Eclipse Season Survival Guide

After an unintended hiatus, we’re back with a new season of magick! First Aradia covers some logistics and show updates (we love you Liz!), and then we dive into the meat and potatoes of the episode. Should we have talked about eclipse season a couple months ago before it happened? Probably. Does that stop you from absorbing the info to prepare for this fall? No way! Learn the basics of what an eclipse is, why it’s meaningful - especially if you’ve always thought they were a bit bunk like Aradia, how you can personalize the energy, and get ideas for spellwork you can cast to make the most of those celestial seasons.

You can find the full show notes here.

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Transcript

Eclipses are astronomical events in which the sun or the moon become obscured and then revealed in the sky. But they're also important events, astrologically and spiritually too. They're seen as deeply transformative periods of sudden intense change in a person's life. Today we talk about the spiritual and magical significance of eclipses, why they're important, and how we can work with them in specific and accessible ways.

Welcome to Two by Torchlight, where we dive deep and get real about magic and witchcraft. It's relationship to science and pop culture and what it's really like to build a modern practice that's accessible, effective, and unique to you. I'm Aradia your veteran witch. And I'm Liz, a newer practitioner.

Hang out with us around the torchlight as we talk all things woo and witchcraft.

Hello and welcome to two by Torchlight, a modern witchcraft podcast. I'm Aradia your host, and I need to apologize for the unintended hiatus. You see my amazing bestie and co-host Liz decided a few months ago, actually it might have been back in December, that it was time for her to step away from this project.

Now if you're in our discord, you might have seen her post. Um, her life was getting crazy. Their candle business was taking off and she couldn't dedicate the time to this show that it and our listeners deserved. Uh, so I took the opportunity to sit with the change in all of its magical discomfort and really decide what I wanted the show to look like going forward without her.

See, we had designed the show to be about two witches, one newer and one veteran, sharing their beliefs and experiences and teaching each other. I tossed around the idea of bringing on a new co-host or just going solo or even ending the show altogether, honestly. Uh, but it didn't feel right. Nothing really felt right.

And ultimately I think I settled somewhere in the middle. So I took this break to restructure the future of the podcast, um, and. It got away from me. It took a little longer to figure out what I wanted. It took a little longer to really get back to writing and scripting and planning and structuring, uh, because of just sort of everything else going on my, in my life in the beginning of the year.

And so ultimately, I decided because I had so much going on, that I would restructure the podcast to be based on work I was already doing on TikTok and on YouTube and on my website. But with this added opportunity to bring on various guest hosts and do witchy interviews, and I have some really cool stuff coming up that I am so super stoked about.

So stay tuned. I got a couple emails about a month ago and excitedly texted them to Liz because I was so excited about, about some cool things that we can do with this show. So it's not over for sure. We're back just a little different. So as of next episode, you're gonna see some new branding. I truly, I love the name of this show, two by Torchlight, was gifted to us by my partner in a stroke of genius, but it sadly doesn't really fit anymore with only a single host.

So moving forward, I'll be calling the show Modern Day Magick, which some of you may already know as the name of my business and bringing the podcast under that umbrella. Honestly, this is gonna gimme greater freedom to do some new and interesting things in the future that I'm really excited about, including.

Bringing Liz back on for guest episodes, she agreed, because I know how much y'all love our dynamic, and honestly, so do I. She's still my bestie and she's not going anywhere. I promise if you miss her too much, you can always jump into the Discord server where she's still engaging with the community, so she's not gone forever.

The two by Torchlight website will be up for a while longer while I migrate all the past episodes and content to its new home on my own website, modern day magic.com. Future episodes and show notes will be archived there. I know change is hard and I know it's scary sometimes. If you have any questions about any of this transition, I want to be totally transparent and clear with all of you because this show is a labor of love, right?

So you can chat with me in the Discord, uh, or you can email me DearAradia@gmail.com, and you can always still reach me at two by torchlight@ gmail.com too, if that's easier because Gmail addresses are free, so I'm not gonna get rid of it. So thanks for sticking by the show as I worked through its uncertain future.

I can't wait for y'all to see what's coming. But N for now, let's get onto the episode. So today we're talking about eclipses because we just went through an eclipse season and we have another one coming up this fall, and it was really illuminating and eye-opening for me, and I want to share with all of you what I learned working through this eclipse season so that you can apply it this fall and going forward.

But before we talk about the spiritual and magical significance of eclipses, we should probably talk about the science of it because it does have a significant factor in how we look at it spiritually. So what is an eclipse? Well, a lunar eclipse is a full moon when the sun, the earth, and the moon are all aligned in the sky in that order.

So sun, earth, and moon. So the earth is in the middle of that sandwich and the sun is fully illuminating the side of the moon facing the earth. See if you can envision that in your head and in the show notes, I'll have some diagrams and some pictures helping to explain this. Because of the slight tilt of the moon's orbit, we can see the full moon, even though the earth is in between the moon and the sun.

So a lunar eclipses when the sun, the earth, and the moon are lined up for a full moon. But the angle of the moon makes it so that it falls within the Earth's shadow, thereby blocking all or most of the light from the sun, causing the moon to go dark in the sky as it moves through its orbit. That's why people will see an eclipse or part of an eclipse at different points because it's based on your geographical location on the earth compared to the moon in the sky and the sun in the sky.

If the moon falls completely within the Earth's shadow, that's a total lunar eclipse, and if only part of the moon crosses into the shadow, that's a partial lunar eclipse. Now, typically one area will have a total lunar eclipse, and then other areas around it will have a partial eclipse, and then you can also.

Not see the eclipse at all based on where you are, maybe because you don't have the correct angle or it's daylight when you're having the, your lunar eclipse, lunar eclipses usually happen two or three times a year, and because of the geometry of the celestial bodies, they always happen during a full moon.

Now a solar eclipse is similar in terms of, I guess, astronomical geography. A solar eclipse is when the sun, the moon, and the earth are all aligned in that order. So whereas with a lunar eclipse, we have the earth in between the sun and the moon with a solar eclipse, we have the moon in between the sun and the earth.

So basically the moon is blocking the sun's light as it travels to earth. As we on earth are looking at the sun, the moon is gonna come across that path and block the light. All of astrology and honestly, most of astronomy is based on the concept of us as people on earth. So astrology on a different planet would look completely different because it's a different perspective because the solar eclipse involves staring directly at the sun or where the sun should be in the sky.

More safety precautions are necessary than when watching a lunar eclipse, which is when you would use special glasses or devices, uh, because even though the path of light is being blocked by the moon, the solar rays are still traveling to earth and can cause damage to your eyes. So, fyi, you can stare at a a lunar clipse.

All you want, but do not stare at a solar eclipse without proper protection, please. During a solar eclipse, people located in the exact center of the moon's shadow will experience a total eclipse. A partial solar eclipse is when the moon passes between the earth and the sun, but the orbits don't exactly line up, and so the moon only ends up blocking some or most of the sun's light.

An annual solar eclipse is again, when the moon passes between the sun and the earth, but it's located at its farthest point away from earth in its orbit, so it doesn't completely block all of the sun, basically. It's not, it's not big enough to cover the sun completely, and in this case, the moon will appear as a dark disc lined up in the center of the sun, creating a bright ring of light around the moon.

It looks really cool. And now something that I learned recently during eclipse season is that eclipses always come in pairs because a solar eclipses when the moon is between the earth and the sun, and a lunar eclipse is when the earth is between the sun and the moon. A solar eclipse will always happen during the new moon, and a lunar eclipse will always happen during the full moon.

So this means they always fall about two weeks apart from each other, like half a lunar cycle. So this is what we talk about when we call Eclipse season. It's the period where the moon's orbit allows for eclipses to happen. Usually lasts around 35 days because the moon's orbit is always tilting and our orbit is always tilting.

It doesn't happen every time we have a so, uh, full or. New Moon. But when we do and when those sort of factors align, they always come in pairs. We usually get two eclipse seasons per year with two eclipses per season. But if the timing works out where the first eclipse happens early enough in the season, we could get a rare third eclipse instead of a pair, which is super cool.

Technically, an eclipse by definition is whenever one celestial body, so like a planet. Moves in front of another celestial body, like a planet or an asteroid or something as seen from the perspective of a third celestial body, which is typically us here on Earth, as I mentioned earlier. But we generally only talk about solar and lunar eclipses because other planetary eclipses simply there aren't noticeable due to their distance away from the earth.

Or to each other planets other than the moon, which isn't really a planet, but a astrology, it's considered a planet, um, are so far away that there are always tiny little dots in the sky. And so sometimes we can see like a Venus eclipse. But we don't notice it as much because it's just a tiny little dot.

As opposed to the sun and the moon, which are such massive celestial influences on our day-to-day life, whether you're talking astrology or just, you know, living a day, um, they have a much greater effect on us because they have an ef much greater effect on us throughout our lives. Does all of that science make sense?

Like I said, I will have diagrams and everything in the show notes, but to sum up a lunar eclipses, when the Earth is in between the sun and the moon, A solar eclipse is when the moon is in between the sun and the earth, and the body in the middle is blocking sunlight from the sun to the earth. So why are eclipses important to us spiritually?

Well, the sun and the moon are arguably two of the most important celestial bodies in astrology because they are the two that have the most direct effect on our daily lives. We see the sun every day, and we can track the phases of the moon just by looking up in the sky at night. It's a bit harder to see where Jupiter is in the sky just by looking, especially if you don't know what you're looking for.

But everybody can find the sun in the moon, and so when something happens to them, we tend to sit up and take notice. Eclipses get a bad rap for being tumultuous and chaotic, but they're honestly more about revelation, which can sometimes be uncomfortable, but it's ne negative and it's always necessary.

Eclipses are said to reveal secrets and hidden truths. Often that are deeply buried and sometimes that we don't even realize we're hiding. It's this idea of covering and then uncovering something. The act of revealing the eclipse in the sky mirrors our own revealing of deep truths that we need to face and work through as above, so below.

Right. Think of eclipse energy as like a sudden burst of shadow work or lighting, a giant spotlight illuminating something in your life that needs to be worked on. Eclipses, identify what we've been hiding or avoiding, whether consciously or not, and they push us along the path towards acceptance and growth.

If we let them, because Eclipse season has a clear beginning and end. They're powerful periods for manifestation and for change and for transformation. Kind of like we use the general lunar cycle, but it's typically more focused on inward change. It's a time when we get to devote to all about us and not necessarily the greater world around us.

So eclipses provide a timetable, often a sped up timetable in which to make these changes. Eclipse seasons are often linked, and so they run in cycles of three over 18 months. And what that means is eclipses that start something in one season will often end up culminating that thing about 12 to 18 months later.

And so it gives you a definitive timeframe with which to do your work, which is really nice because it's basically creating like an energetic container in time that we can raise the energy and dismantle this energy and then release the energy. Now, I will admit that I, for a while, thought astrology was bunk, and I think I might have mentioned this on an episode previously.

I. I've always really identified with my sun's sign of Pisces, but beyond that, I didn't understand astrology and the natal chart and all the different ways that the planets affect us, and so it just didn't make sense to me, and because it didn't make sense to me, I was really only getting real surface.

Level information about it, and it felt super generic. And when something would happen like, oh God, when Mercury goes into retrograde for a very long time, I have fought back against this like horror show that is Mercury and retrograde because it didn't make sense to me that everyone on the planet who's experiencing Mercury and retrograde is all having the same bad time all at the same time.

That didn't make sense to me, but when I started to dive deeper into astrology, I realized that there's so much more nuance based on your natal chart or your birth chart, and you can take all of that nuance and apply it to these celestial events so that maybe one person's full moon is super crazy, but that same full moon for another person is really chill or mercury and retrograde.

Maybe one person has a terrible time of it, but I was having. Not a bad time. In fact, some things were working out for me really well, and it's all based on where these planets and where these signs are falling on your birth chart. And we can take this information and apply it to Eclipse season as well to really get a deeper layer of how these eclipses can be affecting us and how we can work with them to manifest some real profound change in our lives.

And so how do we do this? Well, you start by identifying if the eclipse is solo or lunar, and then the sign, the sun or the moon will be in during the eclipse. Now, the fun thing about a lunar eclipse is because it happens during a full moon, you can either use the sign that the moon is in, or you can apply both the moon and the sun sign at that time.

Because a lunar eclipse is when the sun and the moon are opposite each other. They're always in opposite zodiac signs and a new moon. Because it's on the other side, the sun and the moon will always be in the same sign. So for a solar eclipse, you're really only looking at one zodiac sign. But for a lunar eclipse, you can look at either.

The sign the moon is in. Or you can look at both the sign the sun and the moon are in and give yourself a little bit more nuance. If all of this is super new and confusing to you, just stick with the sign for the sun, for solar eclipse and the sign for the moon for a lunar eclipse. It's fine. Now, once you've identified the signs that those celestial bodies are in, you wanna find that sign in your chart and figure out what house it rules.

And now, if you've never read a natal chart before, I have some resources, some links in the show notes so that you can go pull your chart. But you'll wanna have your chart in front of you. And your chart is basically a big circle and it's divided into 12 sections. They kind of look like slices of a pie or a pizza, right?

And each of those 12 sections is a house, and there are 12 houses on your natal chart, and each house is ruled over by a different zodiac sign. And now when you're pulling your natal chart, I always suggest using whole sign. Houses because it means one sign is assigned to each house and it's very straightforward and it's s lot easier to read and work with.

And you'll find a lot of astrologers nowadays are using whole sign houses because it's so much easier to read. So you pull up your natal chart, preferably with whole sign houses, find the sign in your chart. And figure out what house that falls in. And that house is going to be the area of your life that will be most affected by the eclipse energy of transformation and revelation because each house has a different sphere of influence over your life.

Like for example, your first house is the house of ego itself. It's also the house of your rising sign, but your seventh house is romance in relationships, and your eighth house is. Death and change in sexual energy and so on and so forth. So let's say for example, you are experiencing a solar eclipse, that the sun is in the sign of cancer.

And when you look at your chart cancer rules over your fourth house of home and family and your roots and your private life, This may mean that that solar eclipse is going to help you reconnect with home and family or find an issue that's been preventing you from doing that and help you uncover ways to move past it.

Now an interesting thing, or interesting to me at least, is that eclipses fall on or near the same degree every 19 years. So every 19 years that eclipse is going to be in the same sign. So if the energy of an eclipse hitting you hard, try to remember what you were going through 19 years ago, if you can remember what you were going through 19 years ago, or make a note somewhere safe and check back in 19 years and see if these larger cycles of transformation are sort of hitting you again and again.

Because as we know, manifestation and transformation and especially healing is always cyclical, and we're always gonna come back and go a little deeper and go a little deeper. So we've talked about what eclipses are and why they're important, and how we can get a little bit deeper based on our natal chart, but like, What do you actually do during an eclipse?

So I have four different activities or spell work that you can use to make use of this eclipse energy. Always remembering to customize it based on the signs and the zodiac, or even just like what's going on in your life or what season you're in at the time. So my first tip for Eclipse spell work is to identify any herbal allies that can get you through this intense energy.

So basically choose plants based on the season, the astrological sign, what's associated with the house affected, or what naturally calls to you during this time or during meditation. And work with the energy of those plants to help either uncover what you should be working on during this eclipse season, or help you manage and get through it.

So herbs that are generally associated with the sun and or the moon can help you connect to the energy of that celestial body. If you don't wanna get super deep into the astrological signs and the houses and all of that, go with a solar herb for a solar eclipse, or a lunar herb for a lunar eclipse. And what you can do with these flowers and plants and herbs is to make teas or flower essences or aromatherapy, these are gonna have the most direct effect on your body and mind.

Teas are a whole ritual in and of themselves that can talk about the magic of herbal teas. For ours, flower essences are based on solar energy, and so they're really powerful for working with. Solar eclipses and aromatherapy is wonderful because of the science and the chemistry behind scent and how it affects our mind and our emotion and our memory.

One fun tip would be to create a flower essence by placing it out during the eclipse so that you can capture the energy of that eclipse to use long after that eclipse period has passed, or even throughout that eclipse season, especially if it's shadow work or something equally motivating and equally emotional that you're working through.

Typically when you're making flower essences, you put them under the sun, but say you're working with a lunar eclipse, you can make that flower essence under the moon instead. And we're using the energy of the sun or the moon to really lock in the energy of that eclipse, like a, like a time capsule or like a photographic snapshot so that we can go back to that energy whenever we need to work through the emotions of that eclipse.

Now because we use Eclipse Energy to help reveal hidden things. My second spell work tip is to use candles. You can use candles in spells to uncover the truth of the matter or to help you or someone else see things more clearly. Candle spells are great for revealing and for manifesting, and there's potential for really great symbolism in lighting and extinguishing, or hiding and revealing the candle flame as part of the spell.

Another thing that you can do for Eclipse spell work is to create a vision board based on the themes revealed during the eclipse or what you expect to be revealed during the eclipse based on your natal chart. Vision boards are super useful visual tools for manifestation because they are not just magical, but also psychological, but they can also be used to work through problems and transitions.

By putting your problems up in a visual space where you'll see it, it's really keying your brain to working on it subconsciously, and so you can either use it as a visual reminder or as a way to work through a problem. Which leads me to my fourth tip for spell work, which is to pay attention to your dreams or do specific dream or journey work.

Messages can come through our subconscious. In fact, messages usually come through our subconscious while we're dreaming because we are the most at ease and it's the easiest time for messages to get through. Eclipses are often said to bring news and messages, and so utilizing our dreams can be a way to really take in that information, especially during lunar eclipses because the moon is so closely linked to dreamwork.

So I'm sure you know I'm going to suggest keeping a dream journal when you're working through Eclipse season, but it doesn't have to be a traditional journal. I know a lot of people struggle with that, and so what I do is I keep my phone within reach and I have a specific document or folder on my phone where I will voice record memos that I can save and transcribe and listen to later.

Because I'm not gonna sit and write my dreams in the morning. I'm not gonna remember them by the time I get to the journal, and I'm not going to remember everything by the time I start writing. But I can reach over, grab my phone, create a quick link on my main phone screen page to a voice memo app, and then just like stream of consciousness, verbal vomit into my phone, everything that I remember from my dream the night before.

And then I can go back later words and try to parse through all of the crazy and write it down. It also helps to create bedtime rituals with crystals and herbs and meditation to heighten your dream state and potential to receive information. I have a great dream tea blend on my website that you can check out.

Drink a cup of it about half an hour before bed. Create a real calming environment to go to sleep in, and then write down or voice memo your dreams as soon as you wake up the next morning. Eclipses can be so powerful. I never understood the appeal and the draw of eclipse season and when people would start to talk about, oh, this eclipse is coming up and how is it affecting you and what are you gonna do?

It just felt like any other lunar cycle to me until I started really looking at it kind of from that astronomical standpoint of how they're not super rare. And we can also predict when they're gonna happen. But that doesn't mean that they're not impactful and they're not profound, and they're not just really freaking cool.

Eclipse energy helps to combine the energy of the sun and the moon. And if you know me, you know I'm all about balancing opposing energies. So I've really come around recently to the idea of working with Eclipse Energy, and I'm super stoked that we're gonna have another eclipses in this fall that I can really put these tips to work in.

On October 14th, we're going to have an annual eclipse of the sun visible from part. Of nine different states in the US running from Oregon to Texas, and virtually all of the Americas will see a partial eclipse in the eastern us. Roughly 20 to 60% coverage takes place for the central us 60 to 80% for the Western US 80% or more.

And on October 28th, we'll have a partial eclipse of the moon seen by the entire eastern hemisphere. Though Canadian maritime provinces and New England might be able to see a faint shading at the end. So that solar eclipse will be more visible for people in the US and the lunar eclipse will be mostly visible for people outside of the us.

And then we have a really cool eclipse coming next year in 2024. If you live in the us, which we'll talk about later. I wanna know if you guys already work with Eclipse Energy and what you do, what your practices are, and if you don't work with Eclipse Energy, has this sort of primer inspired you to do anything this fall?

I'd love to hear your thoughts and your practices or what you intend to put into practice. You can reach me@dearradiogmail.com. You can also reach me on social media, on Instagram, on TikTok. And on Facebook, you can find my business page Modern Day Magic, or you can find my personal witchy account, a radio darling.

Or you can jump into Discord and chat with me there again, like I mentioned in the beginning, thank you so much for supporting the show, for sticking by us. For joining the Discord even during our hiatus and for understanding that we are human. We are human beings, living mortal lives, trying to be the best we can be.

And sometimes that means that things like content creation have to take a backseat. I am so excited to be back on this train though. I have amazing things coming up and I can't wait for you to hear all of them and see all of them and talk about them in the discord and email me your thoughts. So thank you so much for sticking by us.

Liz and I are both incredibly grateful for the year that we had with you by Torchlight, and I'm excited for you all to see what the future holds for Modern Day Magic, the Modern Witchcraft Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you guys are having an amazingly magical day, and I will see you next time.