Did I just say the dreaded “eclipse” word? Yes, weary souls, it is that time of year again. With the Taurus new moon passed, we are well on our way to our two eclipses – next week we will see our full “blood moon” eclipse in Sagittarius and then two weeks later, our solar eclipse in Gemini. Hold onto your butts, things are about to get weird up in here!
Even if you’re familiar with working with the lunar cycle, eclipse energy can be hard to understand. I’m going to try and break it down for you. The eclipses occur along an axis of opposite signs in the horoscope – these two axis points are the North Node (simplified as “where we’re going”) and South Node (“where we’ve been”). Because of this, you can view the North node as similar energy to a New Moon and the South Node as similar energy to a Full Moon (if you believe in the wax on/wane off mode of lunar magic anyway – experience may vary).
From my personal experience, this is why eclipse magic can be tricky. When calculating the energy of an upcoming eclipse, you need to take into account whether it’s a full or new moon as well as which of the lunar nodes it conjoins (north or south) and its corresponding energy. (And this is before you’ve ever even considered the sign the moon falls into or how it aspects your own personal natal chart).
But let’s apply it to our upcoming Sagittarius blood moon. The full moon is in Sagittarius and because it connects with the South Node, there is a double theme of letting go. That fits with Sagittarius energy too – always ready to move on.
I get this on a cellular level. Currently, in the US we are experiencing a large shift in the effects of the pandemic and here in Southern New England, we are quickly shifting from our dry winter season to warm and humid weather. As such, I opt to do some support magic to help me align with both letting go of what needs to leave and making space for good things to take their place. My go-to for a spell like this is a Cut & Clear style.
I often do a Cut & Clear as a candle spell but I’ll be away from my home base for this full moon and I don’t want to cart a lot of components with me so I’m making a bath scrub version – I always like bathing for lunar magic anyways. I opted to use one of the many spring tonic herbs that grows rampantly around here as my clearing herb – tonics naturally help to re-balance our bodies through season changes which is exactly what I wanted this spell to do. For the cutting/cleansing element, my go-to is lemon – I wanted to use the zest, but my lemons looked questionable so I resorted to a small amount of lemon essential oil mixed in with the honey.
You will need:
1/4 cup Pink Himalayan Salt or Sea Salt
1/4 cup Spring tonic botanical (I used violet but purple deadnettle, dandelion, or ground ivy would also work)
3/4 cup Epsom salt
3 tbs honey or coconut oil
1 tbs lemon zest or 5 drops lemon essential oil
A mortar and pestle
A bowl and spoon
Optional:
Cleansing incense
A beeswax candle
Cleansing oils
A note on crafting: When you are making something that you are going to put on your body, it is very important that you carefully source the ingredients and make sure that they are skin safe and will be tolerated by YOUR skin. I know that I can put this amount of lemon essential oil in a scrub and my skin will be fine – it’s important to do a skin test. This is the reason that I choose both honey and beeswax candles for this spell – they are both reliably good skin-safe ingredients (in general and for me specifically).
The first step in this is, of course, to harvest a quarter cup of the spring tonic herb that you want to use. Whatever is growing outside is fine. If it’s seasonally too late in your area, you could use rosemary. I used violet petals but you could just as easily use the whole spring growth for ground ivy or deadnettle. I blessed my violet petals to be a spring tonic and then ground them together with the pink Himalayan salt until well combined.
From there, I added my violet salt to a mixing bowl with the rest of my ingredients. I choose a fire space bowl because I intended to light a candle in it, but that’s not neccessary if you’re going to skip that step. You can mix together and put aside until the full moon (or use immediately) if you’d like.
I’m a fire witch, so I almost always burn candles as a part of my spellwork. Here I choose a bright green candle to represent the vibrant energy of this spring full moon and “Earth Mother” oil from the Witches Moon to anoint it with. It’s a fun change-up from the generally much more citrus bases that I use in a Cut & Clear.
Depending on how vigorously I decide to exfoliate day-of, I’ll probably get 2-3 scrubs out of one of these batches. I intend to use for the full moon and will likely repeat on the solar eclipse as well.