The Moon in the heavens has no light of its own – it only reflects the light of the Sun.
Howard Sasportas – The Twelve Houses – Chapter 19: The Moon and Cancer Through the Houses
…it is where we keep in touch with the emotional and instinctive side of life, and where useful inclinations and memories which support existence are exhibited.
What’s Your “Birth Day Lunation Phase”?
Dane Rudhyar wrote in 1967 in The Lunation Cycle: A Key to the Understanding of Personality, that just as there is a solar birth designation (What’s your sun sign?) there is a soli-lunar relationship at the moment of birth that is not only reflecting a vision of a phase but the moon is also in a yearly zodiacal journey. Just as a person can say “I am a Leo”, one can say “I am a New Moon phase”.
CLICK HERE to calculate your moon phase on the day you were born.
CLICK HERE to learn more about the energies of the 8 Phases of the Moon
Archetypal Energy
The Faces of the Moon Mother, an archetypal cycle of sixteen lunar archetypes was created by Dr. Rowena Pattee Kryder. She shares that the interrelationship of the sun, earth, and moon creates a vibrational rhythm of harmonic qualities with the rest of the cosmos. Becoming attuned to the 29ish days of a moon cycle enables us to be aware of the lunar archetypes that move through us.
She gives us the metaphor of the playground swing to remind us of the two poles of the new moon and the full moon. “When you reached the peak of your forward movement, you leaned forward and put your legs back to reach the farthest point” and “like the ebb and flow of the tides which the moon most powerfully creates, the push and pull of our interior forces awaken different archetypes at different times” (p5).
Kryder builds her Sixteen Faces of the Moon Mother around a reptilian dragon power of spiraling patterns of the sun, moon, and earth. We can direct the draconic current (sexual energy) up the tree of life (spine) into the brain and down to the circulation of our spiritual light. “This whole harmonic scenario of the moon cycles as an archetypal journey of the human soul from creation through death to regeneration is echoed in the requiems of Mozart, Brahms, and Fauré, to name a few” (p13).
To clarify: WAXING phase is growing and getting brighter toward a Full Moon, while WANING is diminishing and decreasing toward a New Moon. CRESCENT is a sliver, and GIBBOUS is a wider.
DOWNLOAD brief descriptions of THE SIXTEEN Moon Faces
The Progressed Lunation Cycle
We can easily watch the moon go through her 27-29ish day cycle across the sky. “Watching the progressed Moon chase the progressed Sun around the birth chart is like watching a turtle chase a snail around a race track” (Stephen Forrest). It takes about 3 decades of time to complete a series of progressed lunar phases. The moon moves about one degree a month, while the Sun takes abut a year to get through a single degree.
Due to this phenomena, we all get to experience each of the eight (or sixteen) phases at various times regardless of the phase under which we were born. At some time in our 30ish years chunks of life we will all have periods of 3.5ish year cycles of New Moons and Full Moons. I’ve shared that I was born a New Moon. At the age of 59, my progressed Lunation Cycle became a New Moon again and it will not shift to the next phase of Crescent Moon until October of 2026. This progression is very closely aligned to the 29ish year Saturn Return calendars. I wrote about my second Saturn Return here.
The Progressed Lunation Cycle Calculator can generate your own timeline. I set “2020” as my “From Year” setting drop down then hit ” CALCULATE and it generated an 8-fold Lunation cycle from approximately 2020 to 2050.
Lunar Planting and Other Fun Facts
In Stephen Forrest’s, The Book of the Moon: Discovering Astrology’s Lost Dimension, he shows how our Celtic ancestors held the key to understanding lunar phase and through his writing he covers the basics and goes beyond with the topics of Out of Bounds Moon, The Progressed Lunation Cycle energies, Planetary Phase Angles, and Nodal Phases.
Podcasts
- “The Moon”: Episode 1 of Archetypes and the Planets (January 30, 2023)
- “Planets in Aspect to The Moon”: Episode 14 of Archetypes and the Planets (August 17, 2023)
The Power of Story 