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Detriment is the word to know today. The Moon stands at twenty-six degrees of Aquarius, in a waxing gibbous phase now indistinguishable from full. Aquarius is Saturn’s sign, and it sits directly across the circle from Cancer, which the Moon rules. A planet in the sign opposite its own domicile is said to be in detriment. The term does not mean harm. It means the planet is working in a house arranged to another planet’s specifications.
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Ptolemy, writing in second century Alexandria, supplied the reasoning that later writers dropped. He gave Cancer and Leo to the Moon and the Sun, the two lights, and gave the signs at the far end of the circle to Saturn, the coldest and slowest body known to him. Aquarius is one of those two. The Moon holds no office there because it is as far from her own house as the zodiac allows. By the medieval period the argument had thinned into a table, and detriment was a mark in a grid that a practitioner consulted rather than defended.
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What the tradition made of that condition is narrower than modern usage suggests. A planet in detriment still signifies. It simply cannot signify on its own terms. Nothing in the reading concerns fortune; it concerns authority, and the Moon has none of hers in Aquarius. She has brightness instead. The almanac puts the full Moon tomorrow, so tonight she carries her maximum light and her minimum standing at once, two facts taken from two different columns of the same record. The old writers never averaged them into a single verdict.
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