Moon

Where the name comes from

The Latin name Luna gives us lunar, lunar month, and lunatic. That last one comes from an old belief that a full Moon could tip a fragile mind over the edge. People connected the dots between the bright nights and restless sleep, and the idea stuck in the language even though the effect was never real.

Why you only ever see one face

The Moon spins on its axis in exactly the same time it takes to circle the Earth. The two motions are locked together, so the same side always faces us and the far side stays hidden. People only ever saw it for the first time when a spacecraft flew around the back in 1959.

It is slowly leaving

The Moon is drifting away from Earth by about four centimetres a year, roughly the rate your fingernails grow. Hundreds of millions of years from now it will look too small to cover the Sun, and total eclipses will end. We happen to live in the age when the fit is near perfect.

The Moon in a birth chart

If the Sun is what you are becoming, the Moon is what you already are when nobody is watching. Astrologers read it as feelings, instincts, comfort, memory, the body’s rhythms and the way you were looked after as a child. Its sign is your Moon sign, and its house shows where you look for security. Traditionally it rules Cancer, and Hellenistic astrologers treated it as the light of the night, the leader of any chart born after sunset.

How fast it moves

The Moon is the quickest body in the chart. Hali’s count for 2000 to 2029 gives it an average of 2.28 days in each sign, never less than 1.96 or more than 2.55, and 27.3 days to pass through all twelve. That speed is why the Moon sign is the one most likely to need a birth time, and why the Moon is the body that applies to the most aspects in a chart. The Moon sign calculator finds yours, and the Moon today shows where it is right now.

An example

A Sun in Capricorn with the Moon in Cancer is a classic split. The Sun builds, plans and wants to be taken seriously, while the Moon wants home, warmth and people it can trust. Astrologers would read that person as tougher in public than in private, with the two lights in opposite signs pulling between work and family.

Common confusions

The Moon sign is not the phase of the Moon, though both are in the chart. Phase is the angle between the Sun and the Moon, so a full Moon birth has the Moon opposite the Sun whatever signs they are in. And a Moon in a hard sign is not a sad Moon. It describes a style of feeling, not how much of it you are allowed.