Full Moon in Sagittarius

Visions of Faraway Places in a Time of the Local Neighborhood

Jun 10, 2025

The Full Moon and Sign Polarity

What is it about a Full Moon? Why does it seem so magical? Why might it make some people “crazy”? The astrological answer is in the illumination of the two “lights”, the Sun and the Moon, through opposite signs of the Zodiac.

The Zodiac can be viewed as 6 pairs of opposite signs, or polarities. The signs of each pair are poles of an axis whose function they both share and serve in contradictory, yet complementary, ways. For example, Taurus (birth) is at one end of the axis it shares with Scorpio (death), the sign at the other end. There’s a time for everything, including “a time to be born and a time to die”. It’s the natural economy, the way all values in Time are kept in balance with one another. A different value is toggled in each of the 6 polarities.

Sunlight is the light of conscious life, shining steadily on our thoughts and activities through a single sign for a whole month at a time. Moonlight is the light of unconscious life, reflecting our feelings, moods and dreams through signs that change every 2 - 2.5 days. While we are always functioning in the present in the objective clock time of the Sun, we may feel and dream of a remembered or imaginary past or future in the subjective dreamtime of the Moon.

During the days and nights when the Moon is Full, the Sun and Moon are in opposite signs, ‘speaking’ to us simultaneously from opposite poles of an axis. The Sun affirms conditions of the current moment. The Moon reminds us that there was or will be another moment in time with conditions exactly the opposite of whatever they are now.

The effect of the contrast between the opposing lights is a feeling of bittersweet poignancy as we experience simultaneous contradictory emotions. They are equally compelling. We seem to be stuck with one of them, while the other haunts us from somewhere out of reach. For relief from any discomfort from the effect, we can seek connection with the paradoxical center point between the two extremes, where they meet in timeless union and perfect peace.

In this series, we explore the Full Moon’s effects each month as the two lights confront each other across successive sign polarities.

Full Moon in Sagittarius: Wanderlust

When the Moon is Full in Sagittarius, the Sun is opposing it from Gemini. The two lights are illuminating the Gemini-Sagittarius axis, bringing us in touch with its complementary energies. Gemini-Sagittarius is about our orientation to the world around us, the smaller and the greater respectively. It stimulates simultaneous awareness of the details of a particular location and the way that location fits into the “Big Picture” of the whole world. We can’t be everywhere at once physically, but through shifts of mental focus on the Gemini-Sagittarius axis and awareness of the central point where those signs meet, we can come close to doing that mentally.

Gemini is the sign of details at the local end of this axis. The view of life through the Gemini ‘lens’ is “zoomed in” to the physical world immediately around us. Focused on whatever is there, we observe sensations, sights, sounds, smells, and flavors. Every day in the local area around our home, we experience the same surroundings and communicate with our neighbors in the same local language and accent. We’re naturally accustomed to our local neighborhood, and attached to it, comfortable in the stability of its familiar ways.

Sagittarius is the sign of generalizations at the faraway end of this axis, where deep, basic qualities matter more than superficial differences. The view of life through the Sagittarius ‘lens’ is “zoomed out” to a point too far ‘above’ it for perception of details. Through that lens, the external world looks like a map of whole territories with rivers and bodies of water. The inner view is our mental ‘map’ of categories, patterns, and energy dynamics — our understanding, theories, and beliefs about the world and life in general. If people everywhere share the same basic human qualities, intuits Sagittarius, “foreigners” may be more relatable than we know, and their ways may be interesting. Why not enjoy an adventure in an unfamiliar place, view life from a novel perspective, and expand our understanding of the world? We can do that by traveling, either physically or mentally (through study), to someplace far enough away to have a different culture from the one we’re used to.

This polarity of opposite signs is potentially complementary, because one end of it connects our thinking with our concrete experiences, and the other end connects our interpretive intuition with the Source of Everything. On this axis we gain perspective. We can appreciate both the unique qualities of our current location and its place in the greater context of the world. We can also understand other people better when we know more about the differences in their circumstances. Thus the Gemini-Sagittarius axis serves us as a sort of inner ‘compass’ in more ways than one.

Like all the polarities, this one can be well balanced and rewarding or unbalanced and dysfunctional. We need the emotional security of belonging to a familiar locality where we know our way around and what to expect. But if that’s all of life we know, our narrow perspective tends to keep us alienated from the rest of the world and disoriented to life in general.

Conversely, we need to broaden our experience of life from perspectives beyond our local neighborhood. But a life consisting of only rootless wandering deprives us of the emotional stability and peace that comes from belonging somewhere and being sufficiently grounded in the earth.

The influence of the Gemini Sun puts us mentally in short-journey thinking mode. We’re circulating through our local environment, observing the usual surroundings and the presence of whichever of our neighbors are out and about. Though we’re alert to the local happenings and interested in any noteworthy changes or news, nothing surprises us because we know pretty much what to expect there. And normally in Gemini season we’re perfectly fine with that, because we’re too busy going places and doing things to welcome unfamiliar challenges that might slow us down.

But for the two or three days when the Moon is Full in Sagittarius, we may find ourselves feeling impatient with Gemini’s limitations and bored with our familiar local surroundings. A mind-broadening trip to some faraway place could be the perfect cure for our ennui. Wouldn’t it be nice to just leave all of the same old same old behind for a while? What would it be like to escape on a carefree holiday to some exotic place, where life is different from the life we know, and we have nothing to do but explore?

While the Sun is in Gemini, we’re likely to learn and think about all kinds of things, some of which are out of our reach. Maybe we’d really like to experience some of those things firsthand, but to our frustration all we have is information. Well, that’s a good kind of frustration! Now that we know about them, we can begin to plan for action we only dream of now. A wonderful adventure in a place far away may begin with a wistful fantasy under the wanderlust spell of the Full Moon in Sagittarius.