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Decreasing in light is the technical phrase, and from today it applies. The Moon sits at twenty-two degrees of Pisces, ninety-seven percent lit, one day past full and already giving the light back. The tradition did not read this as a mood. It read it as a measurable condition of the body, filed beside speed, direction, and distance from the Sun.
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Those categories are set out most fully in William Lilly’s Christian Astrology, published in London in 1647, where a planet increasing in light counts in its own favor and a planet decreasing in light counts against it. Accidental dignity has nothing to do with the sign a planet occupies. A planet can sit in its own house and still be weakened by circumstance, and the Moon in the days after full is the plainest case of it: fully visible, nearly fully bright, and structurally past her strength. The distinction did not begin with Lilly. Bonatti works through the same accounting in thirteenth century Italy, and the Arabic material behind him treats light as the thing the Moon is actually carrying.
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Pisces adds nothing to her account either way. She does not rule here, is not exalted here, and is in neither detriment nor fall, which the old term calls peregrine: a planet passing through country where it holds no office. What the election material attached to a waning Moon was subtraction. This was the half of the month written down for cutting, draining, harvesting, and finishing, on the reasoning that decreasing light suits decreasing work. She is at her brightest tonight, and the tradition still filed her under diminishing.
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