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I have seen twilight at mid-afternoon.

I have gazed into the face of Totality.

I have beheld the Black Sun.

By many traditional peoples around the world, eclipses are accounted unchancy and ill-omened events.

(Why not? Seeing them can strike you blind.)

Unsurprisingly, witches see matters differently.

What do witches make of eclipses?

Sabaean archpriest Federico de Arechaga (Ordun), while not himself of the tribe of Witches, certainly knew how to think like one.

He was wont to refer to weddings—all weddings: male-male, female-female, male-female (in this he was far ahead of his time)—as “eclipses.”

For witches, eclipses—those of both Sun and Moon—are considered Great Rites, hieroi gamoi, alchemical weddings of Moon and Sun.

As local priestess Hillary Pell put it, “The Union of the Gods renews the world.”

They bode, we say, coming change.

From Pittsburgh, we drove 72 miles north to Pymatuning.

Swollen with eclipse-pilgrims, the trip—an hour and a half in the going—took four and a half hours in the coming-back.

For three unforgettable hours, differences were laid aside. Rightist, leftist, centrist; Republican, Democrat, Independent; Trumpist, Bidenist, None-of-the-Above-ist: as the great Marriage of the Gods, in all its cosmic glory, unfolded before us, we, too, were one.

We have an exceptionally powerful total solar eclipse occurring in Pisces in a few days. You may be thinking “the eclipse is in Aries!” but it actually is quite literally in the sign of Pisces. Tropical astrology is figurative, whereas sidereal astrology is based on where the constellations actually physically are, their actual size (hint: they definitely are not all a tidy 30°) and accounts for the precession of the equinoxes. Make no mistake, we are in Pisces through-and-through and I should like to make a case for this system and for working with the eclipse in the context of Pisces, not Aries.

Pisces is deep, no pun intended. It is spiritual, mystical, intuitive creative, and of course oh-so-watery. This powerful eclipse then is ideal for divination, enhancing intuitive and magical abilities, but also to banish or end any destructive or unhelpful energies, thoughts, feelings, relationships, etc. If there are any in your life that need extra firepower (or waterpower?), now is the time. Think of it as blasting your obstacles out of the way with the surge of a fire hose.

This is a great time to delve into ourselves, our true, deepest heart, and not the Sun-driven persona that everyone else sees. The Sun yields to the emotional Moon at this time, the Moon which guides and influences us and our actions far more than the Sun does. This is a time for shadow work, for scrying, for personal development and releasing whatever is no longer serving you. Chiron sits very near this eclipse, amplifying the healing energy in particular.

Last night, 2019’s only lunar eclipse took place: a spectacular “supermoon” eclipse. We watched it from our back yard, watching the Moon slowly darken into a ruddy ball, and then, dramatically, the bright edge of ordinary Sun-lit surface burst into being and steadily reclaim it.

Lunar eclipses are really cool. Astronomical events as a whole are really cool: meteor showers, eclipses, transits, and particularly that extraordinary rarity, a prominent comet visible to the naked eye. Whenever possible, I take the opportunity to experience these phenomena, as they bring home in a visceral way that we are on a planet, in space, and there’s a lot of other stuff going on out there.

Mama Moon enters the Fixed, Fire sign of Leo on Jan. 20 at 7:54 pm Pacific Time until Jan. 22. She is a Super Moon at Perigee at 9:16 pm on Jan. 20 which means she’s as close as she can be to Earth and Full. She is also ECLIPSED by the Sun at 6:36 pm on Jan. 20. So, what does it all mean?

Pick a card to find out. Also, take a peek at your natal birth chart to see if the Sun which is currently at 0º Leo conjuncts or opposes a natal planet or angle.

The generalism about eclipses is that in the darkness the sun and the moon meet the archetypal shadow element. What do we want to remain hidden? What do we want to keep secret from our deepest selves? While a Mercury retrograde period pushes us to stop pushing and hit the pause button, eclipse seasons are a call to hit the reset button.

In times of darkness and shadow one needs a wholesome dose of truth. I turn to Rebecca Solnit's essays in Hope in the Dark. Here is a quote to consider during eclipse seasons.

What do we need? What shall we seed?

Hindsight, foresight,  20/20 vision.