The balsamic phase

general summary for a progressed Moon in its balsamic phase

What the tradition reads

The progressed lunation cycle is a slow clock built from the relationship between the progressed Moon and the progressed Sun rather than from their actual position in the sky, the two moving forward a symbolic day for every year of life so that the angle between them repeats the whole cycle of the Moon's phases, from new to full and back again, roughly once every twenty nine years. Rudhyar divided that cycle into eight phases and named them for the Moon's visible phases; the balsamic phase is the last of the eight, the stretch closing in toward the next new moon. Rudhyar describes it in terms of a final letting go of the seed of the cycle now ending, an image he extends into the Moon's own entrance into what he calls the sanctuary of the solar realm, likening the phase to a penitent asking for mercy, or to incense rising toward the sun. He notes that the word balsamic itself has an origin he could not settle, an uncertainty this corpus keeps rather than resolves. The tradition reads the phase as a season of ending rather than beginning, closing a cycle that has already done its major work, and modern astrologers such as Demetra George have written specifically to reframe the negative associations the phase has often carried, treating it as a season of real value rather than simply a low point to get past.

The story

Dane Rudhyar set out the eight phase scheme in The Lunation Cycle, published in 1967, treating the whole of a life as a single unfolding cycle of psychological task rather than a fixed type assigned once at birth. Rudhyar had been studying Carl Jung's psychology as he developed his approach to astrology, and called the result humanistic astrology, treating each phase less as fortune and more as a description of the work a life is suited to during that season. His own account of the balsamic phase leans on religious rather than mechanical imagery, closer to a rite of withdrawal than to a simple ending, and he is candid that some of the phase's own vocabulary, the word balsamic among it, reached him already unmoored from any settled origin. Demetra George's later work on the lunation phases takes up the same eight phase scheme a generation on, describing it as tracing how a life's purpose unfolds across a roughly twenty nine year cycle from emergence to completion, and gives the balsamic phase in particular sustained attention, working specifically to reframe the negative meanings it has often been given rather than to repeat them uncritically.

Written from

Corpus key lunation:balsamic.