The Moon

The Moon also has a page in The Planets set, The Moon in the Signs, which covers what your Moon sign says about you. This page is about the Moon as it moves, month after month, and how I read and write about that movement.

The lunation cycle

A lunation is the full run from one New Moon to the next, and it takes about twenty nine and a half days. That is the month the word month was named for.

The Moon gets round the whole zodiac a little faster than that, about twenty seven and a third days, because the Sun has moved on in the meantime and the Moon has to catch up to it before the cycle can start again. You do not need to remember the numbers. What matters is the shape of it: a dark start, a growing light, a peak, a fading light, and back to dark. Everything the Moon does in a chart or in a forecast sits somewhere on that curve.

The eight phases as they happen

I teach the cycle as eight phases, each one measured by the angle between the Sun and the Moon as seen from Earth.

The New Moon is the Sun and Moon together in the same part of the sky. The Moon is dark and you cannot see it. A day or two later the Waxing Crescent appears low in the west after sunset, a thin curve with its back to the Sun. Around a week in comes the First Quarter, half lit, high in the sky at sunset, the Sun and Moon ninety degrees apart. The Waxing Gibbous follows, more than half lit and filling out night by night.

Then the Full Moon, Sun and Moon directly opposite each other, the Moon rising in the east as the Sun sets in the west. After it comes the Waning Gibbous, still bright but rising later each night. The Last Quarter is half lit again, the other half this time, and you see it in the morning sky. The Waning Crescent is the last thin curve before dawn, and then the Moon goes dark and the cycle begins again.

Waxing means growing. Waning means shrinking. I have watched people spend years in astrology without ever being told that plainly, so there it is.

New Moons and Full Moons

The two points I write about every month are the New Moon and the Full Moon. They are the start and the peak, and they are where the cycle is easiest to feel.

A New Moon is a beginning. I write about each one as a question: what wants starting here, and what does the sign the Moon is in tell us about the kind of start it is? A New Moon in Libra asks about partnerships and fairness. A New Moon in Cancer asks about home and who you look after. The post is a short piece of guidance, never a prediction, and I try to leave you with something to do with it in the week that follows.

A Full Moon is a culmination. Something that was seeded two weeks earlier, or six months earlier at the New Moon in the same sign, comes to light. Full Moons tend to be emotional, and I say so without making a drama of it. I write each one against the pair of signs involved, because at a Full Moon the Sun is in one sign and the Moon is in the one opposite, and the tension between them is the story. The full moon in Aries post and The Capricorn full moon post are two examples of how that works on the page.

The Moon changes sign every two days or so

The Moon moves through a sign in about two to two and a half days. That is why the feel of a week shifts the way it does. Monday has a Scorpio Moon and everyone is intense. By Wednesday it is in Sagittarius and the same office is planning a holiday.

In my Week Ahead posts on a Monday I name the Moon's sign changes for the week, because they are the simplest piece of sky weather you can check against your own days. Try it for a month. Note the Moon's sign each morning and how the day went. You will learn more from that than from anything I could tell you about it.

The void of course Moon

There is a technical term you will meet called void of course. It describes the stretch between the Moon's last major aspect in one sign and its move into the next sign. Older astrologers held that nothing begun in a void of course period comes to much, and some people will not sign a contract during one.

I use it lightly. I will note it if a client is choosing between two dates and one of them falls in a long void, but I have never seen a life undone by signing a lease at the wrong hour. Astrology is weather, and the void of course Moon is a lull in the wind, no more than that.

Eclipses

A solar eclipse is a New Moon that happens close to the lunar nodes, the two points where the Moon's path crosses the Sun's. A lunar eclipse is a Full Moon near those same points. They arrive in pairs or threes about every six months, and a total solar eclipse is visible only along a narrow path on the ground, so most of us see most of them as ordinary New and Full Moons with a bit more weight behind them. I have written about them properly in two posts, What an eclipse actually is and A total solar eclipse is coming, and I would rather send you there than repeat myself here.

Where the Moon lives on this site

The Moon is the part of the sky I write about most often, so most of the live material is in the daily posts rather than here. Every New Moon and Full Moon gets a post, and the First Quarter sometimes does too, as The first quarter moon in Libra and The first quarter moon in Sagittarius show. The Full Moon, New Moon and Eclipses tag pages gather those posts in one place each, and the Week Ahead carries the Moon's sign changes every Monday.

This page has two neighbours in The Library. Your Birth Moon Phase takes the eight phases above and asks which one you were born under, and what that says about the rhythm you live by. The Moon in the Signs, in The Planets set, takes the twelve signs and reads the Moon through each of them, which is the Moon sign most people mean when they ask about theirs.

Which phase is the Moon in tonight? Go and look before you read on. It is the one piece of astrology you can check with your own eyes.

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.