Moon Phase
The Moon's phase is whether she's increasing in light towards the full or decreasing towards the new. Waxing suits a matter that has to grow; waning suits one that has to finish, shrink or be let go.
The fuller picture
Phase in a horary chart is a measurement, not a look at the sky. Subtract the Sun's longitude from the Moon's and wrap the answer into a full circle: anything under 180 degrees is a waxing Moon, anything over is a waning one. The older name for the same fact is increasing or decreasing in light, and it is the phrasing worth keeping, because it says what the reading rests on. The Moon shows more of her face as she pulls away from the Sun, and the tradition takes that literal increase as the pattern for anything else that is meant to increase.
From there the doctrine is short. A waxing Moon is favourable where the matter needs to build — an application that has to gather momentum, a business that has to grow, a body that has to mend. A waning Moon is favourable where the matter needs to reduce: finishing something, being released from something, letting a thing go. So the polarity depends on the shape of the question in the same way a void of course Moon does, and it goes wrong in the same way. Reading every waning Moon as bad news answers a question nobody asked.
Now the honest part, and it is the reason this page is short. The material this glossary is built on has a great deal to say about the Moon — her course, her speed, her last and next aspects, her void, the sign she occupies, whether she is besieged — and nothing at all about her light. Twenty-one chapters of close reading turned up no rule on the phase. The attribution generally offered runs back to Ptolemy and is repeated in every later handbook, but repetition is not the same as a locator, and we would rather say so than write four paragraphs on a rule we cannot source properly. Treat the phase as a light modifier: a reason to lean, never a reason to decide.
One thing that genuinely does deserve attention near the ends of the cycle. A Moon close to the new is also a Moon close to the Sun, and that is a separate and far stronger condition — combustion, and under the sunbeams a little further out — with its own thresholds and its own consequences. If a chart has the Moon a couple of degrees from the Sun, the phase is the least of what is happening. Read the solar condition first and let the phase be a footnote to it.
In your chart
The Moon's own panel reports her as waxing or waning under the older heading of increasing in light, worked out from her elongation from the Sun. Judgment emits the phase at minor weight, and here is exactly what the app currently does with it: waxing counts as favourable and waning as unfavourable for every question except a lost object or a missing pet, where the polarity is deliberately reversed on the reading that a waning Moon brings the thing closer to being found. That is cruder than the directional reading described above, and it is worth knowing before you weigh the line. Phase carries no score on the strength table — there is no point awarded for increasing light.
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