Working with the Moon, Part 2
(plus a fun/stressful/powerful personal story)
Working with the Moon is often an integral part of cosmically influenced spiritual work. Why? The Moon is Earth’s only satellite, and it’s the closest of the heavenly bodies used in astrology. It can be the heavenly proxy for Earth and thus us. The Moon is often seen as the feminine half of the Sun-Moon pair or female in general given her ties to water/the ocean and the menstrual cycle, and because of that femininity, the Moon is (for better or worse) tied to the unconscious, irrational, emotional, and intuitive realms. The Moon is also the light that shines in the darkness, which is where (and when) a lot of magical and occult work occurs. That’s why. I’m sure there are other excellent reasons, but those seem good enough.
Also, in astrology-informed magic, there’s something comforting about working with a faster moving body. You can set all your hopes and dreams on Jupiter’s bounty or the karmic justice of Saturn or even Mars’s excitement and energy, but it takes a while before even Mars makes its way through the zodiac. With the Moon, you never have to wait more than a month for it to be in the right sign. (And for reasons that I explained briefly as an aside in the Part 1 post, fast-moving Mercury and Venus still take a year to move through the signs because they’re bound by Earth’s perspective of their orbit around the Sun.)
So what do you do with your knowledge of the Moon. Generally you’ll find that people who work with the Moon recommend following its steady course: you create and nourish during a waxing period (when the Moon is “growing”), and you harvest and prune during a waning period (when the Moon is “shrinking”). The New Moon (or Dark Moon as it’s aptly called) is a time for stillness and contemplation, a natural pause, but if you’re daring, it can also be a time for big magic or journeys into darkness that can backfire if you use the New Moon’s power unwisely (it attracts shadow energies with which not everyone is prepared to work). The Full Moon is a time for big magic that’s a little more forgiving. And eclipses? Those are super-powered versions of the New Moon or Full Moon. (If you don’t know which type of eclipse goes with which moon phase, read Part 1.)
Whether you actively work with the New Moon or not, it can be useful to know where the lunar cycle is starting and what is being called into your awareness. And if you want to work with the Moon at all, you will probably want to incorporate Full Moon practices.
So what do you do? Well, for one thing, you follow the Moon’s cycle in the signs, just as you do its waxing and waning phases. As you learned in Part 1, the New Moon is always in the same sign as the Sun, so what the New Moon is helping you bring into focus or helping you nourish is a good fit for the astrological season (the Sun’s sign). And what reaches its fruition and will be ready for harvesting will be the thing that you put into motion half a year ago, which is related to the sign opposite where the Sun is located. Of course, you can try to harvest what you’ve just been nourishing with the New Moon, but growth usually takes more than two weeks. (I’ll share a pretty wild story that contradicts that in just a sec.)
If you know your birthplace and birth time, you can determine the astrological Houses where all of this activity occurs. Why does that matter? It helps you understand not just what’s naturally more effective (the astrological season/Sun sign) but where this is all inherently happening for you. For example, if the New Moon occurs in House I, you may find some new cycle starting for your body, your personality, and how you show up in the world, all things related to the first House. And if the Full Moon is happening in House VI, you may find that you’re in a good position to reap rewards for hard work that you’ve been doing in the workplace, which is associated with the sixth House.
You don’t have to stick to the New Moon and the Full Moon, but those are seen as more potent than the Quarter Moons or the less defined in-between phases of crescent and gibbous (“pregnant”) Moon. If you’re working the in-between zones, just keep in mind the symbolism of waxing and waning periods as you look to understand what zones of your life are ripe for growth and where it’s time for some tidying up.
In addition to the monthly lunar phases of New Moon to Full Moon and back, you can also look at the eclipses to understand larger trajectories for your year, where the New Moon solar eclipse occurs and where the Full Moon lunar eclipse ends the next year can give you some idea of a bigger potential shift.
Not long ago, we had the New Moon in Aquarius, and more recently we had the Full Moon in Virgo, which makes sense since it was Aquarius and it is now Pisces season (if that doesn’t make sense to you—again—read Working with the Moon, Part 1). As part of my personal spiritual practice, I, like many other astro/witchy/woo types, pay attention to where the New Moon and Full Moon will next appear in my natal chart. For me, it happened to be a rebirth. I experienced the New Moon in my first House and the Full Moon in my first House. Say what? If you read Part 1 of this series (or know how New and Full Moons work), you know that that hat’s not possible. Aquarius and Virgo are on nearly opposite sides of the zodiac; they can’t both be in House I. And yet they were for me at these precise moments.
How can that be? It’s because, until the day before the Full Moon in Virgo, I’d been working with the wrong birth time for the last three (or more) years, ever since I started caring about astrology in any detail. I had misinterpreted my birth certificate’s method for indicating AM or PM, so I was twelve hours off. Of course, twelve hours is nothing to a planet like Jupiter, and it’s usually pretty meaningless even to quick little Mercury, but it’s ~7º to the Moon, which will change the sign about a quarter of the time, and it’s a totally different—perhaps a totally inverted—arrangement of the Houses. Until yesterday, I believed I was a Capricorn rising with Aquarius taking up most of the first House. Now I know that I’m a Leo rising with Virgo taking up half of my first House. And—spoiler—I’m not a Leo Moon anymore.
At first, I was in shock. My mother texted me on Friday afternoon to tell me that she had found the bracelet I received at the hospital when I was born. “I was wrong about the time. I told you it was XX:35PM, but it was XX:20PM.” I texted back. “No worries. I actually had the right time from my birth certificate. Love you. But you mean AM, right?” There was some back and forth after that because my mother, who is a Pisces, doesn’t pay great attention to details. And while mothers generally remember what time of day (or night) they give birth, at least to its being daylight or nighttime, my poor mother saw the whole day/night cycle because she was in labor with me for more than 12 hours (much more). So who could blame her misremembering which end of the process held daylight?
Well, I may be a jackass for doubting my poor suffering mother who was in labor for so long with me, but I’m a jackass who keeps his receipts, so I went to my copy of my birth records and looked for the time. No time was given. Where did I get the time? Oh, it was on a supplemental form filled out later. I saw what I thought, the AM was underlined. It was a little off because it was done on a typewriter, but clearly AM was indicated with some dashes, you know, like crossing out your selection on a fill-in-the-bubble test. My mother was clearly misremembering.
I explained this to my partner, who, Virgo that he is, explained record-keeping to me. It turns out that on legal documents, you cross out the thing that isn’t applicable so that it can’t be changed. That makes sense from a fraud perspective, but also, this was done on a typewriter, so it’s not like they could have circled their choice. Typewriters don’t do that. Anyway, I apologized to my mother, and then I quickly set to working out my new chart and what it could mean for me. I had a new Rising sign and Midheaven of course, but I also had a new Moon sign. (And I was just coming to terms with my Leo Moon!)
People who actively work with their charts can put significant effort into making the most of astrological timing, and honestly, I think I’ve been doing a good job with mine this year, and I’ve noticed results. But what’s strange is that in my Portals of Being / Year-Ahead reading (the one I did for myself), the theme was Release, and Pisces season was all about celebratory death and rebirth. And Aries was a blank slate with new beginnings. I mean that literally. The result for where I could find fertile growth in Aries was a blank page (divined through bibliomancy). I also saw that in the subsequent months, I would be scrapping all of my planning. That was part of my release. Rereading my write-up, it’s clear that I was confused because it was such a powerful message, and I had such a block about it. I was doing all this damned planning for the year. I didn’t want to abandon it a few months in.
And yet during these past two weeks between the New Moon in Aquarius and the Full Moon in Virgo, I got to go through a rebirthing process. It perfectly aligned with having the New Moon in Aquarius and the Full Moon in Virgo both happening in my first House when using the birth charts I understood to be accurate at the time of those Moons. Mind you, this is the same period during which I literally sat in the cold and dark cave of my apartment during a shock week-long deep freeze in South Texas for three days with no heat or electricity. If I look back at the card I pulled for Pisces—the Great Bear from the Wild Wood Tarot—it’s pretty literal. This was a kind of astrological rebirth, complete with mini death/hibernation and re-emergence.
What’s funny is that for five years or so, I actually thought my birth time was in PM, not AM, so I had been working under the impression that I had this other Moon sign for a while. It didn’t mean much to me at the time because I didn’t understand astrology. But I feel like I wasn’t supposed to know it because it would have been a hard mental shift for me then if I was invested in that identity.
Now I’m in a very different headspace. I understand now that I needed to believe and act as if that wrong birth chart, the one with AM instead of PM, was mine. There were lessons in it that I needed to learn and areas of my life that I needed to activate, as well as bad habits that I needed to overcome.
I also needed to make decisions that went against some of the things in “my” chart because they were intuitively the right decision. And I also needed to do the work to understand my identity in this space, my commitment to Hermit’s Mirror, both as a business entity and as my spiritual purpose. I needed to understand the aspects of “my” chart that made sense and push back against those that felt off, even though I could still learn from them (and sure did).
And I am so excited to evolve into this new version of myself. Surprising no one, I’m thrilled to nerd out with a new natal chart that makes much more sense in many ways but which also has some downsides and things I’ll miss. But I’m also excited for what lies ahead. It’s really an opportunity to envision a new future and to embrace the new aspects of this work that match this current rebirthing.
I will probably talk about all of this more in a post coming up, but let’s just say that my love of Virgo-ruled Hermit and the mirror we call the Moon, which were chosen for my online identity because of my number-9 Life Path (Hermit as 9, Moon as 18), are now absolutely on point. The accidental astrological synchronicities with Hermit’s Mirror have just been wild, y’all.