September in astrology, archetypes and a meditation take makes both survivable
Where you’re standing right now is an empty field.
Leo Season plowed through it with two merciless eclipse storms, uprooting every dead vine, pulling on the uninvited weeds, every ‘one day’ project that lost access to the nutrients long time ago & toxic relationships that choke the soil you’re meant to be growing your actual fucking life in.
It came fast and strong, loudly pointing at the habits and versions of ourselves rotting away in the soil, leaving us standing in ankles deep in the ashes of scorched earth, wondering what to do next, what to invite in and how to nurture it, now that all of this space is mercifully and intimidatingly empty.
Here’s what you do with it. You plant something.
That’s the whole Virgo deal - it’s the early morning bus carrying you and a new found morning clarity home from dancing the night away at the infamous Leo Season bonfire rave. You did it. You did something to your body and your schedule. Some of your resolutions got torched. But you made it to this early morning bus - it’s not gonna do much to your vulnerability hangover, to your real ass hangover. It’s not going to clear the drugs out of your system and silence the ringing in your ears, it won’t erase all the bad decision you made last night.
But this early morning bus is taking you home.
You’ll need shower. You’ll need to feed yourself something. You’ll need to sleep and recover. You’ll need to text everyone who might have seen your wallet with your ID in it. The bus is just a promise of healing to come, which won’t take place without your full cooperation.
The main character monologue upon the stage burning under the stars is done, curtains fall. You’re left with dirt under your fingernails, wincing against the first beams of dawn that fully reveals the vastness of the field that now needs tending.
Listen, the late stage capitalism, that has its claws firmly wrapped around astrology too, will try to convince you your worth is measured in how many tasks you clear off a list before collapsing into bed. It will label her season ‘the productivity season’, but Virgo work feels slower and infinitely more sacred than any to-do list or (and for fucksake can we already stop equating Virgo’s sacred archetype with:) spreadsheets.
Because when the real ancient archetype running this whole season shows up, she will be holding a sickle in one hand (that’s perhaps the diligent, focused, slightly threatening work of getting your ass into gear, be it via to-do lists or otherwise), but in the other hand - a basket full of seeds.
Meet the Harvest Queen
Where I’m from, she would be called Zhiva (or Živa), goddess of life itself, wife to the sun god Dažbog, credited with every harvest and every heartbeat in the same breath. But you probably know her due to the more polished and mainstream mythological current running through the western culture, as Ceres or Demeter, the Greek goddess of grain turning the whole world cold and frigid whilst mourning her daughter’s descent to the Underworld every winter.
For ancient Egyptians she took the shape of cobra and the name of Renenutet, fiercly protecting the grain stores and deciding, with real teeth behind the decision, who ate that year and who didn’t.
This is a stretch, but perhaps you know of Cherokees tales of a first woman - Selu. Called a Corn Mother, she selflessly gave up her body in order for her people to never starve again.
Hanging out in the spiritual corner of Substack, you definitely heard her called Pachamama. The earth mother of Andean beliefs. Aka the one you feed before you dare to take anything from here..a sad fucking inversion of our exploitative behavior within our increasingly dark timeline.
There’s also a filthier & far more punk branch of this archetype sprouting straight out of the fields of old Europe, that I’m obsessed with. Farmers believed the spirit of the grain actually lived inside the crop & as the good workers cut their way across the field that spirit got chased further and further back, homeless with every swing of the scythe or sickle, every deafening roar of the industrial machinery, until it had nowhere left to hide but the very last standing sheaf.
That last sheaf got cut with extra sacred attention, to be woven into a doll and called the Corn Mother or Corn Dolly. Sometimes it was burned as an effigy of the harvest god John Barleycorn, so his spirit could sink back into the earth and be reborn come spring.
But no matter the moniker. This pattern is a reflection of our understanding & reverence of natural cycles. It shows up pretty much everywhere people depended on growing food. Which in turn depended on fostering symbiotic relationships with the earth and her ovulation cycles. Either way, the message is the exact one your birth chart is handing you right now: something has to get cut down before it can be planted again, and the cutting part we’re mercifully fucking done with! Exciting!
So, that’s who’s walking you through this month’s meditation. A goddess who shows up holding a sickle in one hand and a basket of seeds buzzing with potential in the other, for she rules both halves of the cycle. Spread between the ending and the beginning at the exact same moment, as a bridge guarding your journey from one end to the other, the sacred work involved in the actual crossing.
Virgo’s whole mythology is a woman who knows exactly how much labor sits between an empty field and a full table. And after the eclipse Leo exaltations, her attention runs straight past your vibes and lands directly deep within your actual soil.
The Sky Above The Field
Quick and dirty, because you ain’t here for the astro deep dive breakdown (one coming up later, no worries!) and all of us still shaking off August’s eclipses, we better get to the meditation as fast as possible.
Hey, I’ll be blunt. Eclipses are not just an earthquake assaults, done and leaving the ruble to sift through for survivors or treasures. The seismic activity reverberates through the weeks, months, sometimes years to come. Because that quake just knocked things into a different direction, new type of velocity and motion, even if it often does so via subtractions. That’s just how eclipses work, even if it some of it felt perhaps real final this time around...that Pisces lunar eclipse specifically was the last chapter of a three-part story that’s been reworking the concept of who you are and how that shows up out there in the world since September of 2024. So if late August hit harder than you expected, that’s because it was closing something that took two full years to finish.
First week of September, you most likely find your patience running short. Fuses constantly about to pop. Plans stalling. All aggro energy that makes you feel like moving, but the moving is like pushing a pram filled with bricks. Up the hill.
Both glued in a domain and contorted into a shape that make them real assholes, Mars & Saturn be beefing and their tedious square offs infuse the first days of September with the ‘big feelings paired with paralysis to act upon them’ shit.
And then just when you take a breath, ready to move on with stuff, Venus leaves her favorite Libra palace and drops down into the underground cavern of sticky and poisonous but oh so seductive Scorpio. It’s a descent from a shiny throne of all is beautiful, all if worthy of love to the dim paranoia of probing and dissecting and stirring shit up. Questions about worth and value. Of relationships. Of money. Of where money and relationships meet and interplay. This is a running shower on empty in a locked bathroom whilst digging through your partner’s phone type of shit, dialing up the last unknown number he called, with your heart playing a dying hummingbird drum’n’base against your chest. No matter who answers, your nervous system is already fucked because it brought you here. Because it does not see the difference between personal apocalypse only imagined vs experienced.
And then, Venus will be doing a backward dance in the exact same degrees of Scorpio later, so whatever gets uncovered, whatever raw ‘me vs. the other’, money or power (same thing, really) nerve is being targeted with intense energy, is only a preview of deeper internal revisions to be had during Venus’s retrograde.
Same day, Mercury enters Libra. Well, at least all the shit we semi-gleefully stirred will be easier to unpack in uncomfortable conversations, the words flow freely and we might find ourselves turning the volume up on charm, on wittiness, on conflict avoidance. Uranus stations retrograde in Gemini, allowing for integration of some of the shocking developments it brought down on us earlier and no, the sky’s not finished - New Moon in Virgo rises on September 10th, too.
New Moon but also the actual heartbeat of this whole season. As you know, New moons are always a chance on new beginnings, and in the sign of the harvest goddess it’s a full on invitation to be practical about them. Invitation to lay down real, unsexy groundwork for a new routine or a healthier relationship with your body (please!)..or both - a new routine that honors your body and its internal cycles..same as with planting and the cycles of earth..see the connections? An honest, somewhat unglamorous but real and raw audit of what your daily life actually requires of you.
September 22 is equinox. The Virgo work placed on the balancing scale against others and their values. Day and night feeling equal for a split second open the portal into the season of Libra aka the time when all of this internal work will want to be tested against our close relationships.
Now that our inner house have been redecorated, we get to invite others in and investigate how our new internal order measures up against the external chaos of other people’s shit.
At the very end of September, Mercury slides down underground to undergo a scorpionic mission that for sure will show up in our news feeds and political scandals, exposes, leaks and dare I say a public accountability! Release all the fucking files!
But before that, September 26th light up the sky with a powerful unflinching fireworks of Aries Full Moon. It’s sitting almost at exactly the same place where new Moon in Aries started something magnificent and intimidating but necessary back in April, close to retrograding Saturn and Neptune AND Chiron (slipping back to the same fire starter sign for the last stint here). So it all weaves this into a footnote under a mission statement first presented in Feb of 2019. Whatever wound around identity and beginnings or the right to simply exist loudly in your own fucking life has been trying to stitch itself and scab over gets one last and unusually clear look under this sky. Let it finish!
And so, this is a month built on two kinds of harvest. One will be small and immediate. It’s the Virgo stuff that feels like a glamour free conveyor belt of adjustments. Little and chock full of the low key importance: your routines, your long overdue appointments, your showing up for others but also where does that shit run against and past your boundaries?
The other harvest is enormous and long overdue, it’s loud and confrontational. It’s the Aries (Moon, Saturn, Neptune, Chiron, aiiii) healing chapter with opening words written back in 2019, now getting its finale under the September’s full moon unmissable spotlight.
September wants you holding both at once. September wants you to plant the boring seed. September begs you to let the old grief wilt and rot on the vine. Before we pull that crap out of the ground. Treat whatever Venus hands you this month as the dirty draft, the first pass, the first cut it actually is, not the come to the table harvest call. We’ll have some work to do there first. Honor the cycles. Don’t eat from mother earth before you feed her something first.
The Meditation
And this is the energy my Virgo archetype meditation runs on. An audible journey crafted to be taken at any point during the season of growing. Journey inwards that is best experienced with headphones because it’s built around binaural frequencies. I drop you straight into that midnight field under a canopy of stars, barefoot in cool soil, breathing life back down into that eclipse ravaged ground until dawn breaks and the wheat rises gold around you.
Virgo, the Harvest Queen, lands us the focus, the trust & the patience, the attention & the ability to nurture, so that when the harvest arrives, we sit at the table in perfect gratitude to ourselves and to mother earth, fully savoring each delicious bite.
The planting, of course, takes place inside your own chest…and even if the first sprouts doesn’t appear above the ground immediately, you walk back out of that field carrying something that’s finally truly yours.
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