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Two thresholds fall about fifteen minutes apart tonight. At 19:35 UTC the Moon leaves Leo and enters Virgo, and at roughly 19:50 she passes inside seventeen degrees of the Sun. Two percent of her face is lit.
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Seventeen degrees is the figure William Lilly gives for a planet under the Sun’s beams. Near enough to be overpowered, not yet near enough to be consumed. Closer in, at about eight and a half degrees, the same relation acquires a harder name and becomes combustion. Nothing changes between the two except the distance, which is what makes the pair unusual in a system that mostly deals in categories rather than measurements.
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The reasoning was observational long before it was doctrinal. A planet that near the Sun cannot be seen, and a planet that cannot be seen was held to be unable to act on its own account, whatever its dignities added up to. This is the one debility a reader can verify by walking outside before dawn. She is a thread in the eastern sky this morning. By Friday she will not be there at all.
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The shortest void of the month sits inside the same evening. From 18:57 UTC she completes no further aspect in Leo, and thirty-eight minutes later she is across the boundary. Al-Biruni, in eleventh century Persia, belongs to the line of writers who set the planets’ relation to the Sun down as a measurement rather than a verdict. The new Moon falls in Virgo on the eleventh, at 03:27 UTC.
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