The Lunar Gospel: The Complete Guide to Your Astrological Moon

By Cal Garrison

Most people are familiar with their sun sign—the sign determined by your birthday. According to astrologer Cal Garrison, however, it’s actually your moon sign that is the true key to your horoscope.

The Lunar Gospel is a comprehensive guide to moon sign astrology, covering the significant role the moon plays in the horoscope. Cal explores the role of the moon as it manifests in the different signs and houses, as well as its relationship to the other planets in the chart. The Lunar Gospel clearly and insightfully gives you all the tools you need to understand your own moon sign—and the moon sign of other people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
• Release date: Apr 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781633410688

Cal Garrison

Cal Garrison is a professional astrologer and the editor of Spirit of Maat online magazine. She is a trained Flower of Life coordinator and longtime student of Drunvalo Melchizedek. She is the author of several books, including The Astrology of 2012 and Beyond. A native of Massachusetts, Garrison now lives in Sedona, Arizona.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

I fell in love with astrology when I was sixteen. It was 1964. Eight years later, in 1972, a stroke of good luck landed me in an apprenticeship with one of the best astrologers on the planet, a man by the name of Charles Jayne.

Charles was my mentor. For two years, he and his wife Vivia took me under their wing. Their tutelage bought me permission to set up my own practice. Thousands of charts, and as many conversations later, I am even more in love with astrology now than I was when I was in high school.

In the time that has passed since I set out on this path, I have learned a few things. I have also watched astrology evolve from a relatively obscure subject into a popular topic. In the last fifty years, everyone seems to know a little something about astrology, even if it's just our daily newspaper horoscope.

If, by chance, we get beyond our weekly predictions, anyone who finds the subject interesting enough to study further soon encounters an avalanche of books and courses that have mushroomed in the face of the New Paradigm and the rising tide of interest in all things esoteric. The computer age has opened up the amount of information available in this area. As far as astrology goes, there are so many astrologers offering online workshops, writing books, and selling classes that it seems pointless to talk about adding more information to the pile.

Before we continue, we should perhaps answer the question: Why in God's name do we need another astrology book?

Although I was lucky to wind up in Charles and Vivia's salon back in the early days, my astrological work from 1974 until now has taken place in the trenches, in real time, for real people with real questions and real problems. I never had the time or the money to take courses or go to the big astrology conventions. All I had to help me out were the books that other people had written and a burning desire to be a good astrologer.

As far as what it's like to rely upon books to teach me what I need to know is concerned, my library is chock-full of everything from the old, arcane stuff to a raft of glossy, late model, and beat-up secondhand paperbacks. I have read everything. I learned early on that sometimes there is one sentence in a book that turns out to be a priceless pearl of wisdom.

Reflecting upon this, what I see now is that the avalanche of information I referred to earlier does a good job introducing people to the basics of astrology, but, with few exceptions, most of it is material rehashed from other sources. Very little of it is culled from direct experience.

In and around the absence of useful information, there is another issue. The internet has hatched zillions of online courses professing to teach people how to be an astrologer. After five hundred years of astrology as a tabooed topic, all of a sudden—Boom, Presto—these teachers of astrology and the courses they offer are up and running full-time. Each one of them holds out a degree of some kind. Applicants pay their tuition and, upon completion of the course, are entitled to hang up a shingle and sell advice to the public.

Think about that for five minutes. You pass a three-hundred-dollar, six-week online astrology course and are now under the impression that this entitles you to call yourself an astrologer. Because there is nothing to keep delusions of grandeur or ambition in check, you set yourself up as an expert in this field, and you start teaching what you know to individuals, to groups of people, online, and/or in person. The knowledge that gets handed down this way is like pouring from the empty into the Void because it is limited to whatever the teacher knows, and as the teacher was trained through similar courses and workshops, what comes down the astrological pipeline has turned into a diluted model of something that was watered down to begin with.

I have seen enough of this. It has been painful to watch. To answer the question of whether we need another astrology book, I am here to say, Yes, we do. We need a book that takes the basic information to a place that actually shows the aspiring astrologer how to translate the signs and the symbols into a language that helps people identify their soul's purpose clearly enough to open the pathway to the higher self. We need a book for the next generation of astrologers to have something authentic and useful to help them be of service to humanity. We need a book that lifts the Veil on the depths of a subject that has been hidden in darkness for over five hundred years and that was originally given to humankind as a gift from the gods to help us make sense of ourselves and of our connection to the greater whole.

This book has grown out of a love affair that began back in 1964. The knowledge it contains was culled from the school of hard knocks and fifty years of experience as a working astrologer. It will be a useful tool for anyone who wants to delve into the mysteries of a subject that is much more than a New Age parlor game. With any luck, it will open people's eyes to a body of wisdom that is older than time and that half a century down the road is still as fascinating to me as it was when Charles and Vivia Jayne showed up to introduce me to my life's work.

Cal Garrison

Sedona, Arizona

September 7, 2016

Chapter One

THE MOON

Why are we going to talk about the Moon first? If we're talking about the Moon, there's got to be a reason. In a way it doesn't really matter where you start with astrology because you're dealing with a spherical body of wisdom: you can pick any point on the sphere and go in there, and it will take you to every other point. It makes sense to start with the Moon because she's the closest thing to us. But the real reason I start with the Moon is because I want to give you a sense of what I do when I'm trying to figure things out. When I crack open a chart, I don't even look at anything else. I just say, Where's the Moon? What sign is she in? What house is she in? And I look at her first because I get more information out of her than I do out of any other body in the chart.

The Moon, along with the archetype that governs the sign that she is in, tells me everything there is to know about the person's past and all the stories and information that they've brought in from previous incarnations. She's like an open book. After I look at the Moon in any chart, already I can sit down and tell the person this, that, and the other thing. Within a few minutes they will look back at me and say, Wow! How did you know that?

Not only is the Moon telling me about past lives, she is all of the stuff that we have totally mastered. So, the Moon is basically telling me where this person has received a PhD—in the school of Taurus, or, if you've got the Moon in Aries, in the school of Aries. What that tells me about this person is that for the first half of their life (this is usually how it goes) this individual is going to repeat that experience because life is a school and, when you come into this experience, your memories of your previous life are all you've got to bring with you.

So you're born and you've got this context of cellular memory that remembers certain things, so you start to repeat those patterns. But by the time you get to be about thirty-five or forty, you begin to realize that things aren't working the way you thought they would, and you can't keep doing the same old thing because you're not growing or learning anything. Don't forget; the Moon is about growth. If you keep doing what you've already got your PhD in, you're not going to get anywhere. Nobody in their right mind would go back and get their PhD twice in the same subject—not unless they failed at it the first time around.

There is a moment of truth that comes to everyone, somewhere around the fortieth year, when we look around and say, Hey, this isn't working for me anymore. And the deal with the Moon is that you have permission to function from that place, because it does have its good points. The Moon has endowed you with a body of wisdom and experience that is now a permanent part of you, but in this incarnation, you only have permission to function from that place one-third of the time. Operating from that point 100 percent of the time will not allow the soul to grow and evolve.

However, if the Moon tells us where you've been, she also has a lot to say about where you might get stuck. When you think about the Moon ruling all past lives, all previous incarnations, it is interesting to note that all of the cookbook astrology books will tell you that the Moon rules the past. This astrological cliché is voiced incessantly but rarely considered or analyzed deeply. It's easy to slip right by that statement and take it for granted. But if you think about it for two seconds, you realize, Oh my God! The past is everything. It isn't just what happened yesterday; it's what happened everywhere and in everything through all of time, right down to what's going on in your cellular memory.

The Moon has total rulership over memory. Now some of you may argue with that. You will say, Oh no! It's got to be Mercury that rules the memory. Well, Mercury rules the mind, it rules the brain, it rules the neural functions—but it's the Moon that has governorship over the memory because she owns the past. She is responsible for the mechanism in us that knows how to remember, because she is the master of repetition.

Now it's interesting to think about this because time, experience, and repetition are the only teachers here in the Third Dimension. The Moon goes around in circles, over and over again. She is the most blatantly cyclical body in the solar system. The Sun is another one of those things that helps us mark time by repeating itself. We watch it rise, we watch it set, and that pattern repeats every twenty-four hours.

Well, if the Sun moves one degree of arc in a day, the Moon moves one degree of arc every two hours. Totally on time and on the ball, she is responsible for all the tiny, second-hand movements that get us pissed off, and cause us to react, and cause another reaction to occur over there, and another one over there. The Moon is the one who moves the smaller gears that pull us along to the bigger changes. Her cycles are coordinated precisely with the cycles of Saturn.

Commonly known as The Father of Time, Saturn is the one that cuts us off and says, Okay, you've spent twenty-seven years making a fool of yourself. That's enough of that. It's time to get on to the next thing. If Saturn is the one dropping the axe sooner or later—or rewarding us sooner or later, because sometimes he does—within that interval it is the Moon who gets us all the way from A to B. Queen of the small stuff, her movements guide us into the bigger changes. This is why she rules the memory: she has been there and done that more than any other body in the solar system.

By extension the Moon rules our habits. Think about it: what do we do every day? Anything that we do repetitively is ruled by the Moon. She's in all those things we do as a matter of course:

When you're cooking breakfast, that's the Moon.

When you're putting your slippers on, that's the Moon.

When you're brushing your teeth, brushing your hair, or washing your face, that's the Moon.

Anything that is related to the house and especially to the kitchen, that's the Moon.

Food is lunar.

Women are lunar.

Water is lunar.

The laundry is lunar.

When you are hanging up the wash or putting it in the dryer, you are involved with the Moon.

When you're sitting in your living room watching TV, that's the Moon.

All of this is lunar.

The Moon is the mycelium, she is the moss, she is the matrix that all of the bigger stuff takes place in. She holds it in a net—or a web, or a womb. I swear to God this is where the Spider Woman myths originated. So if you think about it, every blessed thing comes out of her and is part of her.

Now the reason I am talking this way is because it's important to get a feel for things. Astrology isn't out there—it's here inside and among us. We're living it. And if you bring this whole concept of the laundry, the household chores, and all of the little mechanical things that we have to do every day to just be human all the way down to the cellular level, the Moon also rules all the automatic responses that keep everything in our body moving. She controls the way the blood flows. She keeps the heart beating. She controls all the tiny changes that cause the womb to open when it's time for the courses to flow or when it's time to give birth. She's the one that knows that it's time for the tide to turn.

Does this make sense to you? Her patterns envelope all of us. We are living through her 100 percent of the time. It's no accident that we associate her with this feminine, watery influence. She is the Universal Mother. We pay a lot of lip service to the Goddess. We do Full Moon ceremonies. We speak of the power of the female. She is the one who silently and invisibly causes all of these things that we totally take for granted and that happen without our participation or attention. All of those things belong to her. This is why the books say she rules our instincts and our emotions; of course she does! That all-pervasive inner knowing of ours that understands instinct and can feel things, and that has intuition, is pulling stuff out of the matrix in the same way that the Moon does. And part of what we need to understand if we really want to be a good astrologer is that you have to be able to see the way things correspond. So the Moon corresponds to the instincts because she operates or resonates at the same frequency; she is basically doing the same thing. One is a reflection of the other, and all of her actions are instinctive. All of her actions are automatic. She is oceanic in the way that she extends herself over everything. When you think about it, this is why she gets connected with the All-Powerful Great Mother and the watery female influence.

When you think of water and the feminine, the area this covers is huge. It's as if to say, "Is there anything that isn't within her domain?" So not only is she the Great Mother; she's also the Grandmother, your biological mother, females in general. And this is literal. When you're looking at natal aspects or transits, and you notice that Saturn is conjunct with your Moon, you know that you're going to have problems with females in general.

She's childhood. The Moon will tell you everything that you need to know about a person's childhood. She is also The Child. And she is the breasts, the stomach, the childbearing organs, and everything we associate with all of those things. She's your mother's breast. She's your mother's lap. She's the feeling that you had when you were cradled in her arms—or not. Do you understand what I mean?

And so the whole thing with her femininity, and the momness of the Moon, is important because in order to really get where a person is coming from you have to know where they're coming from emotionally. You get one thing from your father, you get another thing from your mom. The father is your male aspect, literally. The mother is your female aspect, literally. What you get from your mom is the emotional piece that senses what it means to love, and to feel, and to live in that place of femaleness or femininity.

If you want to be a