June 2020 Lunar Eclipse
2020 Eclipse season begins with a partial Lunar Eclipse in Sagittarius on June 5th. Eclipses are timeline portals. Lunar Eclipses bring up the past so that we can attend to it differently in the present moment. In doing so, patterns change. Right now, this is especially true collectively. All of us are seeing how the present is connected to the past. Many of us must now take different actions to change the pattern. How will you change your reactions to responses, your emotions into actions? How will you do things differently this time? What fundamental mindsets and behaviors will you need to consistently invest in as you do this work? If you’ve been dealing with this your whole life, how can you care for yourself as never before?
The present pain is too much to describe. It is too much to hold alone. It must be felt, acknowledged, and transformed. Lunar work teaches us about embodying spaces of spectrums and spirals. We must hold space for our rage, our humanity, our grief, our sorrow, our joy, our hope, our pain, and our solidarity. Those who have been fighting this fight for centuries must continue to lead and be listened to more than ever. Those of us who have stood by and done nothing or very little must now support them. There is space to learn, read, think critically, speak out, and take action.
There is no end to the work. It must be consistent. In this way, figuring out your particular skill sets, your unique talents, can only help this effort. Figuring out who we might be, apart from a system of hierarchy, dehumanization, exploitation, extraction, and violence is getting to know ourselves on a fundamental level. Use that self-knowledge, talent and interest to help the collective dismantle the violent and rotten structures it was built on. While lunar work asks us to hold many complex truths at once, for white people there is only one side to be on right now. Either you are actively taking efforts to be anti-racist every day and support Black lives, or you are not.
The following thought is indebted to the work of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Resmaa Menakem, adrienne maree brown, and Layla Saad. This is heart work, mindset work, and nervous system work. This is spiritual work. This process includes shadow work, inner child work, ego work, resilience work. It is about deprogramming and reprogramming. It involves alchemy and transformation and evolution. It isn’t separate from our meditations, our rituals, our personal self-development. It has to be a part of it. We have to hold space for curiosity, imagination, generosity, accountability, will, creativity, courage, humility, trust, and intuition. Individually and collectively we must change the present.
The Tarotscopes below were channeled and written by meditating on each archetype and pulling a card for it. You can read for whatever sign you feel called to: some read for their sun, rising, Moon, or all three. Take what you’d like and leave the rest. Always consult your doctor or herbalist before ingesting or working with herbs. Never leave a lit candle or flame unattended.
Aries
2 of Swords
Aries, this Eclipse season is about the conscious choices you make. You have been working through one or more important mindset shifts. Breakthroughs are just around the bend: you’ll feel the results of your practice by the last days of summer. Whenever you are in a crossroads moment—which, let’s be real, is probably everyday now—activate your power of choice. Choose to try a different way. Choose to honor your strongest values.
Currently, you are in an initiatory zone. You are in-between who you’d like to be, and who you see yourself becoming. You’re in-between your desires, and tangible results; in-between deprogramming and reprogramming. This is not a problem. It is a process. Remember the tension or discomfort you feel is progress. A useful practice could be in looking back to affirm how far you’ve come.
You are undergoing all of this inner work while so much turmoil is happening across the globe. It is ok to pause, step away, take space, and acknowledge you are not sure yet. It is ok to protect your peace, your energy. Finding calm and taking action are not mutually exclusive. Examine your proclivities towards “either/or” thinking. It may be particularly useful to weave together your inner growth and ideals to your responses to this pandemic, whether that be in aid, fundraising, mutual care, and/or self-care.
Make space to hold opposites. As the earth’s shadow envelops the Moon, understand that messiness is part of a growth process.
Suggested spell ingredients: a donation Black Lives Matter, an altar to your favorite childhood activity and time spent revisiting that passion, obsidian, love letters to the activists you admire alongside donations and other forms of support you can spare, rosehip oil, and “Capricho del Diablo” by San Cha on repeat.
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Taurus
Ace of Wands
Darling one, this year has been brutal. It makes sense that you’ve needed some time to rewire and relight after all of the upheaval you’ve experienced, and all that you’ve witnessed in the lives around you. There are a few silver linings: you’ve been sure to look after yourself in a different way, and so your self-care has brought healing. All of this tending has resulted in a more solid foundation of trust. This is all helping you receive lightning flashes of energy, psychic hits, and inspiration.
Through the pain and sorrow that still seeps in, you are being given opportunities. They flow in regularly, like tiny drops of golden rain. Use this Eclipse season to get yourself in the mindset to receive all of these gifts.They will be bursts of inspiration in the shower, interesting revelations on socially distanced walks. These sparks will feel potent but they are invisible. It is up to you to follow through, and bring them into form. Your intuition is wasted when it is not put into action.
All of these sparks are arriving to set you up for some of the most upcoming meaningful moments of your life. To paraphrase Toni Morrison: in times of grief, those of us with the purest, truest hearts do not despair. They get to work—that’s what artists do. And you are the artist of your own life.
Suggested spell ingredients: a donation to Reclaim The Block, a candlelit bath or shower with lemon balm oil, dried lavender, tumbled moonstone for each pajama pocket, a bubble blower to help let out your pain and watch it bloom into iridescence, and “Otherside” by Perfume Genius on repeat.
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Gemini
6 of Swords
Gemini, this month’s Lunar Eclipse—during your birthday season— is going to highlight movement. Movement from where you are now, to where you’re choosing to go. Endings and beginnings are on full blast. Goodbyes will eventually turn into different invitations at the mailbox, the inbox. You are moving on. Don’t trip over what is meant to be left in the past.
The energy swirling around you is about action and adaptability. You are the queen of “making it work.” Backbends, duct tape, forgiveness, and other flexible feats litter your past paths of relationships, work, creative projects, and more. You really can make something out of nothing. Now, you are being called to move forward in the spirit of your first choice. What do you want? You are resourced now, in a way you haven’t been before. These resources include your wisdom, your inspiration, your support network, and your intimate knowledge of what is best for you. This new direction is in total support of a major theme of your life’s path.
Whatever sacrifices you are making to get there—whatever grief this could entail—will fuel your journey to wherever you are going. That eventual arrival will be better than anything before because it will be infused with all you’ve learned. It will come from your heart, and will be buoyed along by your growing belief. Flow towards safer spaces for your dreams to root down into.
Suggested spell ingredients: a donation to National Bail Out, homemade rosewater, carnelian, nettle tea, smoky quartz, birdsong, a Ryan Heffington online class, and “Cheap Queen” by King Princess on repeat.
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Cancer
The Empress
The life’s work you’ve undertaken has certainly evolved as of late. Your magic will gain power as you gain more proficiency and clarity, and as you continue to water your various gardens. See whatever changes that are happening as part of a greater cycle. The energy emanating out from this Lunar Eclipse asks you to center love magic as much as you can.
Love magic is mutual aid and systems of care. Love magic is taking breaks from screens, checking in on friends, and taking action. Love magic is also heart magic: little-self parenting, poetry and tea, stretches and soft pillows, and lips stained by berries. The Empress wants devotionals of pleasure, beauty, love, and creativity. These kinds of spells are most effective when they are free of guilt, shame, or shoulds. Invest in your joy. Fill your cup unabashedly.
Another way love magic work will show up is through self-advocacy. You see, sweet Moonchild, when we have boundaries—when we have opinions, when we evolve, and when we communicate our truth—others will not always appreciate it. Part of your current eclipse lesson is not accepting nor internalizing abuse or the disrespect of others. Look for every opportunity to be your own sister, mother, goddexx, and very best friend.
Suggested spell ingredients: a donation to Communities United Against Police Brutality, flowers—lots of them—preferably woven into a crown that you wear while doing the dishes, rose quartz—lots of it—preferably held against your heart, allowance—lots of it—to be kind, to dance, to lounge, to savor, to transform the Moon’s glow into fierce ambition, and “Always” by Sister Mantos on repeat.
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Leo
The Chariot
This Eclipse Season is going to provide you many hints and clues to help you identify what you’ve outgrown. This particular Lunar Eclipse will offer you a potent opportunity to focus on where you’d like to go, and how you’d like to be through this change. Prioritize your values, drop any bullshit that brings you down, make time for your dreams, and watch as more puzzle pieces snap into place.
The greater themes of your current evolution are about going outside of where you’ve been: family patterns, certain relationship patterns, certain ways you see yourself. You are going off your paved roads and rolling down into new landscapes of consciousness. This month and next month, you will be immersed in the process of taking the most important learnings of your whole life—your whole BEING—and combining them into an ethos that reflects your needs. This will become a sustaining elixir that will support you as you navigate, strategize, and rise up into another version of yourself.
This process will likely be messy. It will include being able to recognize what motivations are subconscious loops, and which are oracles of the future. There’s soul mastery when you feel one way, and act another. The truth is there are rarely moments where you get confirmation that you are doing a good job. You just have to trust that you are.
As long as you are gracefully riding the winds of change, as long as you are in the active process of aligning with your best and most honest self through all the tribulations and all the beauty, you are where you need to be.
Suggested spell ingredients: a donation to the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, look around your room and notice 3 things you hadn’t before—free write about them for 3 minutes for 3 days, videos of horses running, time spent in silence under the sunset’s rays, lapis lazuli, and “Anywayz” by Austra on repeat.
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Virgo
8 of Wands
We’ve been taught to fear free falls, but in reality we are usually in a state of flux. To dance within the unknown of where our prayers might land is an important craft to hone. This Eclipse season is an opportunity for you to make a plan around—and to center—your passions, your actions, and your spiritual and/or magical practice. In doing so, you are attracting and creating space for more of what is most important.
Do not ignore fear, tragedy, or grief. Find ways to hold yourself through all the difficulties. Manufacture moments of magic and right action whenever possible. Keep your nervous system regulated, or at least considered; keep your feelings felt and named; keep all sources of soul-sustenance flowing. Whenever possible, share the good with others—especially for no reason other than to keep batons of light and faith passed on through the storm.
This Lunar Eclipse wants you to be clear around tendencies of control. Name what you can’t control, and what you can. Then focus more on the latter. What we can control is our intention. What we can control is our actions. What is needed most at this time is faith, adaptability, and resilience. Even when so much appears to be moving backwards, you can still dare to stay in flight, in forward movement. There’s no other way through.
Suggested spell ingredients: a donation to Black Visions Collective, open windows, videos and pictures of flying squirrels, red candles, clove oil in the bath or anointed before bed, and “You Will Find It” by Mykki Blanco.
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Libra
8 of Swords
This Lunar Eclipse finds you in a bit of an existential crisis. Why wouldn’t you be, with the world in shambles, with all the rugs being pulled out from under us? The violence and the cruelty we are all being shown every hour, on the hour, takes a toll. Reality is a lot to be with, a lot to process.
Underneath all the chaos, pockets of respite await you. This Eclipse season is an opportunity to hold your own hand through a process of decay, chrysalis, and rebirth. There are ways to make this intense time easier. Getting out of your own way means dropping the stories—the ones that punish, the ones that keep you stuck. The world is on fire. Do you really need to keep beating yourself up over not being perfect enough, or pretty enough?
There are some fundamental mindset shifts to be made around what you think you owe, and what you deserve. You don’t owe shit to anyone who consistently makes you feel like shit. Like everyone else who is kind and honest and always tries your best, you deserve all the good things.
Your inherent worthiness is not conditional. What would unconditional love look like? How would it feel inside your body? Make a decision to let love come through more easily. Your existential crisis will shed away, into slow exhales and an action plan.
Suggested spell ingredients: a donation to The Okra Project, rhodonite, ocean breathing, Love Poems and Other Revolutionary Actions by Bobbi Sykes, your favorite dessert for dinner, paintings by Emma Amos, and “How Do You Sleep?” by Sam Smith on repeat.
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Scorpio
The High Priestess
It is easy to see the damage that is done when we don’t tend to the roots of our wounds—the shapes of our trauma are far more visible than the blueprints of their foundation. Until we collectively acknowledge the history of this country, we will not be able to heal and grow. Until the government—and the settlers here—apologize, and begin creating reparations and huge policy changes, then this country cannot fully heal. Until we look at and unravel the spectrum of violence we enact internally and externally, the system will not change. We will be forced to repeat the abuse and toxicity that began hundreds of years ago. This is true for the collective, and it is true on a personal level.
When we don’t let ourselves acknowledge our wounds, when we don’t go straight to the source, this pain festers in the depths. This Eclipse season will bring up some of your old wounds to the surface—this is so they can heal, once and for all. In order for them to heal, you have to rip off the band-aid of whatever you do to disguise the pain. That mask must be cleared away. Then, the root of the wound must be accessed, acknowledged, and loved. Accountability must be taken: in doing so, the wound gets cleared properly. Then the beautiful part comes. This is the part where you feel more free. This is when you no longer can be shoved into someone else’s box. This is when you step into a space where the narratives of your own life are winding, cosmic, ancestral, futurist. You become your own mythology.
This process is not for the faint of heart. Luckily, you’ve got a strong, courageous one beating inside of you. Let it act as your source of softness and strength as you rewrite your life as your own.
Suggested spell suggestions: a donation to The Anti Police-Terror Project, epsom salt foot soaks, bodies of clear, cool water, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, Tiger’s Eye, and “Blind” by Hercules & Love Affair on repeat.
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Sagittarius
9 of Wands
It is time to stop piling on burdens that are not yours to process. It is time to stop living parts of your life for other people, or presenting or performing a certain way to secure safety. This Eclipse season is going to highlight what you are done with. This is about no longer creating extra work, or overcomplicating your process, as a defense mechanism or avoidance technique.
Remember: being busy is not the same as being useful. You are absolutely ready to be the best version of yourself, the most useful-you you possibly can be.
This month’s Lunar Eclipse, in your sign, could have you contemplating sacrifice. This isn’t a punishment, it is the bridge between your present and your future. Sacrifice means “holy”. What you give up will free up your energy for other activities. Doing what you believe is best might not be the easiest, but it will grant you solace. Turning contemplative for the month of June might inflict you with guilt, but more space may be what you need to process certain endings. One leg of your spiritual journey is over. Yet another beginning is calling to you through the forest. Set down that which has exhausted you, and head towards the clearing’s calls.
Suggested spell ingredients: a donation to Sisters Unchained, cedar, herbal offerings to your ancestors, meditations on self-love with clear quartz, a donation to First Nations Development Institute’s COVID-19 response efforts, and “Roses Are Falling” by Orville Peck on repeat.
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Please consider supporting any of the organizations mentioned throughout this page anyway you can.
Capricorn
7 of Wands
This Lunar Eclipse is going to feel tense, sweet Sea Goat. On top of all the pain of the current pandemic, on top of all the grief rippling out into the world like steady tsunamis, on top of all the uncertainty and sorrow and rage you hold heavy in both hands, there’s one more thing you’ll be encouraged to grapple with: your ongoing evolution.
The tension you will be feeling, in part, will be due to the distance between where you are and where you’d like to be. You may already be feeling this gap in the joints of your bones and in the quiet spaces of your soul. Use this Eclipse season to clear away habits, or stories, or excuses that stop you from experimentation or play. Banish what tries to justify staying the same. In one way or another, you’ve gotten into the habit of being fed by ideas or distractions that are beneath you. This Lunar Eclipse could aid you in replacing resistance with flow.
Contemplate what your most important practice—spiritual, creative, day-to-day—would benefit from your investment in mixing it up. Think about actions you could take instead of jumping to defense. Meditate on what it would feel like to envelop yourself in a responsive, imaginative state. Try being the thing you want; embody what you covet most. This is an opportunity to explore what it looks and feels like to exist on your own terms.
Suggested spell ingredients: a donation to the Louisville Community Bail Fund, balancing and strength building exercises, sandstone, backbends (not the mental kind), 7 minutes meditating on lion cubs for 7 days, ginger tea for your inner flame, and “All About Me” by Syd on repeat.
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Aquarius
Temperance
Star child, this Eclipse season is going to offer you opportunities to serve the collective by honing in on your specific gifts. Any of the unique qualities that you effortlessly inhabit will be amplified. Your creative talents, technical skills, intellect, natural skillset, and all the knowledge you have learned, will be illuminated. Please pay attention: what do you catch yourself doing with ease? What are folks in your orbit asking you for help with, or are impressed by? What do you observe and wonder about?
In my interpretation, the Temperance card relates strongly to The Magician—Temperance is like the Magician amped up on healing crystals. Why? Because this archetype is at the end of the second line of self-inquiry, diagonal from the Magician’s placement. Temperance takes all the power, all the knowledge, all the efforts, and all the magic that the Magician and all the other archetypes in-between them hold, and combines them seamlessly. Temperance pours all of that cosmic champagne into chalices to offer up to the collective.
This Lunar Eclipse is a reminder that you are protected, so long as you act within the bounds of your fearless inspiration and integrity. When composted into a deeper meaning, all expressions can serve others. Depravity becomes comedic relief. Subversion becomes nectar to the Goddess. Use your uncensored inclinations as prayer. Share all that you have come into this world to offer.
Suggested spell ingredients: a donation to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education fund, chalices, ice cubes with violets submerged inside, chants, collages and hand-painted images of shields to protect your energy, amethyst, and “Change Your Life” by Kehlani ft. Jhené Aiko on repeat.
Listen to the Modern Women June Lunar Eclipse playlist on Spotify!
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Please consider supporting any of the organizations mentioned throughout this page anyway you can.
Pisces
4 of Wands
Pisces, this Eclipse season will offer you chances & fortuity around support, safety, and community. There will be many moments in the coming two months to focus on these themes and what you need around them. This Lunar Eclipse will begin this process by asking you to commit to centering pleasure and joy.
Now is the time to define what is pleasurable, and what is joyful to you and you alone. Make time each day to collect minutes of each. Become your own joy tracker, your own pleasure sleuth. Let no impulse be too frivolous, let no urge be too unattainable.
Don’t try to ignore your needs, don’t try to downplay your longings. Give into yourself. Let yourself receive.
For ages, you’ve been searching for stable ground and consistent support—part of this is in reaction to circumstances beyond your control. Some of what you seek can be found through building a foundation that is non-reliant on caveats, other people’s opinions, or gatekeeping. Through the years, you’ve embarked on a journey for self that feels resonant and reliable. Now, you are here: at the threshold of trust, about to step through patterns of withholding into a deeper love. Don’t compartmentalize all that you are. It is your unique gifts that will catch and hold you, every single time.
Suggested spell ingredients: a donation to the George Floyd memorial fund, honey calcite, What Happened, Miss Simone? on Netflix, vines of jasmine (or another flower collected on a walk), a yellow face mask to wear on said walk, a self-made joy map in the brightest colors inspired by Gade or Carl Jung, and “My Sisters” by Elisabeth Elektra on repeat.
Listen to the Modern Women June Lunar Eclipse playlist on Spotify!
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Please consider supporting any of the organizations mentioned throughout this page anyway you can.
