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The Moon sextile the Moon

the transiting Moon's monthly passage in sextile to its own natal place, or one person's Moon sextile another's in synastry

What the tradition reads

A natal chart cannot show the Moon sextile itself, since a single body cannot stand at an angle from its own degree; the tradition reads this key through transit, some days after the lunar return, when the Moon's much faster orbit carries it to a sextile with 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 passes through, and Ptolemy names the sextile itself harmonious, so this particular pass of the monthly cycle reads as a comparatively easy stretch within that ordinary emotional weather. Between two charts, one person's Moon sextile another's is read, together with the trine, as the two people sharing very similar tastes and emotional sensibilities: sources describe partners who feel quite comfortable with each other, find it easier to build a harmonious home together since their preferred styles already match, and who tend to give real, shared attention to family matters.

The story

A sextile is sixty degrees, a sixth of the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs names it, together with the trine, harmonious, since the two signs it joins are of the same kind, all masculine or all feminine, a judgment about the angle itself. 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, already a figure of exact and repeated return. A sextile between the Moon and itself, met in transit or in synastry, is that same return arriving at an easy, cooperative angle rather than at the conjunction's exact point.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Moon:Moon:sextile.