in. The anomaly was nothing— just a glitch in a lab procedure. The C.E.O. is as healthy as the proverbial horse. But the medical scare has changed him. He describes it as a wake-up call. He realizes that his job is not feeding his soul, that it pays him only money. He sees his future too clearly— another decade of banging his head against the corporate wall, followed by a few years of golf, expensive whiskey, television, then, inevitably, death.

Next time we tune in, that C.E.O. is building inexpensive homes in Haiti, working for Habitat for Humanity. He has left his job behind, cashed in his chips. His friends joke that they are going to call the Vatican. But he doesn’t think of himself as a saint. He genuinely feels that he is doing exactly what he wants to be doing. They think he is altruistic. He doesn’t feel that way himself. In a world in which everyone dies, he feels he is simply being realistic. Helping beleaguered Haitians means more to him than worrying about third-quarter profits.

When people tell him that Haiti is hopeless, our Chief Executive Officer has a strangely inarticulate reaction. How do you explain that hope is a condition of the human heart, not of the material world, and that the heart never needs to be hopeless? How do you explain feeling gratitude that there are places in the world like Haiti, places that mirror for the human heart the extent of its capabilities and the power of its faith?

He does not even try. He hammers another nail, with a smile on his face.

The Theory

The waning part of the lunation cycle, begun at the moment of the Full Moon, is now solidly established.

The homeward journey is underway, heading back toward the archetypal realm or the Divine or God . . . or whatever you want to name it. In the symbolism of the human life-cycle, we are now past midlife. We are closer to death than we are to birth, and we feel that temporal reality in our bones. A certain detachment from worldly concerns arises. The excitement of endless, youthful expansion— or the illusion of it— now gives way to a more reflective mood, one in which wisdom stops miles short of cynicism, but draws certain understandings from it. The appetite-driven possibilities that once excited us— power, sex, fame— lose their luster. We are beginning to understand that everything born must die. Today’s rock star is tomorrow’s talk show joke. Power slips between our fingers. Our looks fade. Money buys pleasure, but not happiness. We have turned toward home, toward Eternity. Something in us welcomes that change of orientation.

That is half the puzzle. Here is the other half.

At this sixth lunar phase, we are still in the bright hemicycle. Thus we are still extended outward into the realm of manifestation, caught up in our relationships and the existential structures we have created, just as we saw under the Full lunar phase in the previous chapter. The sheer momentum of those relationships and structures carry us forward. We continue to be enmeshed in them, as if they were rushing white water into which we had fallen. The idea of escape may be emotionally tempting, but it hovers somewhere between highly impractical and flat -out impossible. We have mixed feelings about the brick wall of reality that defines our lives —not simple resentment and entrapment, although those feelings are possible here. But more dominantly, we feel something akin to acceptance and surrender, as we accept without much protest the existence of gravity or the inevitability of aging.

Putting the pieces together, in the Waning Gibbous phase our attention is simultaneously focused upon the outward social world and upon eternity. Think of our C.E.O., seeking a larger framework for his life. We are still engaged with others, while we are becoming less engaged with our own personal hopes, needs, and dreams— even though their results are manifest all around us.

In the face of these mature realizations, we seek communion with kindred souls—in the spirit of Lammas, we want to break bread with them. This simple, present -tense act of authentic connection feeds our souls. It pleases us to share that bread, and to nourish others and bond with them as we sense the gathering darkness on the horizon.

A man becomes a dentist and practices for twenty years. The thought enters his mind, “Maybe I should have become a recording engineer.” What can he do? Start over? That is not out of the question, but the practical challenges are daunting. He has a marriage and three school-age children. He has a home. The wistful thought enters his mind, “Maybe I should have married my college sweetie instead.” But he knows that while people sometimes try going back in time that way, it rarely works out. And maybe he actually loves his three kids and his wife. Maybe being a dentist isn’t so bad. Maybe the Road Not Taken will never be taken and we need to find a way to live with that. And maybe this bittersweet wisdom about the brevity and finitude of life is a more solid foundation for our souls than exciting promises about a perfect future and all the hair-on-fire Answers in the world.

Most deeply, maybe the purpose of life doesn’t actually fit completely into that little box labeled Your Personal Happiness.

The dentist invites his wife out to dinner. They arrange a babysitter. Together, they break bread.

The Personality

Virgo may indicate a certain taste for precision and exactitude. True to form, some Virgos are careful house-cleaners. But others live in material chaos— yet their hard drives are studies in orderliness. Just as not every Virgo is wired the same way, neither is everyone born under the Waning Gibbous phase of the Moon. The condition of the rest of the birth chart makes itself apparent , as does ethnicity and, most notably, karmic differences. Please understand the following profile of the Waning Gibbous personality in that light. It is a profoundly significant factor in a person’s chart, but it must take its place in the larger context.

Imagine that, like our Chief Executive Officer a few paragraphs ago, you were faced with a medical death sentence, but one which would not claim you for a year or so. Accepting that emotional challenge, even in your imagination, is a good way to begin to understand the Waning Gibbous Moon personality. The visceral, underlying sense of limited time permeates the psychology of this lunar phase. In our opening story , that diagnosis proved spurious, but its effect upon the C.E.O.’ s psyche was immediate and powerful. How would you personally face that kind of reality? People’s possible reactions are, of course, all over the map. One reaction, easily understood, is of extreme selfishness —a feeling that this is our last chance and so we had better “get it while it’s hot.” We will look at that possibility more carefully when we consider the Shadow expression of this lunar phase.

For many of us, the impact of such a medical death, while certainly emotionally bracing, would be more beneficial. Suddenly, for example, time with our loved ones is so much more precious to us. We feel generous toward them. We take time with our partners, our soul-friends, our children . We want to know who they really are. We want strong heart-bridges linking them to us. Correspondingly, the sixth phase personality is often loving and engaged, able to look past its own needs enough to truly see and appreciate others in a three-dimensional fashion.

Because of the way synchronicity permeates our lives, people born under this phase of the Moon will often see human mortality and fragility expressed outwardly, perhaps in the form of deaths which occur at emotionally close range. They may, in other words, lose people close to them in dramatic ways. They may be actively involved in the deaths of others. There are obvious murderous Shadow possibilities here, although such cathartic involvements are more typically benign— we counsel the dying or the bereaved, or otherwise help in such extreme times. Often, such people have good instincts about what to say to those facing death, or to those left behind.

Like our C.E.O., the person born under the Waning Gibbous Moon often feels a strong pull toward making the world a better place. There is an urge for some larger framework of purpose in life. To call this “altruism” is accurate enough— altruism is often a characteristic of people born under the Waning Gibbous Moon. But the word implies a kind of saintly motivation, when actually what we see here is closer to a sense of enjoying and deriving personal meaning from deep engagement in the lives of other people. Dane Rudhyar frames this sixth-phase generosity in the following terms: “Such a person tends to want to demonstrate to others what he or she has learned or experienced. Thus an individual of that type often acts as a disseminator of ideas— as a popularizer of what has impressed him most forcibly . . . ”

Among evolved sixth-phase people, there is an instinctive feeling about how to help others prepare for their own evolution— and perhaps for their own mortality as well. In my own circles, I have seen many people born under this phase who became involved in profound soul-interventions with others. They may, for example, be psychotherapists or astrologers or psychics— although calling them “medicine people” in the Native American fashion really captures it more effectively. That is why I chose to label this lunar phase “The Shaman.”

One of the hardest elements to express in terms of the psychology of this phase of the lunar cycle is its sweet sadness. A sense of the transitory nature of all worldly happiness is built into the entire waning lunar cycle. That poignant feeling sprouted in the previous phase—the Full Moon— where the waning cycle began. Here, in the Waning Gibbous phase, it is surfacing more compellingly into consciousness. Even in teenagers born under this phase, one often senses the kind of humble, accepting wisdom that more typically expresses itself in men and women after midlife.

The Shadow

Every coin has two sides. A core idea in evolutionary astrology— in fact, in all spiritually healthy forms of astrology , in my view— is that there are affirmative soul-intentions built into every astrological configuration, and that every configuration can be turned into a calamity with enough spite, laziness, or rapacity.

What is the potential Shadow dimension of the Waning Gibbous phase?

Not too many lines ago, I raised the question of how a person might respond to having only a year left to live. While there are many positive benefits that might come to us from such a reminder, we also recognize that it could engender an extreme— and ultimately desperate— form of selfishness. The root issue here is simple enough to grasp: If our working assumptions are that everything in life is meaningless except appetite, that we simply are our physical bodies, and that when we die the lights go out, then a terrible, amoral voracity arises. We want money— and we don’t care how we get it. We want sex and we don’t care whom we hurt. We want fame and power— mostly because they lead to sex and money. The human imagination becomes tragically constrained in this dire situation. Compassion is banished. In our list of Waning Gibbous Moon examples below, you will find the twentieth century’s Prince of Darkness himself, Adolph Hitler. You will also find Carlos the Jackal. Sadism is a form of engagement with others, as is murder. So is abuse in general. The cold, cruel, driven desperation that is the hallmark of the Waning Gibbous Shadow is ultimately an outward crystallization of the psyche’s relationship with itself. The brutality is aimed inward as well, in other words. Depression and apathy can arise throughout the waning cycle, and they are part of the Shadow profile of this lunar phase too. But active sadism is its unique signature in that regard. We are at the end of the bright hemicycle. We are still “into relationships.” Under the domain of the Shadow, that becomes a chilling line.

The Evolutionary Intention and the Karmic Predicament

Why might a soul incarnate under the Waning Gibbous Moon? What are the evolutionary purposes behind such a birth? Throughout the waning cycle, there is a general theme of “finishing business” with other beings. To be deeply engaged with the evolutionary journeys of other people, to the point that we are willing to sacrifice something of our own needs and intentions for their sakes— this kind of love, while potentially dangerous, can also clean up the karma of indebtedness toward others. The soul-intention here is as transparent as glass. We simply aim to pay our karmic debts! There is more, of course. At some point, every evolving soul must get over its self-importance and diminish its self-involvement. Navel-gazing spirituality and self-obsessed psychology do serve their purposes, but in this lunar phase the intentions are more spiritually mature than that. The gradual erosion of self-importance and self-involvement are the evolutionary targets. In making other people’s needs temporarily more urgent to us than our own, we chip away at our egocentricity. The result is that the monumental edifice of our sense of separation and specialness casts a less blinding shadow across the eyes of the soul.

The Secret of Happiness

With the Moon in the Waning Gibbous phase, the secret of happiness in a nutshell is to live every day as if it were your last day on earth. That is a lofty ideal, and thus probably unreachable in practical terms. But the wisdom in those words is the North Star we must follow. When we realize how brief our time on earth is, our entire perspective changes. We stop worrying so much about trivial things. In our motivations, the creation of purpose and meaning begin to replace the endless “almost there” of the satisfaction of appetite. With our self-importance diminished, life’s inevitable slights, unfairness and insults become nothing more than background noise. Authenticity, genuine human connection, and a sense of the “power of now” all loom larger. The spirit thrives. We begin to get the joke that makes the angels smile.

Examples Carl Jung , Alan Watts, William Butler Yeats, Mother Theresa, Bob Marley, Albert Einstein, Loreena McKennitt, Peter Jackson, Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, Allen Ginsburg, Al Gore, Gus Grissom, Steven Hawking, Hermann Hesse, Adolph Hitler, Martin Luther, Vladimir Putin, Vincent Van Gogh, Bill Clinton, Henry VIII, Edmund Hillary, Paul Simon, Jules Verne , Tammy Faye Bakker, Brigitte Bardot, David Byrne, Carlos the Jackal, O.J. Simpson, Johnny Cash, Arthur Conan Doyle, Stephen Jay Gould, George Harrison, Louis Armstrong, Robert Bly, Stonewall Jackson, Valentina Tereshkova (first woman in space), Yehudi Menuhin, Robert ‘Buz’ Myers, Vaclav Havel, Elizabeth Claire Prophet, Gen. David H. Petraeus, John Paul Sartre, Helen Gurley Brown, Stephen Stills, Andy Warhol, Brigham Young, George Washington Carver, Sally Ride, River Phoenix, Prince, Condoleeza Rice, Yasser Arafat, Don Imus, Mitt Romney, Stephen Jay Gould, Tupac Shakur, Antonio Banderas, Winston Churchill, Uma Thurman, Tammy Wynette, Dwight Yoakham, Frank Zappa. John Steinbeck, James Dean, Walter Cronkite, George Lucas, George Clooney, Kurt Vonnegut, Yo Yo Ma, Keith Richards.

Forrest, Steven (2013-04-17). The Book of the Moon: Discovering Astrology’s Lost Dimension (pp. 193-194). Seven Paws Press. Kindle Edition.