Storyteller's Night Sky 2025-08-20 (Crescent Moon Bears Sunlight, Starlight, and Meteor Light to Earth)

This week the crescent Moon wanes through the morning sky, approaching Jupiter on Tuesday, Venus on Wednesday, and then Mercury on Thursday, before it gets lost in the light of the Sun and we don’t see it for a few days. The Moon will come to New Phase after midnight on Saturday this week, and then the cycle begins again, with Moon growing toward full phase, gathering all the available celestial light as it goes; then it begins to wane through the night and on toward dawn as a crescent, or boat filled with spirit knowledge, bearing earthward all it has gathered in the celestial light and coming ashore during those few days before New Phase when we don’t see it. These few days are called the Moon’s “dark phase” and this week, they happen on Thursday and Friday, when it’s a good time to lean into your dreams and to listen to the spaces in between ~ to what you encounter just after you fall asleep, and just before you wake up. It’s not only the light of the Sun and stars and planets that the Moon is carrying our way right now, it’s also the light of the meteor shower. It’s like this: The Moon was Full August 9, Venus and Jupiter met on August 12, and the meteor shower peaked later that night. Jupiter is abundance, Venus is love, and when they’re together, it’s like the classical Greek myth when Zeus makes Aphrodite realize that she, too, wants and needs love. This is the kind of love gives rise to entire civilizations! So the Moon gathered all of this up, and now, bearing this celestial goddess in its boat of spirit knowledge, she descends. In addition to the ancient myth of Venus Aphrodite descending with love, there are also stories of the celestial goddess of wisdom descending ~ she bears the name of Sophia, which becomes Philosophia. Dante’s Beatrice is a celestial goddess that descends to bring him love and guidance, and in the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, the celestial goddess descends with an invitation to a wedding, which is the union with the greater self. This realization of the greater self happens when the celestial goddess becomes Anthroposophia, the divine wisdom or Sophia of the human being the anthropo-. The English poet William Wordsworth pointed at this in his Perfect Woman which begins: SHE was a phantom of delight When first she gleam’d upon my sight; A lovely apparition, sent To be a moment’s ornament; Her eyes as stars of twilight fair; Like twilight’s, too, her dusky hair; Watch the Moon in the morning sky this week, and lean into encounter during its dark phase Thursday and Friday, when it descends and disappears on the mighty shores of Earth bearing toward us all the invitation to the wedding.