The Moon's Coming Aspects

The fuller picture

Start with the axiom that makes horary timing work at all: an aspect is an action. If a contact gets completed an event happens, and if none does, nothing happens. Split a planet's aspects into the two tenses and you have a before and an after — the last aspect is action already taken, the next aspect is what will occur. The Moon has more of both in front of her than anything else in the chart, because she covers about thirteen degrees a day and her contacts turn over faster than any other planet's. Her completed side is the recent past and has its own page. This one is the other half: what she still has to do, and the order she does it in.

Her next contact is the one that carries the weight, and it's doing three jobs at once. The planet she's heading for gives the character of the coming event, the aspect gives how easily it arrives, and the distance left is the count a unit then gets applied to. In one worked chart her next aspect is a trine to the ruler of the twelfth, and the arc to it times the moment a mother finally learns what happened to her son. In another it's a trine to Jupiter that carries the light from the thing asked about across to the person asking, so the same contact is both the chart's perfection and its timing, and its arc agrees with the separate count taken between the two rulers. In a third, a question about a dying man, her next contact is a helpful sextile to Jupiter with full reception running both ways — named as help that ought to have led her back to safety, and then set aside, because a small good can't overturn an overwhelming harm. So a coming aspect is evidence to be weighed. It isn't a result on its own.

Getting the order right is the part that goes wrong, and it goes wrong two ways. The first is which bodies you let into the list. One recorded reading names a contact with a modern planet, reads it for content, and then explicitly sets it aside to find the next aspect among the traditional seven — so what counts as next depends on a decision you've made before you even look. The second way is worse: an aspect that arrives sooner can spoil the one you were counting on. On one chart the reading names a contact nearly three degrees off as the next one and builds a three-month judgment on it, while a sextile at one degree forty minutes — between the thing asked about and the second planet standing for the person asking, perfecting in roughly three hours — arrives first, and our own engine reports that sextile as a prohibition of the very square the reading rests on. So the strongest piece of good news in the chart went unnamed, and the timing came off an aspect that wasn't next. Write the sequence out in order before you interpret any single step of it.

It's worth being clear about what the sequence is not. It doesn't replace the contact between the two rulers. The tradition's timing tools are the applying aspects of the person asking, the thing asked about and the Moon together, and she adds to that pair rather than standing in for it — a chart whose rulers never meet isn't rescued by the Moon having a busy week ahead. Nor is the sequence a set of dates. Each step is still a count of degrees turned into a coarse unit, so four coming contacts give you four approximations and not a diary. And where she has nothing left before she changes sign there's no sequence at all, which is the void of course reading and has its own page too.

One more thing decides what appears in the list, and it isn't settled. Whether a contact counts as coming at all depends on how wide an orb you allow, and practice varies more here than almost anywhere else in the subject. The material this glossary is built on rests one chart's entire judgment and its only timing on Moon aspects around eleven and a half degrees wide, and dates another answer to within eight days off a contact of nearly eight degrees. Under a strict traditional table the Moon and Jupiter reach only about ten and three quarter degrees between them, so the first of those aspects doesn't exist yet — and without it that chart has no perfection, no translation and no timing. This is an open question rather than a rule, and it bites hardest on exactly these aspects, because the Moon's own share of the orb is the widest of the seven after the Sun.