The Moon

What the Moon stands for

The Moon stands for what a person needs in order to feel steady: habit, comfort, the reflex underneath the reasoning, and the way they look after people or want to be looked after.

Traditional astrology gives the Moon the body, the mother, daily routine and everything that changes and comes back: crowds, travel, the tides of ordinary life. Modern readings stress the emotional side, the reflexes learned early and the kind of care a person gives and asks for. Where the Sun describes a self being made, the Moon describes what that self falls back on.

How the Moon moves

It goes round the zodiac in about twenty-seven and a third days, between about twelve and fifteen degrees a day, so it spends a little over two days in each sign. It never goes backwards, and no other body changes sign so often.

It is also the only one whose size changes visibly: a full moon at its nearest is about a seventh wider than one at its furthest.

The cycle people notice is not the twenty-seven days round the zodiac but the twenty-nine and a half from one new moon to the next, because the Sun has moved on in the meantime and the Moon has to catch it up. A new moon is the Moon in the same sign as the Sun, a full moon the Moon in the opposite sign. Astrology reads the phase at birth as well as the sign, and the Moon page shows both for tonight.

The Moon’s orbit is tilted about five degrees to the Sun’s path and crosses it at two points called the nodes. They slide backwards through the zodiac, taking about eighteen and a half years to go round, and eclipses happen only when a new or full moon falls near one of them. The nodes page sets out how astrology reads that axis.

Rulership, dignity and sect

The Moon rules Cancer.

It is exalted in Taurus, at three degrees by the old reckoning, with its fall in Scorpio and its detriment in Capricorn. It leads the night sect, so in a chart where the Sun was below the horizon at birth the Moon is read as the more important of the two lights. The tradition does not rank it among the benefics or the malefics; it is judged by what it is doing, including whether its light is growing or shrinking.

Its joy is the third house, which the Hellenistic astrologers called the house of the goddess. One idea belongs to the Moon alone: the void-of-course Moon, one that makes no further major aspect before it leaves its sign, which electional astrology treats as a poor moment to begin something new.

Reading the Moon by sign and by house

By sign, the Moon is read as the style of a person’s emotional life: in Aries quick to react and quick to move on, in Taurus wanting things steady and physical. By house, it is read as where a person looks for comfort and belonging and where their moods show most. The Moon moves about half a degree an hour, so birth time matters more for it than for any planet, and on a day it changes sign the time decides the sign. The Moon sign page works that out.

A worked example: the Moon in Cancer in the fourth house is its own sign in its natural house, and is read as a strong need for a settled home and family ties that run deep. Put the Moon in Capricorn, its detriment, in the tenth house, and the reading turns to feelings kept under management and a sense of security drawn from work and standing. The tradition does not call one better, only more at home.

What gets confused about the Moon

The Moon is a satellite, not a planet; astrology is using the older, wider word. And the Moon sign is not the Sun sign: somebody with the Sun in Leo can have the Moon in any of the twelve, which is part of why two people with the same birthday in different years can read quite differently.

Its monthly return to the birth position, about every twenty-seven days, has a chart of its own, set out on the lunar return page.