New Moon in Taurus
An essay on anxiety and a New Moon ritual for good fortune, courage, and support
Other than reading Philippe Borgeaud on the Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece1 less as history and more as magical insight into my personal history with panic attacks, I turn most often to Rollo May’s The Meaning of Anxiety to apprehend the “what for” and “why” of anxiety along individual and cultural breaking points.
The book sits haphazardly on a shelf of occult tomes, often kissing corners with Jennifer L. Griffith’s Traumatic Possessions and my dog-eared copy of the unknown author’s Meditations on the Tarot. This is the shelf in my office that freaks out family members; even my stalwart mother-in-law tends to avoid the room, maybe a little anxious about what she might discover (a strange bauble? a dried flower petal?!) tucked in amongst the rose incense and empty vials of magical oils, apothecary bottles with their stained labels.
May’s book belongs on this shelf, because to read it is to encounter an eccentric vision of anxiety that sees it as an affective requisite and vital condition for moving past boredom, helplessness, and inertia. Anxiety, for May, helps us to give up our entrenched ideas of ourselves, others, and the world around us. It forces us into the kind of “right action” all our favorite social-media animists like to champion these days. And far from being a detriment to creative effort, May argues, anxiety is a necessity2 for all creativity, all art, because anxiety is the “cleavage between expectations and reality” that is “present as one condition of all creative activity.”
May’s vision of anxiety doesn’t easily align with “the world is sick, so of course we must be, too” vision of mental health that certain leftists are so galvanized by these days. Nor does it pair nicely with the medical model of mental illness that prevailed up until just a few short years ago, when the big funding arms of the National Institutes of Mental Health and the like quietly began to roll back monetary support for research that attempted to lash mental illness to specific neuromarkers in the brain.3 The drug companies are still selling us psychotropics that purport to alleviate suffering based on a neurobiological model of mental illness that fewer and fewer scientists buy into. Meanwhile, the accepted conversation around mental illness on the left has largely become one of shrug and defeat: “If you’re feeling good in a world this bad, something’s wrong with you,” is the gist of this line of inquiry, with all the bells and whistles of “nuance” and “compassion” and “dark humor” it takes to get the essay “restacked” a couple hundred times on Notes, our social-media-anxiety-engine-du-jour.
Born on a New Moon in Taurus similar to the one we’re experiencing today, May’s insights into the etiology and alleviation of anxiety, despair, and other mental illnesses arose from a strong personal objection to the tyranny of labels, a Taurean refusal of anything that reduced the emotional textures of the human experience into only ever pathology and proscription. His compassion for psychological suffering was rooted in practical, creative action as well as in an unflinching ability to bring awareness to neuroses with the sense that such neuroses could be transformed into states of creative well-being, with proper guidance, re-education, and support.
These days, it feels almost risky to speak of anxiety as something that can be overcome, transformed, or integrated as a helpful, if uncomfortable, part of an emotional whole. But having lived with anxiety for as long as I can remember, and having tried all sorts of interventions against its presence, including inpatient treatment, I can honestly say I’ve never found anything so helpful as May’s book, which effectively gave me permission to re-encounter my anxiety, not as a sign of a bad brain or an irredeemable world, but instead to use it as a means of enlarging my sense of creative possibility, to believe in Kierkegaard’s assessment that “to venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose oneself.”
This New Moon in Taurus is a wonderful moment to confront your own anxieties as signposts of true desires, and to venture forth in spite and because of your own sense of panic. Below is a New Moon ritual for bringing secret stores of courage, support, and good fortune into your life, calling on the powers of Venus, who rules this lunation and makes her magic without fanfare, hidden beneath the beams of the Sun.
New Moon Ritual for Courage, Support, Good Fortune
This ritual works best between noon and about 1 p.m. on Tuesday, May 7, the day of the New Moon, no matter which time zone. For most places, this will give you a Leo rising chart with the New Moon and Venus in the Taurean Tenth House, for maximum power and effect. But if you can’t make or find time for the ritual then, no need to get too precious about it. As an astrological magician, I’ve been brought up in the hard guidelines of Hellenistic electional astrology, but in my heart-of-hearts, I’m a Queen of Cups tarot lady, meaning I ultimately put more stock into intuition and intention than I do into rules handed down by daddies throughout time.