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The Moon square the Moon

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

What the tradition reads

A natal chart cannot show the Moon square itself, since a single body cannot stand at an angle from its own degree; the tradition reads this key through transit, at the point roughly a week after the lunar return when the Moon's much faster orbit carries it to a square 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 is passing through, and Ptolemy names the square discordant, so this pass of the monthly cycle reads as a harder, more effortful stretch within that same ordinary emotional weather. Between two charts, one person's Moon square another's is read, together with the opposition, as real difficulty keeping the two people's moods in step: sources describe one partner up while the other is down, conflicting daily schedules such as a night owl paired with an early riser, and small habits or idiosyncrasies that can feel almost unbearable, though the same sources add that patience and compromise let irritating behavior be modified or simply tolerated well enough for a shared life to work.

The story

A square sets two bodies ninety degrees apart, a quarter of the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs names it, together with the opposition, discordant, since the signs it joins are, in his words, of different natures and sexes, a judgment about the angle regardless of which bodies stand in it. 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. A square between the Moon and itself, met in transit or in synastry, is that same return arriving at a harder angle, the familiar cycle asked to work rather than simply to recur.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Moon:Moon:square.