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Prevention is the old word for a full Moon. The Moon sits at eight degrees of Aquarius today, waxing gibbous, ninety eight percent lit, two nights short of that opposition. Aquarius belongs to Saturn. She rules Cancer, is exalted in Taurus, falls in Scorpio, and holds none of those offices here, which puts her in the condition the tradition called peregrine: a planet abroad, capable but without a post.
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The prevention arriving Friday is an eclipsed one. Ptolemy, writing in second century Alexandria, gave eclipses a great deal of room in the Tetrabiblos, and he read them the way the Hellenistic material generally read them, as signs concerning regions, cities, harvests and seasons rather than as news about one person’s week. Much of that material concerns which territories a given eclipse was thought to touch and how long its effect was reckoned to run. The scale is worth knowing, because the apps inherited the word and dropped the scope.
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A Moon increasing in light was held to be stronger than a Moon losing it, which is why the medieval writers preferred the first half of the lunar month for anything intended to grow. Ninety eight percent is near the top of that climb. Saturn’s sign cools what it holds, and the tradition read the Moon here as steady, distant, slow to warm to anything put in front of her. On Friday all that accumulated light goes into the earth’s shadow at close to the hour the old writers counted her fullest.
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