☽ Moon

Moon is the inner world of the chart. It governs emotions, needs and instinct.

Moon at a glance

• ArchetypeThe Inner World
• Governsemotions, needs and instinct
• RulesCancer
• Cycleabout 28 days
• Keywordsfeelings, needs, moods, memory
• In the bodythe stomach and breasts

What Moon means

The Moon is what you need, as distinct from what you want. It is the fastest thing in the chart and the most private, and it tends to show itself long before anybody has decided to reveal anything.

It is the placement people recognise instantly when it is described to them, more reliably than the Sun. The Sun is aspirational. The Moon is already true.

Habits live here, and so does whatever you reach for when you are tired. What you do at eleven at night without deciding to is usually the Moon.

When Moon is the hard part

It changes sign every two and a half days, so a birth time a few hours out puts it in a different sign entirely. If your Moon has never quite fitted, check the birth time before you check anything else.

And a need is harder to own than a want. The Moon describes something most people were taught to be faintly embarrassed by, which is why it is so often the last part of a reading anybody accepts.

Its cycle, and the ages it lands on

About 27.3 days to go round the zodiac, and about 29.5 from one new Moon to the next. The two numbers differ because the Earth moves as well, so the Moon has further to travel to catch the Sun again than to return to the same star.

That gap is why the calendar month and the lunar month have never agreed, and it is the oldest unsolved administrative problem in human history.

Can you see it?

The easiest object in the sky to check a chart against, and worth doing once. If your chart says the Moon is opposite your Sun, the sky will be showing you a full one.

It rises about fifty minutes later each day, which is the entire phase cycle in one sentence: the Moon falls further behind the Sun every night until it is on the far side of us, full, and rising as the Sun sets.

What retrograde actually is

The Moon is never retrograde. It is the one body that always outruns the Earth's motion, so it never appears to go backwards against the stars.

What it does instead is go void of course: the stretch after its last aspect to a planet and before it enters the next sign. That is a real interval you can look up in any ephemeris, and it is nothing whatever like retrograde.

Moon also touches

the mother, the public, tides, habits, the past, what makes you feel safe.

A question to sit with

What do you need right now, and when did you last give it to yourself?