Almagest

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The Moon opposite the Moon

the transiting Moon's monthly passage opposite its own natal place, roughly the full moon of the personal lunar month, or one person's Moon opposite another's in synastry

What the tradition reads

A natal chart cannot show the Moon opposite itself, since a single body cannot stand at an angle from its own degree; the tradition reads this key through transit, roughly two weeks after the lunar return, when the Moon's much faster orbit carries it directly opposite its own birth place. Wikipedia's account of astrological transits notes that the transiting Moon is felt mainly through mood and feeling, coloured by the sign and house it is passing through, and Ptolemy names the opposition discordant, so this point of the monthly cycle reads as another demanding stretch within that same ordinary emotional weather. Between two charts, one person's Moon opposite another's is read, together with the square, as real difficulty keeping the two people's moods in step: sources describe one partner up while the other is down, mismatched daily schedules, and small habits or idiosyncrasies of a partner that can feel almost unbearable, though patience and compromise are said to let irritating behavior be modified or tolerated well enough for a shared life to keep working.

The story

An opposition sets two bodies a hundred and eighty degrees apart, the full diameter of the circle, the greatest distance either can stand from the other; Ptolemy counts it, together with the square, discordant, set against the trine and sextile's harmony. Selene meets herself in the fifty daughters Pausanias credits her with bearing to the sleeping Endymion, a number some readers connect to the fifty lunar months of an Olympiad, her own monthly cycle carried out into offspring; the same goddess who yokes her team nightly to drive her chariot across the sky is, by this account, a figure of exact and repeated return. An opposition between the Moon and itself, met in transit or in synastry, is that return carried to its farthest point in the cycle, still one continuous course rather than two separate moons.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Moon:Moon:opposition.