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Void of course is the condition to know today. The Moon stands at twenty one degrees of Scorpio as the day opens, makes her last exact aspect at 03:29 UTC, and does not enter Sagittarius until 16:41 UTC. Thirteen hours in between with nothing completing. The old term for that stretch is void of course, and it describes a Moon that has finished her business in a sign but has not yet left it.
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Scorpio is also her fall. Fall is the counterpart to exaltation in the scheme of essential dignities: the sign opposite a planet’s place of honor, where the tradition held it has the least of its own nature to draw on. The Moon works by increase and by softening. Scorpio is fixed, watery, ruled by Mars, and not a sign that softens. The arrangement of exaltations and falls is set out in Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, in second century Alexandria, and the later writers inherited it more or less intact.
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Both conditions hold at once today, weak by sign and idle by aspect. Bonatti, in thirteenth century Italy, counted a void Moon among the things that made a horary chart unfit to judge, and Lilly carried the same caution into Christian Astrology, published in London in 1647. Neither called the hours unlucky. They called them empty, which is a different claim. A void Moon was never a verdict on the day. It was a note that the sky had stopped answering questions until she changed signs.
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