The Groundlessness of a Pisces New Moon

The Groundlessness of the Pisces New Moon

Tonight the Moon goes dark in the final degrees of Pisces, (28 degrees). This is the last breath of the zodiac before the wheel turns again. There is something profound about a new moon in this particular place. Pisces is not the beginning of things. It is the place before the beginning, the great undifferentiated waters that preceded form, the womb of the womb. A new moon here is not a planting so much as a dissolving, a return to source that makes all potentials possible.

The stellium gathered in these waters right now is remarkable. The Sun, Moon, Mercury retrograde, and Mars are all moving through Pisces together, which means the ordinary faculties of mind and will are submerged. Mercury retrograde in this sign does not simply scramble communications. It takes thought itself and returns it to the liminal imaginal dream realm, to the pre-verbal knowing that lives in the body before language arrives. Mars here is not the warrior. He is something older, the impulse toward life that moves like a current beneath the surface, directionless in the way of water, yet absolutely purposeful.

The tarot card that corresponds to Pisces is the Moon Card, and it is one of the most unsettling and sacred cards in the Major Arcana. In the Rider-Waite Deck, the image of a full moon hangs between two towers while a wolf and a dog howl up at her from the earth below. A crayfish, ancient and armored, crawls up from the pool at the bottom of the card, making its slow pilgrimage toward the land. The path between the towers is long and winding and there is no clear destination visible. Everything in the image is luminous and strange, bathed in that particular light that makes familiar things look like they belong to another world.

The Moon card has often been read as madness, though that’s not exactly what it means. It represents the courage required to walk through territory that cannot be mapped, the inner landscape where the unconscious speaks in symbols and sensation rather than in clear declarative statements. The crayfish emerging from the depths is the psyche itself, making the crossing from the purely instinctual into something that can eventually be integrated and named. But that process is slow. It cannot be forced. The towers on either side mark the boundary between the known and the unknown, and the path runs directly through that threshold rather than around it.

A new moon in Pisces is, in the deepest sense, a Moon card moment. The sky is literally dark. The inner world is more real than the outer one. The wolves are howling because they can feel the pull of something immense and the crayfish in each of us is making its way up from the floor of whatever it is we have been carrying.

And then there is Venus. She has just moved into Aries, crossing the threshold that astrologers recognize as the zero point, or the world point. The Aries point is the place of pure emergence. As she fully inhabits that Aries fire, she passes through this point, and meets the moon (3/20) at Root Chakra Gateway of Ascent. The charged borderland between the dissolution of Pisces and the ignition of Aries. Muladhara, the Root Chakra, is the seat of our most primal sense of belonging, safety, and the right to exist and take up space. It is the energetic foundation upon which everything else is built. Venus moving through this threshold right now is asking a very old question: do you feel entitled to be here, do you claim this one incarnation? Not just mentally, but in the somatic sense. In the bones. In the blood? Can you claim your right to be here now?

This is where the new moon in Pisces can become genuinely destabilizing. Pisces is, by nature, a groundless space. There is no earth here, no fixed point, no solid thing to press your feet against. When a new moon opens its dark portal in this sign, especially with so many planets gathered here, the ground can feel like it is simply gone. Old certainties soften. Identity becomes porous. The structures we have organized our sense of self around can begin to feel arbitrary, even illusory. For some this is liberating. For others it is terrifying. Often it is both at once.

What to do when the ground disappears? In Liz Green’s book, “The Astrology of Fate”, she posits that Pisces is the realm of the Primordial Mother. The Primordial Mother is not the personal mother. She is not the idealized or wounded figure from our individual histories. She is something older and vaster. She is the ground beneath the ground. She is what remains when every constructed foundation of ours has been stripped away. The Great Earth Mother traditions understood that the most fundamental safety does not come from external structures but from the living body of the Mother herself, the dark soil, the mycelium, the heartbeat at the center of things. When Pisces dissolves everything that feels solid, it is not abandoning us to the void. It is returning us to her.

To work with the Primordial Mother at this new moon is to practice a very specific kind of trust. Trust in the intelligence of the dissolution itself. The waters know what they are doing. The darkness before the dawn is not empty. It is full of everything that is becoming. When Venus stands at the root chakra gateway asking whether you feel safe enough to exist fully, the Primordial Mother is the one who can answer that question.

Uranus sits at 28 degrees of Taurus, in a tight sextile to this new moon, offering a single note of electric clarity within all that dissolution. This is the kind of insight that arrives as recognition, as the sudden sense that something you have always known has finally been confirmed.

Neptune and Saturn have both crossed into Aries. Jupiter is now direct in Cancer. The larger architecture of the sky is shifting and this quiet, dark, deeply interior lunation is being offered as a threshold moment, a time to consolidate and integrate before the new structures demand to be built.

This is not a moon for setting intentions in the usual sense. It’s a listening moon. A moon that allows the waters to show you what they are carrying. For asking not what you are building next, but what still needs to be released before you can build it truly.

How are you all feeling as we move into this new moon portal and into the threshold towards the Root Chakra? Do you feel any of these themes alive within you? The groundlessness rising up to meet you?

Art by Michael Cheval - Features a figure with an egg in her womb space, and several abstract thresholds traveling in a non linear way through the realm of all potentialities.