Last Separation

The fuller picture

The Moon covers about thirteen degrees a day, which is more ground than any other traditional body, so her aspects turn over faster than anything else in the chart. That makes her most recently completed contact the closest thing a horary figure has to a timestamp on the recent past. The measurement is simple: take the aspects she has already gone exact on, and the one she has travelled least far past is the last one she made. Because the orb of a separating aspect is distance already covered rather than distance still to go, a tight separation is a recent event and a wide one an older one.

The reason to read it at all is that the tradition splits a significator's aspects into two tenses. The last aspect shows action already taken; the next aspect shows what will occur. Sitting underneath both is the axiom that aspects are action — if an aspect happens an event happens, and if none will happen nothing does. So the Moon's two neighbouring aspects give you a before and an after, and the before is often the more useful of the two in conversation, because it is checkable. Someone who has just been told what the chart says happened last week will tell you straight away whether the chart is describing their life.

Some of the readings are specific enough to be worth memorising. On a question about somebody absent, the Moon or the ruler of the first having lately separated from the ruler of the sixth says the person has recently been ill; from the ruler of the eighth, that they have lately been in danger of their life; from the ruler of the twelfth, that they may have been confined, and in real fear and anxiety. Notice what those three are doing. None of them is an argument about the answer. They are statements of fact about a person the querent cannot reach, offered as description, and the verdict is settled somewhere else in the chart.

There is one more use, and it is the practical one in a question about a mislaid thing. The Moon's last separation is taken to name whatever displaced the object: the nature of the planet she came off, and the house that planet sits in, describe who moved it or what happened to it. That is a description of a cause rather than a prediction, which is the same job the last separation does everywhere else.

What it never does is answer the question. A completed aspect cannot carry a yes about something still to come — the applying side of the chart does that work, and a separating trine is good fortune already spent rather than good fortune arriving. The one place a last separation comes close is a question about something that has already finished, where the Moon coming off one of the two rulers corroborates that the matter is behind the querent rather than ahead. Even there it is support and not the path: she augments the pair of rulers, and never stands in for them.