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Syzygy is the Greek word, and it means a yoking together. The two lights meet at eighteen degrees and twenty-six minutes of Virgo at 03:27 UTC this morning, the same degree and the same minute of the same sign, which is all a new Moon has ever been. Nothing is lit.
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The term covers both meetings, the conjunction and the opposition, the dark Moon and the full. Ptolemy, in second century Alexandria, treats the syzygies as the moments a forecaster attends to before anything else, on the reasoning that whatever configuration stands in the sky when the lights come together governs the interval that follows. The month was read from its hinges rather than from its middle.
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Then nearly the whole of the day runs empty. From 05:52 UTC she completes no further aspect in Virgo, and the void holds until 23:51, when she crosses into Libra with nine minutes of the day remaining. Close to eighteen hours. Void of course means only that and nothing more: no further aspect before the sign changes.
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A dark Moon and a long void inside the same twenty-four hours is about as empty a reading as the system produces. The electional writers had nothing to put under it, which was the whole of their advice. She comes out of it in Venus’s house, at the very end of Friday, already gaining light.
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