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Opposite signs make opposite rules. The Moon rules Cancer, so her detriment is Capricorn, the sign straight across the wheel from it, and she crossed into Capricorn at 04:55 UTC this morning. By tonight she stands at roughly nine degrees of it. Detriment is the term for that position: a planet at work in the sign built on the reverse of its own principle.
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Capricorn belongs to Saturn, and the tradition placed Saturn and the Moon at nearly opposite ends of its physical scheme. The Moon was classed cold and moist, the body of growth and flux and increase. Saturn was cold and dry, the planet of limit, age, and delay. A Moon in Saturn’s sign was therefore read as constrained rather than harmed. She keeps her own nature. The room was built for something else. Firmicus Maternus, writing in fourth century Rome, is one of the Latin sources for that pairing of qualities, and the same scheme of dignities turns up again in Al-Biruni, in eleventh century Persia.
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None of this described a bad day. It described a planet with no standing in the place where it stood, which mattered enormously when an astrologer had to decide which body in a chart to believe. A Moon in detriment made a poor significator and a weak witness, and the judgment leaned on something else. She is in Capricorn until Monday afternoon, which is two and a half days of working without a title.
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