The Moon Also Rises

[Alan Annand]

Is there anything more cursed in the life of an astrologer than a client without a birth time?

Granted, it’s a splendid scapegoat that allows us to tell the client, “Gosh, without knowing your ascendant, I can’t really tell if you’re ever going to get married,” but for most of us who take our roles seriously, we’d actually prefer to offer some sort of prognosis and/or counsel.

Certainly, specific issues like “Will I ever get married?” beg for the application of horary astrology, but that’s not the topic du jour. Whether or not a horary chart will resolve the marital question, we’d still like to have something approximating the natal chart to get a reading on all the other spoken/unspoken themes in the life of that client.

In western astrological practice, the traditional alternative is to prepare a “solar chart.” Typically, this means calculating the birth chart for the time of local sunrise, which places the sun exactly on the ascendant. An alternate method is to calculate the birth chart for noon, ie, the half-way point of a calendar birthday that’s measured from midnight to midnight. Then we manually rotate the chart to place the Sun in the position of the ascendant.

The only real difference between these two options is that in the approximate six hours between “sunrise” and “noon”, the Moon will move about three degrees of arc. That could move the Moon in or out of orb in certain aspects, but the rest of the planets will be little affected, and you’ll have a reasonable proxy for an accurate birth chart.

Vedic (Hindu) astrologers apply a different strategy, and one that western astrologers could as easily adopt. In Vedic astrology, the Moon sign is far more important than the Sun sign. Not only does the Moon drive the system of “planetary periods” unique to Hindu astrology, but it is seen as more descriptive than the Sun of the client’s physicality, personality and psychology.

The Moon represents our emotional mind, a sort of “operating system” that records and assesses all sensory input, and has a huge influence on our likes/dislikes, our day-to-day personality, and our relationship with the world around us. By contrast, the Sun has more to do with our ego, ideals and projections on the world.

Furthermore, the Moon is a more potent individuating factor than the Sun. The reason we want a birth time in the first place is so we can launch our interpretation from the most dynamic, ie, fastest-moving, factor in the chart. The ascendant changes every two hours. Knowing it helps us make distinctions between a dozen people born on the same day.

In the absence of knowing the ascendant, the next fastest-moving element in the chart is the Moon. Launching our interpretation from the Moon-as-Ascendant helps us make meaningful distinctions between a dozen Aries-born spread over the period March 21st to April 20th.

So how do we prepare a Moon-rising chart? If the client has some idea of birth-time, say “sometime in the afternoon”, then we can define afternoon as Noon to 6pm, split the difference and guesstimate the birth-time as 3pm. If the client doesn’t have a clue whether his/her birth was morning, noon or night, then we calculate the chart for noon. In either event, once you calculate the chart, rotate it to treat the Moon as ascendant, and interpret from that perspective.

Even when Vedic astrologers know the Ascendant, they still routinely rotate the chart in their minds to treat the Moon as if it were rising. Why? Because this fresh perspective from the next-most-dynamic element of the chart often provides useful corroboration of some natal themes, and in some instances, functions as a tie-breaker in an interpretation that gets otherwise hung up on conflicting evidence from the Ascendant-only perspective.

As my yoga teacher used to tell me: “Why not stand on your head? The worst that can happen is you’ll see the world in a different way.”

[Chandler Stephon Armstrong]

This is a very interesting concept, and reminded me of a simlar technique of using the "New Moon Before Birth" as the ascendant as well.... As the new moon marks the conception cycle, it's also been used in family planning as well... have you every used (or does Vedic astrology) the new moon before birth as well?

[Alan Annand]

Western astrology uses a few different “pre-natal events” to shed further light on the person’s destiny. I’ve never heard of using the New Moon just prior to birth, but here are a couple of others that turn up with some frequency:

Some astrologers like to examine the eclipse (solar or lunar) immediately preceding the birth date, which could be as much as six months earlier. This is supposed to shed some light on the karmic purpose of the incoming soul.

A more popular concept involves the “pre-natal epoch,” even though “epoch” is misleading, since it’s often treated as a synonym for “era”. The PNE concerns the moment of conception for the person whose birth chart is under examination. Theory has it that conception should have occurred when the Moon was either in the same sign as the birth chart Ascendant, or directly opposite (the Descendant). Aside from being used as a rectification tool for adjusting the correct time of birth, the PNE chart is also used to comment on the incoming soul, whose spirit supposedly takes embodiment in the womb at that moment.

My original article discussed only the adoption of a different perspective on the birth chart itself. As an alternative to viewing the planetary patterns from the perspective of the Ascendant, every astrologer has the option to look at it all over again from the perspective of the Moon. In Vedic astrology, there is not that much emphasis on any pre-natal events, except possibly as a means to rectify/correct the birth chart, which is then used as the ultimate springboard for interpretation and prediction.