Almagest

The library · The lunations

The new phase

general summary for a progressed Moon in its new phase

What the tradition reads

The progressed lunation cycle reads the slow, roughly thirty year relationship between the progressed Moon and the progressed Sun, moving forward a symbolic day for every year of life, as a repetition of the Moon's own phases from new to full and back to new again. Rudhyar divided the cycle into eight phases of forty five degrees each, and the new phase, running from the exact conjunction out to forty five degrees of separation, is the first of the eight and opens the whole thirty year cycle. The tradition reads a new phase progressed Moon as "strongly subjective, emotional and impulsive," a temperament that meets the world through feeling before it meets it through analysis, and that can project its own inner state onto events rather than see them plainly as they are. It is read as a seed phase, carrying an impulse whose actual direction is not yet clear even to the person living it, closer to instinct and appetite than to a formed plan, and the tradition treats this lack of a clear objective as proper to the phase rather than a fault in it, since the whole work of the cycle's later phases is to give the new phase's raw impulse a shape it does not yet have.

The story

Rudhyar's The Lunation Cycle set out the eight phase scheme as a description of a working life rather than a fixed birth type, treating the roughly thirty year progressed cycle as eight successive seasons of psychological task; the new phase, in this reading, corresponds to the moment the actual new moon marks in the sky, the Moon and Sun in conjunction and the Moon's disc entirely dark, and Rudhyar read this as the point in the cycle where energy is renewed before it has found any form. He developed the scheme while studying Carl Jung's psychology, and called the resulting approach humanistic astrology, treating a birth chart as a structure of potential to be lived out over time rather than a fortune told once and fixed. The Rudhyar Archival Project's own summary of his eight lunation types keeps this reading intact, describing the new phase native's subjectivity and impulsiveness in Rudhyar's own terms, and noting the risk that comes with it, feelings projected onto the world with little regard for whether the world actually matches them.

Written from

Corpus key lunation:new.