If you have ever asked yourself, “what’s the Moon phase today?”, help is at hand.
There are loads of free widgets you can find online to answer this question for you…
… we even have one on this site in the right hand column just there ===> (scroll down if you can’t see it!)
But once you know the Moon phase, what are you meant to do with it? I will answer this question soon.
But first…
A Very Brief History of Moon Phases
So of course, the Moon has been spinning around the earth forever. In fact, it’s the orbit of the Moon around the Earth than keeps the Earth from spinning completely uncontrolled into the Universe and beyond! Or to put it a little more scientifically
It is the pull of the Moon’s gravity on the Earth that holds our planet in place. Without the Moon stabilising our tilt, it is possible that the Earth’s tilt could vary wildly. It would move from no tilt (which means no seasons) to a large tilt (which means extreme weather and even ice ages). – Royal Museums Greenwich
We know that humans have charted the Moon’s passage through the skies for at least 15,000 years. There are cave paintings in France to prove this. Why we did this, no one can be sure – it may have been a way of marking the passage of time, of knowing when the bright Full Moon would light up the Earth and night with moonbeams or when the New Moon would have the Moon disappear from view.
In the middle of last century, a French-born US-bred esoteric astrologer Dane Rudhyar brought the idea of interpreting the Moon’s phase into public consciousness with his book The Lunation Cycle.
What Rudhyar did that was so different was that he divided the Moon’s monthly cycle into eight phases of 45 degrees each.
Rudhyar was more interested in the meaning of these phases in the natal chart – in other words, the idea was that you would find out what Moon phases you were born under and that would have a meaning, which was based on the study and analysis of many, many charts.#
(I was definitely standing on Rudhyar’s broad shoulders when I wrote my book Moonology.)
So what are you meant to do with the 8 main phases of the Moon?
In the next day or so, I’ll give you a potted list of how to use each phase.
In the coming weeks, I will be releasing a mini-course to help you better understand these 8 main phases – and the mysterious 9th phase.
So stay tuned for that!
In the meantime, have a beautiful day.
