Moon in Medical Astrology

The Moon was the second of the two lights and, for a birth by night, the first candidate for the giver of life in Ptolemy’s rule. Lilly held it to be cold and moist, the planet of the phlegmatic humor, and listed the brain, the stomach, the bowels and the bladder under it; Ptolemy had earlier listed the stomach, the belly and the womb. The Moon mattered more than any other planet to the everyday practice of the tradition, because it crossed a sign every few days and the almanacs printed its sign for every date beside the Zodiac Man. Culpeper built his decumbiture method on it, following the Moon from the hour a person took to bed through the quarters of its month. What follows is that history and nothing else: no line on this page describes a reader or any living person.

Three authors, three columns, and one entry in all of them: every source in the table beneath this section placed the stomach under the Moon. A second agreement runs through the columns in different words. Ptolemy wrote the left-hand parts, Lilly the left eye of a man, Culpeper the left side; each was recording the same Greek pairing that handed the right side to the Sun and the left to the Moon. Ptolemy’s own list added taste and drinking as faculties, the belly, and the womb, which neither of the English authors kept in this row.

The brain is the entry that moved. Ptolemy gave it to the Sun, as the Sun page records, and did not list it under the Moon at all. Lilly and Culpeper both opened their Moon lists with it, and the shift is consistent with the humoral tag they attached to the planet: a cold and moist organ went to the cold and moist light. Lilly added the bowels; Culpeper, writing for physicians in 1655, kept the bladder from Lilly and dropped the bowels. The entries differ by inclusion, never by contradiction, which is the pattern across most of the seven classical rows.

The nature column reads cold and moist, and the sign column Cancer, the sign the Zodiac Man lists at the breast. Lilly and Culpeper both wrote the stomach into Cancer’s region as well, so that the sign and its ruler shared an organ in the English lists. How the sign list and the planet list came to overlap is a question the Zodiac Man guide takes up, and the planets and the body guide reads this row against the other six.

No other planet in this series produces a table like the one below. Across 1900 to 2050 the Moon enters a sign 24,223 times, which works out to well over a hundred entries a year, and its mean stay is 2.3 days. Its longest stay in the sample is 3 days, in Aries, and that figure is a whole-day count of a crossing that took a little longer than usual because the Moon was near the far point of its orbit, where it moves slowest.

The share of days by sign is the flattest in the series: Libra takes the largest share at 8.36%, Scorpio the smallest at 8.31%, and the two are separated by almost nothing. The reason is that the Moon’s slow point and fast point do not stay put. They travel once around the zodiac in under nine years, so over a century and a half every sign has had its turn as the slow one and the differences wash out. The Sun’s table, by contrast, keeps the same slow sign for centuries.

The retrograde column is 0% of days, because the Moon circles the Earth and has no loop to make. Lilly’s table of fortitudes nevertheless scored the Moon’s motion: he gave points for a Moon swift in motion and took them away for a slow one, and a swift Moon is one crossing a sign in close to two days rather than close to three. The almanac tables that printed the Moon’s sign against each date were tracking exactly these stays, and the Zodiac Man guide describes what the surgeons of the period did with them.

Frida Kahlo’s chart serves here as a specimen of how the texts placed a Moon, and the page says nothing about her beyond the placements. Her Moon stands in Taurus in the 10th house, with Leo rising. Lilly’s table listed Taurus as the Moon’s exaltation, so this Moon carried one of the two strongest essential dignities in his scoring. It is angular, at the top of the chart, in one of the places Ptolemy allowed for the prorogator. She was born by day, however, which put the Sun ahead of the Moon as the first candidate; the Moon’s place would have made it the next in line.

Its phase is balsamic, which belongs to the last of the four quarters, the stretch from the last quarter to the new Moon. The tradition tallied that quarter as cold and moist in the temperament method, and Lilly’s fortitudes counted a Moon decreasing in light as a debility set against the exaltation. The lord of Taurus is Venus, placed in Gemini in the same house. The Moon is nowhere near the 6th, whose cusp is Capricorn and whose lord is Saturn in Pisces; an astrologer of Lilly’s day would have read it for the house it occupied and for the native, not for sickness.

The Moon’s essential dignities in Lilly’s table were its house in Cancer, its exaltation in Taurus and its triplicity in the earthy signs by night; its detriment fell in Capricorn and its fall in Scorpio. Like the Sun it had no terms. To these the table added accidental points that no other planet received in the same form: the Moon increasing in light was a fortitude and decreasing in light a debility, and swift motion counted for it while slow motion counted against. The site’s temperament calculator follows the same quarters, giving each phase a hot or cold and a moist or dry vote.

Combustion applied to the Moon at the conjunction with the Sun, which is the new Moon, and the tradition read a Moon under the Sun’s beams as the most hindered state it could be in. Lilly used the same measure for the Moon as for the planets, counting it combust within a set distance of the Sun in the same sign and under the beams at a wider one. A retrograde Moon does not exist, as the stays table shows, so the debility of retrogradation never entered the Moon’s score. What the table did record was the Moon void of course, moving to no aspect before it left its sign, which Lilly read in questions as a matter that came to nothing.

In every horary question Lilly took the Moon as a second significator of the person asking, alongside the lord of the Ascendant, so a Moon in the 1st house doubled that role. In a nativity the 1st house was the house of the native’s body, and a Moon there cast a cold and moist vote in the temperament tally and, by night, offered itself as the giver of life if its place allowed. Lilly’s chapter on the Moon, like his other planet chapters, described the person signified when the Moon ruled the Ascendant or occupied the 1st, by shape and coloring, as portraiture rather than as medicine.

For sickness the Moon was read twice over. Lilly’s significators of the sick were the Ascendant, its lord and the Moon; the significators of the disease were the 6th, its lord and any planet inside it. A Moon in the 6th therefore belonged to both lists, standing at once for the person and for the illness, read by its nature, cold and moist, and by the parts in the table above. Culpeper went further and made the Moon the clock of the decumbiture: he followed it from the hour the person lay down and judged the days on which it reached a square or an opposition to its own place. The 6th house guide takes the house itself from there.

The Moon sits in the Placidus 6th house for the first third of its own arc beneath the horizon, the same rule that applies to every planet, and at forty degrees north that comes to 2 hours in an average day. Which hours of the day those are depends on the phase. A new Moon sets with the Sun and enters the 6th in the evening; a full Moon sets near sunrise and enters it in the morning; the quarter Moons enter it around midnight and around noon. Over a month the Moon in the 6th visits every hour of the clock.

That is why the shares in the table are so even. At the equator the Moon is in the 6th in 8.28% of charts, at forty degrees north in 8.35%, at sixty in 8.36%, and the Whole Sign count at forty degrees north is 8.31%. The Moon’s own motion of about a sign every two and a half days is slow beside the daily turn of the sky, so it is carried through the houses like a fixed point, and the house system changes the answer for a chart near a cusp without changing it for charts in bulk. The methodology page states the sampling.

After the Moon’s own sign, house and phase, Lilly went to the planets it was separating from and applying to, since the Moon’s last and next aspects carried the story of a question. He looked at its dispositor, the lord of the sign it occupied, and at whether Saturn or Mars cast a square or an opposition to it. For a nativity he set it beside the Sun and the Ascendant to settle the giver of life, and beside the lord of the 6th to see whether the two had any aspect between them.

This page is one of ten in the series; the Sun page is its pair, since the two lights shared the giver-of-life role and the absence of retrograde motion. The sign pages for the 6th house include Cancer, the Moon’s own sign, among the twelve cusps. The Zodiac Man guide explains the almanac table that depended on the Moon’s stays, and the planets and the body guide sets this row beside the other six classical planets.