Oct 2023 Solar Eclipse - Ending/Saros 134

This chart marks a moment rather than a person: the exact ending of the annular solar eclipse of 14 October 2023, drawn for Re'im in southern Israel. An annular eclipse is the ring of fire, the Moon passing in front of the Sun while too far from Earth to cover it completely, so a bright annulus of light remains. Astronomically it belongs to Saros series 134, the forty-fourth of seventy-one, at the Moon's descending node, and it was followed two weeks later by a partial lunar eclipse.

At this instant the Sun and Moon stood together in Libra, sign of the scales, of balance, fairness and the weighing of two sides. An eclipse conjunction here speaks to reckonings and to relationship, to what is just and what is out of balance. Both luminaries fell in the fourth house, the very floor of the chart, the domain of home, homeland, mother and lineage: the place where roots run deepest and where peace of mind is either held or shattered. The Cancer Ascendant, ruled by the Moon, wraps the whole moment in the crab's protective shell, the archetype of the homeland and of care.

A chart of a place and an hour, it reads as a portrait of light briefly withdrawn over ground that would soon know great sorrow.