Moon

Meaning

The Moon is the Earth’s satellite and the swiftest light in the sky: it crosses a sign in two to two and a half days and the whole zodiac in about 27 days. With the Sun it is one of the two luminaries, and astrology gives it the night. Where the Sun radiates, the Moon reflects, receives and keeps.

In a chart it describes emotional needs, moods, habits and the body’s rhythms: what someone needs to feel safe and at home, and the reflexes learned early in life. Where the Sun is what a person aims for, the Moon is how they live from day to day, often without noticing.

Tradition makes it the leader of the night sect. It rules Cancer and is exalted in Taurus; its detriment is Capricorn and its fall Scorpio. It signified the mother, the body, the crowd and everything that grows and changes, and, being the fastest planet, it was read as the one that carries each influence on to the next.

Its gifts are sensitivity, care, memory and the ability to adapt. Its difficulties are moods that steer the day, comfort that hardens into habit, and old patterns kept long after they have stopped helping.

In practice

• Its sign and house show what brings comfort and where belonging is sought: in the 4th the Moon often makes home a refuge; in the 10th it asks a public life to feel personal.
• Its phase at birth, the angle between the Sun and the Moon, is read by many modern astrologers as a temperament, the new Moon’s spontaneity or the full Moon’s awareness of others. The phases also pace the month.
• Returns. The Moon comes back to its birth place every 27.3 days. Progressed, it moves about a degree a month and returns around ages 27 and 55, often read as chapters of emotional life.
• Eclipses happen when a new or full Moon falls near the lunar nodes.

Across traditions

• The Chinese calendar is lunisolar: each month begins at the new moon, and the Moon, 月 yuè, is the great yin to the Sun’s yang. The sky is also divided into 28 lunar lodges, the xiù, roughly one for each day of the Moon’s round.
• Indian astrology calls it Chandra and gives its sign more weight than the Sun’s; its 27 nakshatras, lunar mansions of 13°20′ each, shape much of a reading. Arabic and medieval European astrologers used 28 mansions of their own.
• Human Design reads the Moon as the driving force: its gate shows what moves someone and keeps them going.

Origin and history

The Moon set the first calendars. In Mesopotamia it was Sin, whose crescent opened each month, and Babylonian astronomers learned to predict its phases and eclipses with remarkable precision. Greece called it Selene and Rome Luna, whose day, dies Lunae, gave the French lundi. Hellenistic astrologers made it the leader of the night sect and read the body and the mother from it, and in the horary astrology of the Middle Ages and of William Lilly, the Moon’s next aspect often showed how a question would unfold.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune takes the Moon from the Swiss Ephemeris (DE441): its apparent position seen from the centre of the Earth, astrology’s usual frame, in the tropical zodiac. Seen from the birthplace itself, the Moon, being so close, can appear up to about a degree away.

Because the Moon moves 12° to 15° a day, its degree needs the birth time. Without one, the chart is cast at local noon, which can put the Moon up to about 7½° off; Ulune then checks the whole birth day and marks as uncertain anything about the Moon that could change within it, such as its sign or an aspect.

To decide whether the Moon was void of course at birth, Ulune follows it on the ephemeris to its next exact conjunction, sextile, square, trine or opposition with the Sun or a planet out to Pluto: if none comes before it leaves its sign, it is void. The calendar finds the four main phases and the void spans the same way. In the weighted balance of elements and modes, the Moon counts three times.

Correspondences