Self-Authority, Rebirth and Ceridwen’s Cauldron
9 November 2026
The Scorpio New Moon arrives on Monday November 9th at 07.01 GMT. Here in Britain it rises with the Sun, a few minutes before dawn. A beginning made in the dark, with the light just about to break over the edge of the world. A very Scorpionic start!
Spring beginnings are easy to understand. Something green pushes up, and we cheer it on. November speaks another language entirely. The leaves have fallen, the fields are bare, the ground is busy with decomposition. Nobody plants in November. And yet everything that grows next season is being made right now, underground, out of what died this year. Compost is the most hopeful thing in any garden, and it smells of death. This beginning starts by going down. The bulbs have already put down roots. November is the part of the beginning that happens out of sight.
Scorpio is the sign that knows this in its bones. It doesn’t ask how to avoid the descent. It asks what have you brought back? What did you learn in the dark this autumn? What did you finally see clearly? What do you now know that you cannot unknow, about yourself, about someone you love, about the world? Most of us carry a few bad seeds. The loss that shook our foundations, the diagnosis, the divorce, the betrayal, the death that rearranged the family. The truth about a parent, a partner or a country that, once seen, could never be unseen. Scorpio does not let us return empty-handed. It also does not let us pretend we never went.
Ceridwen the Enchantress
In the Welsh tale of Taliesin, the enchantress Ceridwen spends a year and a day brewing a cauldron of inspiration for her son. A local boy, Gwion Bach, is set to stir it. Three scalding drops leap onto his thumb, he puts it in his mouth, and in that instant he knows everything. The rest of the brew turns to poison and the cauldron cracks. Gwion runs. Ceridwen gives chase through every shape in creation, hare and hound, fish and otter, bird and hawk, until Gwion hides as a single grain of wheat on a threshing floor and Ceridwen, as a black hen, swallows him.
Nine months later she gives birth to him. She means to kill the child, but he is so beautiful she simply can’t. Instead, she sews him into a leather bag and sets him afloat. He is found caught in a weir, and the man who finds him exclaims at his shining forehead. Taliesin, radiant brow. He becomes the greatest bard in Britain.
This is the Scorpio teaching; what is swallowed in the dark is carried, and grown. And notice who does the gestating. Ceridwen carries the very thing she was hunting. Her rage, her loss, her ruined year’s work, all of it goes into her body and composts into a shining child.
SABIAN SYMBOL
Which brings us to the Sabian symbol for this New Moon, ‘A woman, filled with her own spirit, is the father of her own child.’ Self-generated authority. She does not wait for anyone to seed her, sanction her or bless her. She conceives from her own depths and raises what she creates herself. There is the woman who had to be both mother and father because no one else turned up, and the woman who learned to parent herself when nobody did it for her. There is also the woman who simply stops waiting to be chosen, stops waiting for permission, and begins.
Like every symbol, it has a shadow. Taken too far, the woman who fathers her own child becomes the woman who cannot ask. She does everything, trusts no one, carries it all and is quietly exhausted by it. She grew up before her time and never put the weight down. Self-sufficiency can be a gift or it can be a fortress, and it is worth knowing which one you are living in. Ceridwen shows us the healthier way. Having birthed her child, she lets him go. She puts him on the water and trusts the current. What we give birth to has to leave our hands eventually.
THE WORLD STAGE
It’s hard not to see this symbol playing out on the world stage. On Tuesday, in its 250th year, America voted, and the blue wave arrived. Democrats took both the House and the Senate and a remarkable number of the new faces were women. Fifteen women won governorships, a new record. Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Black woman ever elected governor of an American state. Deb Haaland and Peggy Flanagan became the first Native American women to win a governorship and a Senate seat. In Texas, Latina, Gina Hinojosa, who called herself an ‘angry mom’, unseated Greg Abbott. And this was not one party’s story alone, because Tennessee elected its first woman governor too, a Republican. Women filled with their own spirit, deciding the time for waiting was over.
Yet none of them did it alone, and the sky is clear about that. Venus is in Libra, her own sign, as this New Moon begins, and she is making easy sextiles to Mars and Jupiter in Leo. Desire and affection are on speaking terms again. Warmth flows more easily. Generosity comes naturally. Every victory speech last week rested on volunteers, organisers, neighbours and the long line of women who ran before and lost. Self-authority and community need each other. The strongest women in any room know exactly who helped them get there.
HARD EDGES
The harder edge of this chart comes from the Sun and Moon in Scorpio squaring Mars and Jupiter in Leo, fixed water against fixed fire. Scorpio wants depth, privacy and the truth beneath the truth. Leo wants to be seen, applauded and proved right. Mars and Jupiter together are enormous fuel, courage, appetite, conviction, the urge to go big. Jupiter enlarges everything it touches, including pride. Under the square to Scorpio, this can tip into theatre: the victory lap, the righteous row, the attention-grabbing grand gesture. At its best Leo is the monarch who serves the kingdom. At its worst, the kingdom serves the monarch.
Meanwhile Mercury, retrograde in Scorpio is squaring Pluto. What was hidden is coming to the surface, documents, motives, the conversations held behind closed doors. The new majority in Washington is already promising investigations and Scorpio has a long memory. With Mars and Jupiter roaring in Leo, the temptation will be to turn a mandate into a vendetta. There is a difference between accountability and revenge. This Moon will test whether we know it.
Further out, the slow planets keep doing their deep work. Saturn, retrograde in Aries, is drifting back towards Neptune, testing every new ideal for whether it can actually bear weight. Uranus is closing in on its trine to Pluto, Neptune holds its sextile to Pluto, and Uranus sextiles Neptune. Together they describe a rewiring of power far below the level of any single election, the kind of change that is only visible in hindsight. Chiron lingers in the last degrees of Aries, still asking where we learned that standing up for ourselves would cost us love.
STILL NO EARTH
And once again there is almost no earth in this chart. After the Taurus full Moon briefly gave us ground to stand on, fire, water and air carry this chart with only Lilith standing in Capricorn. That is November in a sentence. The earth has gone underground, doing its composting while the rest of us argue above it.
Personally, this Moon asks for one intention, not a list. Scorpio is a fixed sign and its gift is concentration, the ability to hold a single focus for a long time. Choose the one thing you are prepared to tend for years rather than weeks, the hope you are almost afraid to say out loud, and go deep with it. Keep it private if you like. Some seeds grow best unseen.
It also asks you to own your authority. Where are you still waiting for permission? Whose blessing are you holding out for, a parent’s, a partner’s, an institution’s? Stop waiting for someone to hand you what you have earned. Find your spirit and stop rehearsing your own helplessness. Choose that intention, write it by hand and keep it somewhere dark until the spring.
Wishing you all infinite new moon love and blessings,
Davina
Shamanic Ritual for the New Moon in Scorpio, November 9th 2026:
The Pomegranate
Scorpio is the sign of the descent and the return. It is Persephone’s sign, the girl taken underground who ate the seeds of a pomegranate and returned as a queen. The old tales can’t agree whether she ate one seed or seven. They all agree that once she had eaten, she couldn’t go back to being who she was.
This ritual needs one pomegranate, a bowl of water and your hands. It uses the oldest kitchen trick there is for getting the seeds out, and the trick turns out to be the teaching. Do it at dawn on Monday if you can. If dawn isn’t possible, any time in the three days after the New Moon will do.
You will need:
A ripe pomegranate, heavy for its size
A large bowl of cold water
A small knife and a board
A small dish
A candle
A slip of paper and a pen
A patch of garden, or a pot of soil
Opening
Light the candle. Hold the pomegranate in both hands for a moment and feel the weight of it. A good one is surprisingly heavy, because it’s full. Say aloud the following:
“I have been down into the dark places of my life, and I have come back up.”
Breaking it open
Score the skin around the middle with the knife, just through the skin and no deeper. Then put the fruit under the water in the bowl and pull it apart with your hands.
The juice will run and your fingers will stain. Let them. Some knowledge leaves a mark.
Letting the water sort it
Keep your hands under the water and ease the seeds out with your thumbs, a section at a time. The seeds sink to the bottom, and the bitter white pith and skin float up to the top. You don’t have to pick through anything. The water does the sorting.
While your thumbs are busy, say out loud the things you’ve learned the hard way. Not the wounds themselves, what they taught you. Begin each one the same way:
“I know now that…”
Keep going until nothing else comes. Then skim the floating pith and skin off the top into the small dish. Lift out the seeds and leave the pink water in the bowl.
Eating the seeds
Take a small handful of seeds. Eat them slowly, one or a few at a time, and taste them properly: sharp, sweet, a little bitter at the core.
“I take what I have learned into my body. Nobody gave it to me, and nobody can take it back. It is mine.”
The intention
Write one intention on the slip of paper. One sentence, in the present tense, about where you will stop waiting for permission and begin. Don’t explain it or justify it. Just write it down. Fold the paper small.
Into the ground
Take the dish of pith and skin, the folded paper and the bowl of pink water outside. Dig a small hole in the garden or a pot and put the paper in first, with the pith and skin on top. Cover it over. There is almost no earth in the sky at this New Moon, so the earth you give it is the earth that holds it.
Pour the pink water over the top.
“What I brought back up, I plant. Let it feed the spring.”
Closing
Come back inside. Put the rest of the seeds in a small bowl in the fridge and eat a few each morning this week, or share them with someone you love, which is better still.
Blow out the candle.
So mote it be....
If this Moon has you wondering what you have brought back from the depths, and what to do with it, my one-to-one Wisdom That Works sessions are a guided oracle for exactly that moment. In an hour together I read your astrology, Gene Keys and the cards, held within four decades of shamanic practice, so you can see the pattern you are living and take your next step with clarity.
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