New Moon and full Moon in the Pisces weeks

In the weeks before the beginning of spring, two headings turn up regularly in horoscope texts, about a fortnight apart: “New Moon in Pisces”, and then “Full Moon in Virgo”. It reads like two separate pieces of news. It is the same matter twice over, seen from two sides, and that it should be these two signs that are named was settled in advance.

A phase of the Moon is an angle

One half of the Moon is always lit and one half dark. How much of the lit half shows depends solely on how the Moon stands to the Sun as seen from the Earth. When the two lie in the same direction, the dark side is the one turned towards the Earth: new Moon. When they lie opposite each other, the bright half is in full view: full Moon. Everything in between gives crescents and half Moons.

Astrology measures exactly that distance, only in degrees of the zodiac — zero at the new Moon, a hundred and eighty at the full Moon. A phase is therefore not a property of the Moon but a detail about two celestial bodies at once. That is why notices of this kind always bring in a sign that seemed not to be under discussion at all.

Why the new Moon carries the Sun’s sign

For the Pisces weeks one thing follows from this at once. As long as the Sun is running through this section, the Moon at the moment of the new Moon is on the same degree as the Sun, and so in Pisces as well. A new Moon in these weeks can take place in no other sign. It is named after the Sun, not after the Moon, even though the name suggests the opposite.

How often that happens follows from two measures of time that are almost the same length: the Sun needs just under a month for one sign, and a good twenty-nine and a half days pass from one new Moon to the next. As a rule, then, exactly one new Moon falls in the Pisces weeks, occasionally none and occasionally two, depending on how the two rhythms happen to line up.

The full Moon lies opposite

A good two weeks later the Moon is halfway round its circuit and faces the Sun. From Pisces, a hundred and eighty degrees is Virgo. That is why the full Moon of these weeks carries the same name year after year, and the same pattern runs through the whole calendar: the full Moon of the Aries weeks is in Libra, that of the Taurus weeks in Scorpio. The pair changes with the season and with nothing else.

You can check this without any table at all. A full Moon rises as the Sun sets, and is at its highest at midnight. In the sky it takes roughly the place the Sun occupies by day half a year later: high in winter, low in summer. Anyone who steps outside on a March evening and sees the full Moon rising in the east is looking at the opposition the texts are talking about.

What that means for a birth in these weeks

The phase tells you something about your own chart as well, and without any arithmetic. If your Sun is in Pisces and you came into the world at a new Moon, your Moon is almost certainly there too. Both lights in the same section means: no second colour to hold out against it. If you were born at the full Moon, it is in Virgo, exactly opposite; the tradition reads a tension into that, one to be borne between two demands.

Between those two dates the same holds by degrees: the further your day of birth lies from the last new Moon, the further apart the two are in your chart. A glance at a lunar calendar for your date of birth is enough to judge that, long before anything has been calculated.

Set against most of what a horoscope column prints, this one detail has an advantage: you can look at it instead of believing it. Where Neptune is running just now cannot be checked at the window; the phase of the Moon can. What a birth chart holds beyond the Sun and the Moon you will find under Planets; how the twelve sections of the circle are arranged, under Zodiac signs.