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At 11:33 UTC today the distance closes to eight and a half degrees and the condition acquires its harder name. The Moon holds Virgo through the whole of the day, nine degrees along it by noon, combust and invisible, with under one percent of her face still lit.
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Combustion is the tighter of the two solar conditions. Under the beams a planet is overpowered and can still be argued for. Combust, it was held to be burned through, its significations spoiled rather than merely dimmed, and in the old tables of debility no single entry counts more heavily against a planet than this one. William Lilly sets the boundary at eight and a half degrees.
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Then the doctrine turns over on itself. A planet within about seventeen minutes of arc of the Sun, minutes and not degrees, was said to be cazimi, in the heart of the Sun, and that was read as the opposite of burning: sheltered, seated, strengthened past anything its sign could give it. Eight degrees of separation is ruin. A quarter of one degree is a throne.
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Whether any of that applies to the Moon herself is a question the tradition never settled. She reaches exact conjunction with the Sun tomorrow at 03:27 UTC, which by the letter of the cazimi rule is the strongest position available to her all month, and by nearly every other reading in the same books is the weakest, because the dark of the Moon ended things and began nothing. Both judgments sit in the material. Nobody reconciled them.
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