|
Light was the first thing the old astrologers measured. Before dignity, before aspect, they asked whether a planet was gaining it or losing it, and the Moon stands in Aries today at nineteen degrees, losing. Eighty-seven percent of her face is lit. That figure drops every night from here.
|
|
Decreasing in light is a technical condition, not a mood. William Lilly, writing in seventeenth century London, set it among the accidental debilities: not a fault in the planet itself but a reduction in its power to act, the way a lamp is still a lamp at half its oil. A Moon increasing in light counted as a fortitude. A Moon decreasing counted against her. The distinction is older than Lilly and runs back through Bonatti in thirteenth century Italy into the Arabic material before him.
|
|
Aries gives her nothing to stand on either. It is not her domicile, not her exaltation, not her detriment, not her fall. A planet in a sign where it holds no essential dignity was called peregrine, from the Latin for foreigner, and the tradition read such a planet as competent but unsponsored. Aries belongs to Mars. The Hellenistic writers read the Moon here as quick, hot, forward, short on patience. Ptolemy in second century Alexandria placed the sign among the cardinal and the fiery.
|
|
What the electional writers did with a waning Moon is plain enough. It was the phase for cutting, harvesting, closing accounts, and undoing. Beginnings went under a Moon gaining light, and Dorotheus of Sidon in the first century is among the earliest to put it that way.
|
|
