The first quarter phase

general summary for a progressed Moon in its first quarter phase

What the tradition reads

The progressed lunation cycle reads the slow relationship between the progressed Moon and the progressed Sun, moving forward a symbolic day for each year of life, as a repetition of the Moon's own phases from new to full and back to new again, the whole cycle completing roughly once every twenty nine years. Rudhyar divided the cycle into eight phases, and the first quarter is the second of the eight, following the new phase. Rudhyar names the first quarter, together with the phase across the cycle from it, as one of the scheme's two crisis points, calling the first quarter a crisis in action and its later counterpart a crisis in consciousness, the two together bringing to a focus, in his own words, the very quality of change itself. He describes the phase as a moment of basic dissatisfaction with the self that is nonetheless also a time of challenge to the self, one in which a person meets, as he puts it, their own subservience to time, the point in the cycle where whatever began at the new phase must either prove itself able to be built or fail under the resistance it now meets.

The story

Rudhyar's The Lunation Cycle, published in 1967, set the whole eight phase scheme out as a description of a working life rather than a fixed birth type, treating the roughly twenty nine year progressed cycle as a set of successive seasons of psychological task that every life moves through at its own pace. Rudhyar had been studying Carl Jung's psychology as he developed his approach, and called the result humanistic astrology, treating the birth chart as a structure of potential to be lived out rather than a fortune to be told, and the eight phases as the changing task of living that potential out over time rather than eight separate personality types. He uses the word crisis for this phase and its counterpart in the old sense of a turning point rather than a disaster, the moment, in his account, when whatever effort has been building must pass a real test of resistance rather than simply continue unopposed, a description that fits the plain arithmetic of the point as well, a first quarter Moon sitting exactly a quarter of the way through a cycle whose outcome is not yet decided.

Written from

Corpus key lunation:first-quarter.