Sign Gemini, six degrees
Phase Waning crescent
Condition Peregrine
The word to know today
Peregrine
From the Latin for foreigner or traveler. A planet passing through a sign where it has no home and no office. The tradition treated such a planet as competent but unsponsored.
Peregrine is the word to know today. The Moon is in Gemini, at six degrees, in a waning crescent phase. Gemini is not a sign the Moon rules, is not the sign of her exaltation, is not her detriment, and is not her fall. She holds no essential dignity here at all.
This mattered most in horary astrology, the branch that answered specific questions by casting a chart for the moment the question was asked. William Lilly, writing in seventeenth century London, warned that a peregrine planet at the hour of a theft was a strong significator of the thief, precisely because it belonged nowhere and could be identified by that rootlessness. The doctrine did not originate with him. It runs back through Bonatti in thirteenth century Italy and further into the Arabic material.
Gemini adds its own coloring. It is an air sign, mutable, ruled by Mercury, and the tradition read the Moon here as quick, dispersive, oriented toward speech and short movements. A waning crescent is the last sliver before the dark of the Moon. In the older calendars this was the phase for finishing, not for beginning.
From the shelf
William Lilly, Christian Astrology
1647, London. The doctrine of the peregrine thief runs back through Bonatti and into the Arabic material.

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