Luminary
Moon
What you need to feel safe.
In a birth chart, Moon describes your inner life: feelings, instincts, what you need to feel safe.
What it is
A quarter of Earth's diameter and the largest moon relative to its planet in the solar system. It moves about 13° a day, faster than anything else in a chart.
In a chart: Roughly two and a half days in each sign. The Moon moves about 13° per day, making it the most birth-time-sensitive of the ten chart bodies.
How astrologers have read Moon
- Traditional significations
- The body and its rhythms, the mother, the public, travel, moisture and change, nurses and nursing
- Modern natal shorthand
- Emotional needs, instinct, habit, what you need to feel safe
AsterNym’s interpretation
At its best
Emotional fluency: knowing what you feel while you feel it, and being a safe place for other people to put things down.
The difficult end
Moods treated as weather that everyone else must live in. Needs expressed as sulking rather than sentences.
What to do with it
Name the need before it becomes a mood. The Moon is the one part of a chart that asks rather than performs.
What Moon rules
Traditional domicile ruler of Cancer. If Cancer is your rising sign, Moon is your chart ruler, the planet a traditional reading treats as standing for you. AsterNym uses the traditional ruler for chart-ruler and dignity calculations and displays any common modern association separately.
| Domicile | Cancer |
|---|---|
| Exaltation | Taurus |
| Detriment | Capricorn |
| Fall | Scorpio |
Traditional essential dignity is a symbolic astrological framework, not a measure of astronomical strength or a judgement that a placement is good or bad.
The metal of Moon
Silver Ag
Silver became the Moon's standard metal. Polished silver has exceptionally high visible-light reflectivity, which makes the correspondence easy to understand symbolically.
AsterNym reads it as: Receptivity: you take the shape of what you are near, and see clearly by reflected light.
The other chart bodies
Where is Moon in your chart?
Its zodiac position comes from the body's calculated astronomical longitude. Its house is derived from your local birth horizon using AsterNym's declared Whole Sign house system.