#9: Why haven't I ever paid attention to the moon?
it is huge and bright and right there...
Upcoming Astrology:
There are plenty of week ahead resources out there (the CHANI podcast is a good one), so I thought it might be more fun to read a focused interpretation of one dynamic in the sky.
Specific astro dynamic: Jupiter is moving into Taurus soon (May 18). I’m sad to see him leave Aries, but he does paint a slightly nicer picture in Taurus in a lot of ways. The excellent astrologer Larry Arrington pointed out that Matisse has Jupiter in Taurus in his birth chart and he painted this piece during a period that Jupiter was back in Taurus again:
Coincidence or not, it gives a nice vision of the indulgence and pleasure we can look for in this next phase of Jupiter’s cycle.
Waxing and waning poetic on the moon 🌝
I’d never paid much attention to space before the past year of learning how astrology’s history has unfolded and the theory’s grown. I’ve never been able to spot more than Orion’s Belt and I probably couldn’t have told you what the Moon’s phase was on any given night. But a side effect of paying attention to how people have interpreted the natural world in the past is you begin to pay more attention to the natural world around you. Being aware of which planets are in certain signs and knowing which sign the Sun is in has made it so I reflexively track the Moon’s movement, growing slowly out of its New Moon phase, reaching its Full Moon bloom, before it slowly wilts away. Finally, near the end of the cycle, the Moon decomposes into the New Moon and begins the next cycle. I’m starting to experientially understand the Moon as an indicator of time’s passing.
Historically, the Moon and the Sun were primary indicators that time was a real thing, shifting lights (maybe living?) that every other living thing seemed to respond to. People could conceptualize an order to life reflected by the changes in the sky, especially the changing silver body that emerged when the Sun set. It’s interesting to consider what the Moon might have looked like to people. It looks like its surface is shining, but much more softly than the sun and at varying, predictable levels as each night passes. Simultaneously much more predictable than weather or plant cycles but far less tactile and more distant.
A group I’m part of is beginning to study eclipses, reading and discussing what ancient people thought about and gleaned from moments in which the Sun and the Moon seemed to temporarily lose step with each other and break off their balanced dance. In these moments, the light of the world that was otherwise reliable disappeared. The sky’s royalty suffered some kind of temporary deposition and also, depending on where you were located, took the only light you had away with them. Until you’d learned to predict them, surely there’d be some existential anxiety, some question as to whether that might happen again, if it could be worse next time, what had been done to cause it or what it might have meant.
Most ancient astrologers agreed that eclipses (like the one we had on April 20 and the upcoming one on May 5) were especially concerning for emperors. In Babylon, the royal court would put a substitute in the king’s throne on the day of an eclipse (sometimes a real person, sometimes a straw figure) and hide the king somewhere amongst the people.
Today, there are many different approaches to interpreting eclipses. There’s still a school of thought that they primarily apply to leaders (or people in the national spotlight—Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon’s firings were interestingly timed), especially if you can see the eclipse from within the nation and meet a few other standards (the full solar eclipse in April 2024 is going through a lot of America, just in time for the 2024 election). Evolutionary Astrologers have an interpretative system that sees the locations of eclipses the year you were born as having bearing on your soul’s journey. There’s a tradition from Hindu Jyotish astrology that attributes the two eclipse points to the head and tale of a dragon, one end driven by a powerful hunger and the other in a never-ending purgative cycle.
Something that is pretty consistent through different astrological schools of thought is that eclipses are humbling. Rare cycles in the sky that are dramatic enough to draw anyone’s attention, even if you’ve never considered the changing sky or tracked the path of the Moon, eclipses are loud. On the other hand, they’re predictable, even by people thousands of years ago. This dynamic is at the center of what’s so interesting to me about people and astrology, people and the instinct to make sense of the nonsensical. It makes me wonder what I’d have noticed or not noticed if some other curious persons hadn’t come before me. What kind of person notices the division of the sky and the slightly shifting location of the Moon within it? When’s the last time you watched the Moon change? Have you ever?
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
P.S. I love questions, send me your questions! And share this with anyone you think might enjoy :)