Lunation

every reader

What the tradition reads

A lunation is one complete cycle of the Moon's phases, from one new Moon to the next, a span astronomers call the synodic month and measure at a little over twenty nine and a half days, slightly longer than the sidereal month the Moon takes to return to the same star because the Sun itself has moved on meanwhile. Astrology reads each new lunation, the moment the Sun and Moon meet exactly in longitude, as a fresh start for whatever sign and house it falls in, treating the following weeks as coloured by that meeting the way the whole year is coloured by the Sun's own return each birthday. Beyond the ordinary monthly sense, the tradition applies the same eight named phases, new, crescent, first quarter, gibbous, full, disseminating, last quarter and balsamic, to the slow relationship between the progressed Sun and progressed Moon, a cycle that unfolds not across a month but across the roughly thirty years it takes the progressed Moon to complete its own circuit, so that a single life is read as passing through its own lunation cycle at the pace of the secondary progressions rather than the pace of the sky.

The story

Lunation is a Medieval Latin coinage, lunatio, built directly on luna, the Moon, naming simply the completed circuit of the Moon's changing face rather than any one phase within it. The eight phase scheme most astrologers use today for the extended, progressed sense of the word is a twentieth century addition rather than an ancient one: the astrologer Dane Rudhyar set it out fully in his 1967 book The Lunation Cycle, dividing the roughly thirty year progressed cycle into eight seasons of forty five degrees each and naming them for the Moon's own visible phases, treating the whole sequence as a description of psychological work suited to each season of a life rather than a fixed type assigned once at birth. Rudhyar had been studying the psychology of Carl Jung as he developed the idea, and called the resulting approach humanistic astrology.

Written from

Corpus key glossary:lunation.