Your Intuitive Moon
By Trish MacGregor
Smashwords edition, 2011
License notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
In memory of Richard “the Fids” Demien, fellow Gemini and seeker: 6/5/48 – 8/1/99; and to Megan and Rob, my anchors
Author’s note:
This book was originally published in 2000, so there are some dated references – like my daughter being just eleven years old and no references to 9-11. But the material about the intuitive moon is timeless.
In 2000, there were few if any websites that offered free birth charts. Things have changed dramatically in the years since, so I’ve included websites where you can type in your birth data and your natal chart appears in seconds. That enabled me to eliminate countless pages for the moon ephemeris. You gotta love the Internet!
Enjoy! And may we all flourish and prosper in 2012 and beyond.
Your Intuitive Moon
By Trish MacGregor
Chapter 1: The Face of the Moon
Chapter 2: Who We Were, Who We Are
Chapter 4: Intuitive Reality Check 1, Your Intuitive Profile
-Your intuition: Carl Jung’s types
Chapter 17: Intuitive Reality Check 2, Oracles
Part Two: Your Lunar Neighborhood
Chapter 19: Moon in the Houses
Chapter 20: Intuitive Reality Check 3, Navigation
Chapter 21 The Transiting Moon
Chapter 24: Intuitive Reality Check 4, In the Shadow of the Moon
When I was a kid, one of my greatest pleasures was watching the full moon rise over the mountains that surrounded the city where I lived, Caracas, Venezuela. There was – and still is, as far as I know – a silo-shaped hotel on top of the highest peak that could be reached on foot or by cable car. As moonlight spilled into the valley, the hotel stood darkly against all the light, a sentinel at a gate between worlds.
Bit by bit, the entire slope of the mountain was revealed in a way that I simply couldn’t see by daylight. The network of the cable car system seemed intricate and mysterious. The hundreds of ranchitos or shacks that dotted the hillside were no longer an eyesore; they formed an intricate and complex city. As the light flooded the valley, I saw Caracas in a completely new way. And in my memories, it’s the night-time version that remains most vivid because it’s softer, mystifying and mystical, and speaks to a deeper part of me.
In astrology, that’s what the Moon is about – the deeper parts of us that others don’t see. It’s yin, receptive. It symbolizes our experience of mom or her equivalent, our relationships with women, the way we nurture and are nurtured. It reveals how we react when we’re hurt. The moon symbolizes our connection to our roots and, deeper still, to the collective sea that unites us all. It is our common ancient heritage, that distant past when life unfolded in synchronization with the lunar cycle. The moon also represents our intuition.
Just what is intuition? It’s the feeling you get about the guy your mother thinks you should go out with. He’s bright and personable, but he rubs you the wrong way. Something about him puts you off. It’s a hunch, a gut feeling, and you can’t explain it. It’s the unease you feel about getting on a particular flight or a sense of urgency that seizes you for no logical reason that your child is in trouble. When intuition is at work, consensus reality may be whispering that you’re a nut case.
Intuition is the sense that allows us to come to conclusions that have little or nothing to do with our reasoning minds.
This kind of pure, swift knowing differs for each of us. The moon in our birth charts holds the blueprint of our intuition - the area of our lives where it’s strongest or weakest, how to develop it more fully, and how we experience it. It represents our right-brain self, the self that perceives the whole picture in here and seeks to manifest its deepest desires and needs out there. It’s how we seek to fulfill ourselves, to live to our highest potential.
These components - phase, sign, house placement, nodes, aspects, eclipses, the whole lunar package - describe our intuitive capacities and the best expression of our intuition. They describe how we can use our intuition to enhance and change our lives, improve our health, and alter our reality.
When I was younger, intuition was something that other people had. Invariably, these people were looked upon as oddballs – the carnival gypsy who read palms, the tea leaf reader who lived alone in the big house on the hill, the medium who communed with dead grandmothers. In the world I inhabited, these intuitives lived on the fringe.
In the last twenty-five years, our concept of intuition has changed dramatically. It’s no longer seen as something out there or as a talent that only certain people possess. We’ve all got it. And the more we use it, the stronger it gets.
Intuition manifests differently for each of us. You might sense it in your body, in a dream, as a penetrating insight, a creative breakthrough, an inspiration or even as one of those aha! moments when pieces of some puzzle snap into place. However you experience it, your natal horoscope holds vital clues about your intuitive capacity and how you can develop it. And that’s what this book is really about.
You won’t find winning lottery numbers here. But you may well find that your Scorpio moon possesses the power and innate wisdom to dream the winning numbers before they are drawn. You won’t find any shortcuts on meeting your soul mate. You may discover, though, that your Libra moon indicates that relationships are one of the issues you chose to explore before you were born.
Intuition allows us to integrate our right brained lunar selves with our left-brained solar selves and come up with a self we can live with.
But is it practical?
“If intuition is such a practical tool, then how come I haven’t won the lottery?” Or found the right man or woman? Or the right job? Or the right house?
I’ve heard this question, in various forms, frequently over the years and have certainly asked it myself. The truth is that there’s no easy answer.
Theoretically, you should be able to use your intuition for anything. But first, you have to recognize an intuitive impression when you get one and second, you have to trust your impression. It seems to me that most of us, at least in the western world, have a tough time mastering the trust part of this equation.
How can we be sure that a hunch, a vision, or simply an impression that we get about something is, well, true? Maybe it’s just wishful thinking or fear. Maybe it’s something we read or saw in a movie. Maybe this, maybe that.
Part of the problem in trusting an intuitive impression may be due to acculturation. Even though intuition isn’t regarded as the dark stepchild that it was twenty-five years ago, logic and left-brained skills are still considered to be more desirable. We don’t teach intuitive skills in our schools. We generally don’t honor that part of the personality in our mainstream world. There are more and more exceptions to this, however, and eventually all those exceptions will gather a momentum that gives birth to a new paradigm, a new system of belief about the role of intuition.
When we allow our intuition to flourish, however, and listen to what it says, it becomes easier to “live in the flow,” to follow our natural rhythms and inclinations, and to trust ourselves. And if that isn’t practical, then what is?
In the Flow
One evening on the island of Cedar Key, on Florida’s Gulf coast, my daughter, husband and I were walking along the pier when a pod of wild dolphins appeared. We’d seen dolphins before, but never like this, close enough so that we could feel their joy and spontaneity. Their clicks echoed in the summer air as they surfaced and dived again and again. It was then I fully understood what it means to live in the flow.
When we live in the flow, our intuition works smoothly and effortlessly. If you have any doubt what this means, then hang out with some young kids for a few hours. They make caves out of sheets, play with imaginary friends, hunt big game in their back yards, and create worlds out of nothing more than their imaginations. Their intuition is most obvious in their impulses, which they follow without a second thought. When they’re hurt or angry, they verbalize it. When they’re scared or sad, they let you know. Since they haven’t learned to censor their emotions or impulses, they live in the intuitive flow.
This flow is what we, as adults, seek to recapture when we’re old enough to realize its value.
Using this Book
To find out the sign your moon was in when you were born, go here http://www.astro.com/cgi/ade.cgi for a free natal chart. You’re looking for a quarter moon symbol. Note the house in which your natal moon falls.
The moon is the most rapidly moving body in the sky, traveling from one sign to another in two and a half days and circling the zodiac in twenty-eight days. If the moon changed signs on the day you were born, going from Virgo to Libra, for instance, then read the sections for both Virgo and Libra.
“…three giant steps for mankind…”
Neil Armstrong
Collective Concepts of the Moon
Throughout the millennia, the moon has been the stuff of myths and fairy tales, poetry and legends. It has been worshipped and cursed and endowed with magical and curative powers. Religions have grown up around it. Sacrifices have been made to it.
In the early fifties, the moon was a favorite theme in science fiction books and movies and the storylines rarely varied: the aliens came from the moon, we colonized the moon, or the moon fell out of orbit…you get the general picture. Even Disney issued movies in which the moon played a vital role. In one film, a Western, a woman who wore a hoop skirt typical of the American west started bouncing in her hoop skirt and kept bouncing higher and higher until she bounced right into the moon. The shadow you see in the moon is, according to Disney, that woman in the hoop skirt.
In 1969, Neil Armstrong took three giant steps for mankind and our concept of the moon was forever changed. Even though its relative position in the sky hadn’t changed, everything else about it had.
We now had some idea what it really looked like and the news was far from good. Dust, dust, and more dust. A black vacuum. Unimaginable cold. Nothingness. In memory, I can still see the dust that flew up around those giant steps of Armstrong’s and I can see the brilliant points of light impaled against the black sky overhead. What’s most vivid in my mind, though, is how the Earth looked from the moon – a swirling turquoise gem 240,000, a blue pearl turning in space. Our planet literally looked alive.
This was the year when Vietnam was in full swing. Americans arrived home in body bags, riots swept across college campuses, LSD was the drug of choice. People were tuning in and dropping out faster than the pictures of the moon were beamed back to earth.
This was the year that half a million people converged on the tiny town of Woodstock, New York, to hear Hendrix, Baez, Dylan, Choplin, and all the other musicians who had captured the emotional reality of war and chaos. Women threw off their shackles. Carlos Castaneda and Aldous Huxley hurled open the doors to other realities. Camelot was dead, Martin Luther King was dead, and we had walked on the moon.
In many ways, those steps of Armstrong’s signaled that we were ready to confront our unconscious selves, our feminine, intuitive selves.
Fast-forward to the summer of 1997, July 4 to be exact. In the opening scenes of the movie, Independence Day, a mammoth shadow falls across the surface of the moon. A moving shadow whose shape is unmistakable. The message comes through loud and clear: the shadow is that of a spaceship that uses the moon as a base and now that ship is on the move toward Earth. What ensues is pure Hollywood, with Will Smith holding the record for aliens annihilated. But Independence Day, like Armstrong’s three giant steps, is part of our contemporary, collective perceptions of the moon, its essential beauty and sublime mysteries.
Despite Hollywood and NASA, each of us has some personal concept about the moon. After all, we drop our heads back on any given night and there it is, shaped like a ubiquitous eye or the grin of a Cheshire cat or like a piece of fruit with the top lopped off. It speaks to us. We speak to it. Romance, madness, werewolves, witches, pagans, Druids, ocean tides and blood tides, or a sharp rise in murder and mayhem: it’s all fair game where the moon is concerned. Every notion that we hold about the moon is true for us and that subjective texture is certainly in keeping with the nature of the moon in astrology.
If the sun is Apollo in your corner of the universe, then the moon is your personal oracle. If the sun represents your life force, then the moon represents the internal landscape that supports and maintains the life force. In astrology, lunar energy is embodied in that mythological moment when Luke Skywalker recognizes that Darth Vader is his father or when, in ET, the alien is getting drunk and the boy is trying to dissect a frog at school and their psyches mesh. Lunar energy is operating when reality splits off for the character Gwyneth Paltrow plays in Sliding Doors or during the love scene in Titanic.
Lunar energy is the MO in Thelma and Louise, in Jacob’s Ladder, and in What Dreams May Come. It’s the psychic visions the young boy has in The Shining or the visions another young boy has in The Sixth Sense. It’s the mother’s anguish in The Deep End of the Ocean, and it’s Oprah being Oprah weekday afternoons. Without lunar energy, we would be empty shells, automatons, the burn-the-books society in Fahrenheit 451. We would be Keeneu Reeves still stuck in the matrix, powerless puppets who accept everything at face value.
Lunar Facts & Oddities
Most of us learn facts about the moon in grade school science class. Today’s kids have a distinct advantage over their parents, of course, because we’ve already been to the moon and information is so readily accessible through the Internet. When I entered the word “moon” in a search engine, I came up with 277,000 hits. These include sites where satellite photos of the moon can be downloaded and provide information on every facet of the moon you could possibly want to know about.
One particular site, moon-watch.com is for “moon enthusiasts.” It has a wealth of information on current research and includes regular updates on the discoveries by NASA’s Lunar Prospector spacecraft. The spacecraft entered the lunar orbit on January 11, 1998, and has conducted its mapping missions from fifteen to sixty-three miles above the moon’s surface.
This mapping by the Lunar Prospector has added credence to a long held theory that the bulk of the moon was ripped away from the Earth when an object the size of Mars collided with it four to five million years ago. A March 16, 1999 press release from NASA read: “Similarities in the mineral composition of the Earth and Moon indicate that they share a common origin.”
The moon is our only satellite and its average distance from Earth is 238,857 miles. Its revolution around the Earth takes 27 days, seven hours, and 43 minutes. Even though it’s only a quarter the size of Earth, its gravitational pull is the main cause of our ocean tides. In fact, the moon actually has more than twice the effect on tides than the Sun.
Since our bodies are primarily water, the moon’s gravitational pull on the tides also affects our bodily fluids, metabolic rates, and, of course, our emotions. The link, for instance, between the full moon and violent aggression has been noted for years by police officers, hospital workers, and employees at mental institutions.
In the 1970s, a Miami psychiatrist, Arnold Lieber, decided to conduct a scientific study to find out if these observations were true. As a med student at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, he’d noticed recurring periods when patients on the psyche ward were more disturbed than usual. These periods would last for several days, then the patients would resume their normal behavior. He became curious about the phenomenon and finally conducted a scientific study. His findings, later backed by four other independent studies, confirmed that during the full moon and, to a lesser extent, during the new moon, there are increases in all violent crimes – homicide, rape, assault. There’s also an increase in lesser crimes – burglary, auto theft, larceny, and drunken and disorderly behavior.
Is it any coincidence, then, that the word lunatic is derived from the word lunar?
Hospital workers and maternity ward nurses have long noticed that more babies are born at the full and new moons than at any other time of the month. These may be due to the fact that the gravitational pull is strongest when the moon, sun, and Earth are aligned, as they are during the new and full moon. These observations have been backed by scientific studies. Interestingly enough, the lunar calendar is still the basis for calculating a pregnancy. The nine months are synodic months (the length of time it takes the moon to orbit earth).
Since the moon has no atmosphere, it has nothing to protect it from meteor strikes, which is why its surface is pocked with impact craters. Since it has no tectonic or volcanic activity, its surface is immune to the erosive effects of atmospheric weathering, tectonic shifts, and volcanic upheavals that reshape the surface of our planet. In comparison, Earth is a work in progress. On the moon, even the footprints left by the Apollo astronauts will remain intact for millions of years unless a meteor strike obliterates them.
The moon’s gravity is about a sixth of ours; that’s why the Apollo astronauts looked like they were jumping rope up there. Despite appearances to the contrary, the moon has no light of its own. That gorgeous full moon you see each month is the reflected light of our Sun.
In ancient cultures, the passage of time was marked according to the lunation – or cycle - of the Moon. A month was the time between one new moon and the next and, in a typical year, there were thirteen lunar cycles. This way of marking time still exists among some pagan sects today and may be closer to our natural rhythms than our present solar calendar.
Astrological Lunar Facts
The Inner You
The moon in your horoscope is every bit as important as your Sun sign. In fact, Eastern astrologers give the moon greater emphasis than the sun sign. The moon rules the sign of Cancer and the fourth house in the horoscope. She represents mom or whoever plays that role for you and also symbolizes other women in your life. The moon is feminine, yin, our intuitive selves.
In the physical body, her territory pertains primarily to women – breasts, ovaries, womb. In both genders, she rules internal fluids and the stomach, and, of course, she’s our emotional barometer, the gauge of our inner health. Not surprisingly, the moon rules conception.
A Czech physician, in fact, theorized that every woman had a fertility cycle that depended on the phase of the moon when she was born. Eugene Jones developed a fertilization calendar based on his theory, which allegedly showed a 98 percent success rate. He charged an astronomical fee for his calendar, but people who were desperate for children paid it.
Jones claimed that if a woman used his methods, she could choose the gender of her child. His technique was based on the rules of classical astrology, which he’d studied, and boils down to using the gender of moon signs. If conception took place on a Leo day, the child would be male. On a Taurus day, the child would be a girl.
The medical establishment went berserk over his claims. But when a panel of gynecologists challenged him to predict the genders of babies based only on their conception dates, Jones’s accuracy was 87 percent.
The moon is exalted in the sign of Taurus, in her fall in Scorpio, and in detriment in Capricorn. But what, exactly do these terms mean? If your moon is in Scorpio or Capricorn, are your cursed for life? The terms are just jargon. The thing to remember about exalted, fall, and detriment, is that they simply describe how lunar energies mesh with the energy of particular signs.
I was about eighteen when I read my first description of my Capricorn moon. It was hardly a rave review. Adjectives like ruthless and power hungry and comparisons to Hitler sent me back to the astrologer who had erected my chart. “This isn’t me. There must be some mistake.”
Nope, no mistake.
In the years since then, I’ve come to appreciate my Capricorn moon. It grounds me and keeps me focused. When my Gemini sun is scattered in the wind, the energy of my Capricorn moon brings me back to where I should be. When my external world is disordered and chaotic, my Capricorn moon is my emotional fortress. But when I got fed up teaching Spanish to hormonal seventh graders and entertained the idea of becoming a fulltime writer, my Capricorn moon balked – too much uncertainty, no regular income, no health insurance. Then once it got all those objections out of the way without my deviating from the notion, it shouted, Go for it.
Those descriptions I read way back when made me more conscious of the characteristics inherent to a Capricorn moon so that I tried harder to channel the negative traits into more constructive channels. “Integration of lunar energy” may sound like pseudo psychobabble, but it’s a key factor in summoning and using your intuition.
Astrologer Robert Hand, in his excellent book Horoscope Symbols, writes: “At a certain level, the lunar parts of the mind are in touch with everything, everywhere. The Moon, then, becomes one of the indicators of psychic ability, a mode of perception in which everything is in some way connected.”
In a sense, your natal moon allows you to perceive the big picture, the forest, your personal hologram, and its myriad connections to the matrix of life. Not bad for a satellite, right?
The Signs & Elements
Moon signs, like sun signs, come in a baker’s dozen. They even have the same names – Aries, Taurus, Gemini, and so on around the zodiac. And, like sun signs, they have two broad groupings – by element and by mode. These categories reveal a great deal about the nature of the signs and make it easier to place your natal moon into a simple context.
The elements are what you learned about in grade school science class: fire, earth, air, and water. Three signs go with each element. Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius are fire; Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn are earth; Gemini, Libra, and Aquarius are air; and Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces are water. Simple enough. But what’s it mean in real life?
It means that if you’re a Libra sun married to a Taurus sun, two signs that aren’t particularly compatible, and have been married successfully for 25 years, then chances are your moon signs get along famously. Maybe your moon is in Virgo and your spouse’s moon is in Pisces, earth and water respectively. Or perhaps your partner’s sun sign is the same as your moon sign, which gives you an instinctive, emotional understanding of each other. It may also indicate a karmic connection between you, something that originated in other lives.
Compatibility in terms of elements is just common sense. Air feeds fire, water nurtures earth. Other combinations can work, of course, but may not be quite as compatible. An Aries sun sign may feel that his Scorpio mate is always trying to “dampen his fire.” A Libra may resent the way her Capricorn mate tries to smother her with practicality. You get the general idea here.
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung studied the charts of 483 married couples to see if there was something particular in their charts that made their marriages work. He found three common factors: a conjunction (union) between one partner’s moon and the other partner’s sun (same sign and close in degree); the same moon signs in both charts; and one partner’s moon on the other partner’s ascendant. His findings make perfect astrological sense.
The first combination (sun and moon in same sign) gives you and your partner an instinctive understanding of each other’s needs. The second combination (same moon) gives you similar emotional needs and responses. The third combination (moon and ascendant in same sign) means that one partner’s emotional needs mesh with the self the other person presents to the world.
Fire
Back to grade school science. The nature of fire is to burn. But fire exists in many forms: candlelight, fireworks, brush fires, solar flares, explosions, fire from a match, in a fireplace, and forest fires. We use fire for light, to cook our food, to stay warm. It’s all the same energy and whether it’s constructive or destructive depends on the way we use it.
Applied to astrology, the fire signs as a group are energetic, passionate, enthusiastic, impulsive and impetuous, filled with vitality. They’re the Indiana Jones of the zodiac, action-oriented. They’re great at starting things, at getting projects off the ground. They’re innovators, paradigm-busters. They can also be emotionally explosive, sharp-tongued, and consumed by their own energies.
As a fire sign moon, your intuitive insights are likely to come to you in abrupt, brilliant flashes, with an explosive force that seizes your attention. This could be the aha! that grabs you in the middle of the night or the answer that slams into you when you’re doing sixty on the freeway. The insight is usually sudden and unexpected, but it concerns something you’ve been working on or mulling over for awhile.
You would think that fire signs, moon or sun, should get along best with other fire signs. But I’ve seen too many explosive combinations between fire signs. It’s as if all that action and vitality is just too much under a single roof. Fire gets along best with other air signs.
Earth
The earth signs are definitely calmer than their fire cousins. These folks are practical, efficient, and pay attention to details. They’re grounded. It’s unlikely that an earth sign would head off to Tahiti on the spur of the moment. But a Sagittarian would do it in a heartbeat, with nothing more than a backpack and his ATM card.
Earth signs often enjoy gardening, sports, camping, being outdoors. They tend to be athletic and often enjoy cooking and gourmet foods. They can be security conscious, ambitious individuals, but always move at their leisurely pace, which can drive everyone around them crazy.
As an earth sign moon, your intuitive insights are felt mostly in the physical body. You talk about “gut feelings.” You’re acutely aware of the energy that other people radiate. A sprained muscle, a cold, even a headache: this is the voice of your intuition. The trick is figuring out what the symptom is saying. If you work in the health field, then one of the skills you develop is being able to interpret other people’s symptoms. By this, I mean you’re able to pinpoint the emotional cause of the symptom. The paragon of this ability is the medical intuitive. But all earth signs have it to some degree.
It’s interesting to look at families where everyone has an earth moon. Regardless of what their sun signs say about how they get along as a unit, the common earth moon gives the family unit a practical, efficient focus.
Air
In many ways, the air signs are the most ephemeral of the zodiac, the hardest to pin down. We can see fire, earth, and water, but not air. However, we perceive the effects of air – a sea breeze, wind blowing through trees, hurricanes, tornadoes, La Nina, El Nino, smog, and fog. Then, of course, there’s the simple fact that if we don’t breathe, we die.
The mind is the air sign’s domain and it’s through the mind that you explore your emotions, the realm of the moon. This may seem contradictory, since we usually don’t think of emotions as a mental process. But for an air sign moon, it isn’t enough to just feel something; you have to understand it and that’s the job of the mind. You’re good with language, communication, and abstract thought. You go to sleep with your mind buzzing away and wake up with that same buzz in your heads.
As an air sign moon, your intuitive flashes come to you through your intellect. You might get vivid mental images, mind pictures. You might tune in to your intuition through writing, art, speaking. Clairvoyance may be your vehicle.
Air signs generally do great with other air signs and part of it may be that they always have something to talk about. They also get along well with fire signs.
Water
We drink it, swim in it, bathe in it. It feeds our lawns our flowers, our slice of earth. It covers most of our planet and constitutes eighty percent of our bodies. It molds itself to whatever vessel contains it. Like air, we can’t live without it.
Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces. This trio hits us where we are the most vulnerable. Our homes, our sexuality, our karma. This trio is entirely about emotion. They feel their way through life and all of us have known one or two: the smothering parent, the infidel, the martyr or the savior in our midst. The water signs can be so intense that you want to strangle them. But always, there’s a sense that they’re connected to something larger, that they know stuff that eludes the rest of us. And, quite often, they do. They are the natural psychics of the zodiac, deeply compassionate.
These people usually aren’t as objective as air or fire signs and tend to see everything through a subjective lens. This makes them well-suited for the medical and health fields, artistic pursuits of all kinds, teaching, metaphysics, and counseling.
As a water moon, your intuitive insights come to you through dreams, visions, your emotions, and when you’re involved in something creative. Your sense of touch may be so acute that you can pick up intuitive impressions when you touch people or objects. Precognition may be something that comes to you naturally.
In a family where everyone has a water moon, you can always feel the fluidity of emotions eddying around them. Chances are they live close to water, too, or wish they did. Water regenerates their spirits.
Modes of Being
Some people fall so obviously into categories that they become our prototypes for certain kinds of people: the prom queen, the jock, the cheerleader, the computer nerd, the missionary, the scatterbrained, the social butterfly. They are prototypes for certain characteristics that usually fall into three broad groupings: focused, resolute, and adaptable.
These words describe not only characteristics, but ways of using energy. In astrology, there are three such groupings or triplicities: cardinal (focused), fixed (resolute), and mutable (adaptable). Each grouping holds one sign of each element. In other words, a Virgo – earth – and a Gemini – air – may not seem to have much in common on the surface. Yet, because both are mutable signs, they are oddly compatible. They use energy in the same way, through adapting to people and circumstances and being flexible.
With moon signs, triplicities are particularly revealing because the energy is primarily emotional and intuitive. This explains why two people whose sun signs are at complete odds get along incredibly well. A Taurus and a Gemini sun, for example, are the typical tortoise and hare couple. The Taurus is Ferdinand the bull, content to snooze in the sun and smell the flowers. The Gemini, meanwhile, is zipping around, stirring up the field and trampling the flowers. But if both of them have moons in the same triplicity – Libra and Capricorn, for instance, or Aquarius and Leo – then they use emotional and intuitive energy in the same way. They have an instinctive understanding of each other’s deeper needs.
If you’re a cardinal moon sign, then you move primarily in one direction, along a single focused path. You’re able to draw on emotional reserves you probably don’t even know you have. You’re not a quitter, unless you lose interest, then you walk away without resentment of guilt because you simply don’t care anymore. Intuitively, you’re at your best when your goal is utterly clear in your own heart.
If you’re a fixed moon sign, then you’re in for the long haul. Your emotions tend to cluster around a particular area in your life and you don’t change your opinion or convictions just because someone you know believes something else. Your intuition is immediate, all encompassing, and expresses itself through the element of your moon sign.
If you’ve got a mutable moon, you’re an emotionally flexible person. You adapt to whatever suits you, can fit your emotions to someone else’s, and can easily put yourself in the other guy’s shoes. Intuitively, you’re quick, the kind of person who can assess the mood of a group as soon as you walk into it. It’s as if you adapt yourself to the other person’s mood.
Table 1 outlines the elements and mode of each sign. In table 2, brief descriptions are provided for each sign.
Table 1: Elements & Modes
Table 2
Keywords for Moon Signs
Aries, cardinal fire: Primal energy, self-starters, impatient and impetuous.
Focused as long as interest holds. Can be emotionally explosive. Emphasis on self. Sudden insights.
Taurus, fixed earth: Stubborn, persistent, slow to change opinion. Great endurance. Security-conscious. Appreciation for the finer things in life. Intuition is tactile. Gets “gut feelings.”
Gemini, mutable air: Mental, communicator, versatile, adaptable, emotionally flexible. Quick changes in mood, erratic temperament. Mentally intuitive, gets clairvoyant impressions.
Cancer, cardinal water: Sensitive, nurturing, home-oriented. Emotionally elusive, changeable, needs deep roots, introspective. Intuition works best through the emotions and dreams.
Leo, fixed fire: Bold, dramatic emotions played on public stage. Enjoys attention. Flamboyant. Emotionally volatile, particularly when involving kids or creativity or some strong belief.. Intuition is quick, hot, immediate, an aha!
Virgo, mutable earth: Emotionally detached, a perfectionist, practical. Can be picky about details, enjoys order. Mentally intuitive. Intuition also works through health and the body.
Libra, cardinal air: Seeks balance emotionally. Inner need for harmony. Mentally intuitive. Clear impressions come through dreams, visions, and in relationships with others.
Scorpio, fixed water: Emotionally powerful and intense. Emotionally intuitive, a swift, immediate knowing. Intuition may also work through sexuality, dreams, any connection to deeper layers of life.
Sagittarius, mutable fire: Think of the New Hampshire motto: live free or die. Emotionally adaptable, but only to a point. Intuition usually future-oriented, involving the larger picture. Simply “knows” things.
Capricorn, cardinal earth: Compartmentalizes emotions. Has emotional reservoirs that can be tapped during times of stress or crisis. Intuition works primarily through the body and can be particularly strong through touch and hearing.
Aquarius, fixed air: Emotionally sociable and concerned with large, societal issues. Future- oriented, visionary. Mentally intuitive, like Gemini, but intuition can manifest through dreams and visions, similar to fixed Scorpio.
Pisces, mutable water: Emotionally ambivalent, deeply sensitive to other people’s moods and emotions. Very compassionate. Intuition naturally strong. Gets “gut feelings,” may have precognitive dreams and visions.
Sun Signs, Moon Signs
Most people know their sun signs. But since there are references throughout the book to sun signs, I’ve included a table that provides the beginning and end dates for each sign.
Table 3: Sun Signs
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Even if you don’t believe in past lives, your astrologer probably does. Most western astrologers, in fact, usually have certain things they look for in a natal chart that relates to past lives. Saturn and the aspects or angles it makes to other planets; Pluto and its aspects, and the moon and the moon’s nodes are some of the preferred.
Regardless of what planet or aspect an astrologer uses, it won’t yield names, dates, and places of your past lives, unless the astrologer is also psychic. The whole point, in fact, has less to do with who we were than with who we are and with the patterns of behavior, needs, beliefs, and desires we brought into this life from the past. The moon’s nodes are excellent indicators about past life patterns that may be operating in our lives now.
The Nodes
It’s one thing to talk about a planetary body that we can see. But it’s something else to talk about points that have no physical reality. Specifically, the moon’s nodes are points formed by the moon’s orbit around the earth as it intersects the ecliptic – the earth’s orbit around the sun.
Every planet has a north and south node, but when astrologers talk about nodes, they usually mean the moon’s nodes. The north node, called the dragon’s head, and the south node, the dragon’s tail, are always opposite each other and form a “nodal axis.” This is a kind of fulcrum, a seesaw that can be as precarious as a tightrope act or as easy as walking across the street, depending on how well we integrate the opposing energies into who we are.
The south node represents talents, abilities, and behavioral patterns that are deeply embedded in our psyches. Since these patterns have prevailed in past lives, they are familiar and comfortable to us. These accrued resources and skills are part of what we share with others, but when we get stuck in them, our lives don’t work quite right. The south node represents the past that we have to move beyond and the north node points the way. To evolve as spiritual beings, we need to embrace the essence of the north node. It represents the future and our spiritual evolvement.
The signs of the nodes represent the texture of the shift that must take place for us to make the successful transition from past to future in this life. The houses in which the nodes fall explain the kinds of experiences that allow us to make that transition. The sign and house placement of the moon and the aspects it makes to other planets describe the ways in which our intuition can help us to make that transition.
Chris, a 42-year-old single mother, has a north node in Scorpio and a south node in Taurus. During her fifteen-year marriage, she felt progressively stifled. She and her husband seemed to move farther and farther apart until their daughter was all they had in common. She felt used up, her self-respect hit an all time low, but she hung in there for another two years, hoping things would change. Things didn’t change. She ended up in the hospital with a gall bladder problem, she felt depressed a lot of the time, and in the deepest parts of herself, she knew it was over. So she filed for divorce.
Now she and her daughter live alone, with a menagerie of pets. Her home is considerably smaller, she works harder than she ever has to make ends meet, but she’s happier. She learned that her need for security (Taurus south node) wasn’t worth the sacrifice of her self-worth and sexuality (Scorpio north node). She learned that she hungered for intense experiences and deeper understanding of herself and her life (Scorpio north node) and when the pressure and the need to evolve became too much, she overthrew the tenacity of that south node and struck out on her own.
Interestingly enough, her moon is also in Taurus. This suggests that by allowing her intuitive voice to be heard, by being tenacious in developing and trusting her intuition and by putting it to practical use, she will attract and embrace the deeper understanding she hungers for.
The nodal axis is key to understanding how to balance the old patterns of the south node with the challenges and growth indicated by the north node.
The Nodal Axis
The twelve zodiac signs can be viewed as pairs of six that encompass opposite qualities but use energy in the same way. In a pair, the elements are always different, but the modes are the same. Aries, a fire sign, emphasizes the self, while Libra, an air sign, emphasizes relationships with others. Yet, both are cardinal signs.
In practical terms, this means that if your north node is in Aries and your south node is in Libra, then your growth potential is greatest if you rely on yourself, form your own values, and follow your own initiative. If your north node is in Libra and the south node falls in Aries, the opposite would be true.
Every astrologer has an opinion about the nodal axis and the opinion depends on what kind of astrology is practiced. Karmic astrologers view the south node as karma, deeply embedded patterns acquired over successive lives that must be overcome through the north node sign and placement. Humanistic astrologers focus on the south node as biases set down in early childhood, unconscious patterns that must be released through the sign and position of the north node. Astrologer and author Robert Hand views the nodes as “connections to other people; that is, they are an axis of relationship. In this context, the north node has a joining quality and the south node has a separating quality.”