HD Transits 2 – 8 August 2023

The Return of the Female Shamans

I’m writing this as the Full Moon lights up the Gate of Retreat (33). I was heading out to the cafe, but decided on a coffee in my garden instead. It’s like that at the moment. The energy is inward focused, and will stay that way through August and September.

This is not about retreating from the world, but withdrawing from what doesn’t support your own world-creating processes. There is some healing, but much of it is about having the space to notice who you are becoming, and to imagine where you might go next.

It’s time for us to swim in the sacred seas. To write a new story. A story that includes our own cosmic nature and potent powers of transformation. It’s time for the return of the female shamans.

How We Create the Future

The Sun will be in the Gate of Retreat (33) for most of this week (until August 6). The Earth is in the Gate of Approach (19), down in the Root Centre. The energy is for growth, for noticing what is approaching you – the great growing energy of source seeking your unique form of participation. This is not a time for pushing forward, or even for focusing on results. Its time instead to take a moment to remember that you and I have within us the power to create the future.

Gate 33 is the gate of remembering. This week we remember who we are. We remember that it is up to us, both personally and collectively, to create a new future for humanity.

We are being ushered through a portal, a doorway which will open us to a new way of seeing ourselves and the potential for a new human story. This is both magic, and the result of hard work in recovering aspects of self we were told don’t even exist. We have imagined ourselves back into wholeness!

Chariklo – the feminine polarity of creation

There’s another planet in the Gate of Approach – Chariklo – the largest of the Centaurs, and a potential dwarf planet. Chariklo holds the feminine polarity of creation. She weaves our destiny and opens doorways for our future. She is joined by Hygiea, an asteroid and also potential dwarf planet, in the Gate of Revolution (49).

Hygiea is granddaughter of Apollo, daughter of Asclepius, and was originally included – along with her sister Panacea – in the Hippocratic Oath taken by all doctors. It’s a curious fact that most healing shamans dress in women’s clothes, and it’s likely that Hygiea was a healer long before the ancient Greeks brought forth Apollo and Asclepius.

Hygiea’s domain is in seeing the whole person, including all our parts and dimensions, as necessary to our health and wellbeing.

One of the functions of this channel – Gate 19 and 49 – is to ensure everyone in the tribe has food and shelter. Clearly that’s not happening around the world right now. Which triggers this channel’s deeper function – it is about change – radical change. It is the ability to change the government, to realign our own governing principle, to change our shape, our alignment with the stars, to restore our own natural harmony.

Chariklo and Hygiea – both potent feminine healers – light this channel up with the shamanic potential of previously unimaginable new beginnings.

What do you call a gathering of Female Shamans?

On August 8, dwarf planet Ceres (the Great Mother, nourishment, transformation) shifts into the Gate of The Gentle (57) making a channel with Sedna (feminine shamanic transformation) in the Gate of Presence (20).

A word on Gate 20. In the I Ching it is sometimes called the Watchtower, a name also given to Mary Magdalene because she held such presence as a role model of the transformative power of the divine feminine.

On August 20, Ceres (in 57.5) will be exactly opposite Chiron in the Gate of Shock and Initiation (51.5) This is less about healing than it is about waking up, about being present to our own lives, and everything we have to bring to them. Parts of ourselves that have been shut down will wake up, facilitating deep transformation on all levels.

Who’s Confused?

As a background to this process, Mercury and Mars are sitting in the Channel of Abstraction (64-47) all through August and. September.

Mars is in the Gate of Before Completion (64) in the Head Centre this week. On August 7, Mars shifts down into the Gate of Oppression (47) in the Ajna Centre, and Mercury moves into Gate 64.

You might know this channel by the keyword Confusion. But the confusion is just about how we frame what’s going on.

Mercury spends almost it’s entire upcoming retrograde in this channel.

More: Neptune in Gate 36: Reclaiming the Dark on how we are waking from a cultural hypnosis.

Are we there yet?

Back when I was first introduced to Human Design, and began my study of the I Ching, I was perplexed about the last two of the 64 hexagrams. Why is hexagram 63 called Completion, and the following hexagram 64 called Before Completion?

The answer is that hexagram (Gate) 63 is the moment when everything is perfect. You’ve finished the project, cleaned the house, won the award. That moment of Gate 63 perfection is – unfortunately! – never meant to last. We can’t hold onto it. We shouldn’t resist the ensuing change, but we do.

In contrast, Gate 64 is the time just after completion. We get our degree. Hurrah! And now we have to go into the job market. We clean the house. Hurrah! And then the kids come home.

Gate 64 is that moment just after the perfect culmination of the previous cycle, when everything is in flux. We have to move carefully in these new times, to see how things will settle. At this stage, any small input can create large consequences.

The mental pressure of Mars (and later in the week, Mercury) in this gate can have us seeking quick solutions, fast responses to complexity. That’s not what this is about. There is more deepening than quickening right now. Mercury fully completes its dance through the Gate of Oppression (47) at the end of September. Then we will have the gifts of this channel – a greater perspective and a whole raft of new perceptions and possibilities.

Who Gets To Say How Things Should Be?

I mentioned that the confusion in Gate 64 comes from how we frame things. Right now there are people who have the perfect arrangement of circumstances. They have power and riches, and more on the way. They are in Gate 63 – Completion – and they are not keen on allowing anything to shift that perfect arrangement. And then there are the rest of us who are looking on confused, as the world burns and homelessness rises. How does this make any sense?

Mars and Mercury are doing some heavy lifting in August and September, along with Chariklo, Hygiea, Ceres, Sedna and Chiron. Taking time out allows us to reconnect with some sanity, to reduce the influence of the emotional manipulation. (Which is mainly coming at us from Neptune in Gate 36).

Most people are confused and, quite frankly, terrified about where we go next. Can we even do anything to create a real future, rather than just meekly shuffle into Armageddon?

This is the pathway of the female shaman – the uncertainty and chaos of new birth. Shape-shifting, radical change, moving with the flow of universal creation.

So, while the withdrawal energy may take you away from the external world it brings you into greater relationship with it’s true transformative potential. Saturn (which has it’s own shamanic processes, being the planet most strongly related to matter (mother – mater) has shifted back into the Gate of Abundance (55) where we discover that universal flow bypasses much of what many people think of as ‘real life’. It shifts the perception of what reality is, and of what it means to shut ourselves away from the flow of life.

Perhaps coffee and writing in my garden are more real than being in the rat race? Perhaps there is a way of creating great change, birthing new worlds, despite the appearance of withdrawing.