Welcome to the Scorpio Full Moon, which is also a lunar eclipse. This is the time in the lunar calendar when the spotlight is transformation and rebirth, power and control, intimacy and vulnerability, money and wealth. The lunar eclipse is exact on May 5, 2023 at 1:34 pm ET, 14 degrees Scorpio-Taurus. That’s 10:34 am Los Angeles, 6:34 pm London, 7:34 pm Johannesburg, 3:34 am Sydney (May 6), and 5:34 am Auckland.
If full moons are a time when something is put in a spotlight and we have to react in real time, then lunar eclipses turn up the intensity. It’s not uncommon for dramatic events to coincide with lunar eclipses or dynamic decisions to be made. We may find this time confrontational, too, especially with the emotional energy of Scorpio.
With dramatic aspects to Uranus in Taurus, this eclipse demands that we reinvent or shake up what’s not working. Uranus is like a light in the dark, a spark of awareness or stroke of genius that changes everything. It’s not an energy that we are unfamiliar with, especially coming out of the heavy influence of Saturn square Uranus in 2021-2022. Key areas of our lives may look different than they did two years ago.
It’s important to understand this eclipse in a larger framework of time. First starting with Uranus’s time in Taurus since May 2018, March 2019. As an evolutionary planet, Uranus’s job is to get us to evolve by any means possible. It’s the planet of new consciousness and revelations. For some, especially the fixed signs of Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius, 2018 and 2019 was the start of a seismic shift, with key events in that May-June 2018, March-April 2019 timeframe. (Read Uranus in Taurus: Sign by Sign for reference.)
This eclipse is merely an activator, another plot point (or plot twist) in a well-lived story.
Then there’s the fact that this is the last Scorpio eclipse in a series of eclipses that began in November 2021 and came more into focus with a Scorpio Lunar Eclipse on May 16, 2022 and a Scorpio Solar Eclipse on October 25, 2022. While there is one more eclipse in this series, a Taurus Lunar Eclipse on October 28, 2023, this eclipse may bring the cycle to a decisive end.
Scorpio, as a sign, reminds us that everything comes to an end. It’s part of the cycle of life and part of the dance it makes with its opposing sign of Taurus. If Scorpio brings us into the energies of decay and endings, then it helps us to make way for the rebirth of life that we see in Taurus. We can’t have one without the other.
It’s not easy to say goodbye, whether due to natural causes and the march of time or because of a sudden untimely ending. It can be an emotionally painful separation that brings up grief. How do we make peace with something that we know, on one hand, is a natural part of life, but something that we are hardwired as humans to fear? How do we accept?
Scorpio, a water sign, prepares to transport us to the next journey of life — powerfully so, initially so. (Death is an initiation to life.) But sometimes we get stuck in the process, like a ship that is unable to leave harbor.
Scorpio reminds me that the sign that follows is Sagittarius, the sign of faith. And sometimes we need to make a leap of faith and let go into the unknown in order to allow Scorpio’s alchemical waters to take us to new spaces.
With Mars in Cancer, old emotions and memories may come up. Home and family may be major themes. We may have powerful choices and decisions to make, ones that may not feel easy. With Mercury Retrograde, we have to reevaluate our choices and see things from every angle.
Like the previous eclipse, the Aries Solar Eclipse on April 20, Pluto makes a square to the Lunar Nodes, indicating that once again this eclipse brings up themes around karma and fate. These eclipses have the power to reform and transform or dig up some of our deepest hidden emotions.
That said, search for release. Allow for a process of “death”. Make space for something new. Scorpio is the volcanic ash for Taurus’s fertile soil.
And if you want to learn more about this eclipse and it’s larger story and what it means for you, get my The Eclipses of April & May 2023 webinar in the link below.