Wheel of Life Full Moon Meditation – 28 August – Virgo

Friday 28 August 2026
12 noon, local time

Sun in Virgo, Earth, the Craftsman;
Moon in Pisces, Water, the Mystic Healer

Paviland Cave – photo “Visit Gower”

Dear Gatekeepers,

Welcome to Friday’s full moon meditation in Pisces. This full moon will have a partial lunar eclipse. Read on for updates on our annual conference in November.

Cave entrance. Photo from The Modern Antiquarian

Our Pisces full moon meditation this month takes us to South Wales on the British Landscape Zodiac. Here we have the oldest ritual burial site in Europe. Thirty-three thousand years ago a young man was buried with great care, adorned with a necklace of seashells and carved mammoth bone beads, covered in red ochre. Lying beside the skull of a mammoth, his own skull was missing. Paviland Cave, is a special place with its striking entrance and at 22 metres long, now overlooks the sea but at that time sea levels were much lower and the sea would have been around 70 miles away. This was during the last ice age when there was a period of climate warming before the climate cooled and once again northern Europe became covered in deep ice and snow. We still worship special places and however much we are separated from our ancestors by great voids of time, they were exactly like us. Only their circumstances were different.

River Thames Blessings – a Pilgrimage from Westminster Abbey to St Pauls

Thames River blessing to cool the Phoenix fires during pilgrimage with Sarah Dawkins and Andrew Clark on 15 August between Westminster and St Paul’s Cathedral.
Angela Shaw Trustee

Partial Lunar Eclipse

Noah Kujawski – shortlisted in Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2022

Early in the morning of Friday 28 August we have a lunar eclipse at the full moon. Our partial lunar eclipse will begin at around 3.30 am BST. The moon will move further into the Earth’s shadow until the maximum of the eclipse at 5.12 am, when approximately 90% of the Moon will be in the Earth’s umbra, the darkest part of its shadow, making the moon glow red. After this, the Moon will slowly move out of the umbra until the Moon sets and the eclipse is no longer visible at around 6.15 am. The Moon will be low on the horizon and best viewed from a high point with a clear view to the southwest.

Autumn Equinox Wednesday 23 September at 1.05 am BST

The autumn equinox marks the mid-point of autumn and one of the two times of the year when the daylight and night-time hours are equal, with the Sun rising at 6:00 am and setting at 6:00 pm on an ideal horizon. The equinox occurs on or about 22 September, being variable between 21-23 September.

The Garden of the Hesperidesby Edward Burne-Jones 1870-73

In Celtic/Anglo-Saxon countries the equinoctial festival is known as Mabon. It is the second of the three harvest festivals and is celebrated in the Christian calendar as the main Harvest Festival. It is also known as the Feast of Avalon and Festival of the Wine Harvest. The Feast of Avalon refers to the Apple Harvest, for one of the principal meanings of Avalon is ‘land of apples’. This is actually a reference to the Hesperides, a mystical island associated with the myth of Atlantis. The Islands of the Hesperides is where Merlin was nourished, inspired and enlightened (like the Buddha) whilst seated beneath an apple tree, eating golden apples, in the Hesperidean orchards, which were looked after and guarded by the Hesperides, the daughters of Atlas. The apple tree symbolises the Tree of
Knowledge or Enlightenment. © Peter Dawkins

https://www.zoence.co.uk/time-cycles/autumn-equinox

Mandala of Moon in Pisces
Sun in Virgo
From the Lincolnshire dancers in Virgo on the
British Landscape Zodiac
By Gill Fiddes