Heaven, Earth, & Humankind: Three Spheres, Three Light Cycles, Three Modes: Volumes Ii & Iii: the Moon and Phase Relationships

By William M. Wadsworth

The aim of this book is to map some of the deep structural and interpretive functions of the three modes for astrology. By first making inferences from ancient writings, then analyzing the correlations of the modes, it will be argued that the modes are vital to an understanding of human behavior. They anticipate a persons level of functioning, or in other words, their governing meme. In traditional systems modes define three basic levels of human functioning: the intellectual, social, and biological. Properly understood, these human imperatives provide psychological insight into the interpretive meaning of sun, moon, ascendant, and planets. The associative values ascribed to the modes derive from their corresponding direct relations to the planes of the ecliptic, equator, and the horizon. Consequently, it is within astrological technology that this essay contends that the modes help interpret the sun, moon and ascendant in a natal chart, whose meaning also is measured by these same three planes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503560796

Book preview

Heaven, Earth,

& Humankind

Three spheres,

Three light Cycles, Three Modes

Volume II and III:

The Moon and Phase Relationships

William M. Wadsworth

Copyright © 2015 by William M. Wadsworth.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015905452

ISBN:      Hardcover                              978-1-5035-6077-2

                Softcover                                978-1-5035-6078-9

                eBook                                     978-1-5035-6079-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 05/21/2015

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

700831

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 How Do We Experience the Moon?

Chapter 2 Traditional Perspectives

Dark of the Moon

Waxing Half-Moon

The Full Moon

Waning Half-Moon

Chapter 3 Practical Phases

Chapter 4 Two Macropatterns in the Human Response to Lunations

The Type II: Feminine Cycle

The Type I: Masculine Cycle

Chapter 5 How to Adapt Phase Relations to the Season in Which They Occur

Chapter 6 The Moons of a Midwinter Masculine Cycle

Chapter 7 The Moons of the Midwinter Feminine Cycle

VOLUME III

How Geometrical Aspects Articulate Phase Meaning for All Cycles

Chapter 1 Background of Phase Relationships

Essential Historical Dates

Chapter 2 The Structure of Phase Relationships

Chapter 3 An Evolutionary Description of the Major Waxing Aspects

Chapter 4 The Reflective Waning Aspects

Notes

Fig.%201%20full%20moon.jpeg

Figure 1. Full moon from Earth¹

Chapter 1

How Do We Experience the Moon?

Everyone feels the tug of the moon. Go around a bend in a mountain road and see the rising full moon sometime. Notice the sliver of the horned moon between high-rise buildings on a cold night. Consider the red-yellow-and-white-colored moon in different atmospheric conditions, the varied elevations of the moon, its constant surprise. A heavenly body, yet it is so close it feels as though it should fall to Earth. The moon triggers primordial feelings of wonder, surprise, comfort, and optimism. The moon and change are synonymous. We gaze at the moon and remember romantic associations: moonlight streams through a window, a nighttime stroll by a lake, and an outdoor concert on the lawn. Our months are punctuated by the phases of the moon, and farmers and seamen always know where they stand with weather and tides in relation to the moon. We sense that the mysterious moon is a stepping-stone between heaven and earth. It modulates solar energy and helps nature to adapt. It translates the will of heaven into form and function. We act in response to a prominent moon, and over time, she assimilates, integrates, and provides boundaries, roles, laws, form, and structure for otherwise unlimited, unstructured extremes in the cosmos. It protects us from meteors and from assertive heat and cold in the vast vacuum of space, where poles of absolute light and darkness compete. In the natal chart, where the sun symbolizes life-giving daylight and warmth, the moon symbolizes night and coolness with all the beneficial, restorative, and conserving characteristics of yin, and its placement determines the relative availability and balance within yin.

Lunar motion acts as an enormous flywheel that keeps a motor turning, so as to generate chi, electricity, and magnetism, while keeping the solar power in check. The moon protects us even when major planets Saturn and Jupiter trigger solar flares and endanger solar equilibrium through opposition or conjunction. The sun and moon are the warp and woof of earthly life. The tidal flows of the oceans are tied to the moon, as are migrations, reproductive patterns, and weather and agricultural patterns. So the moon is collaborative and female and tied to terrestrial transformations in the widest and best sense, that it gives birth, nourishes, and through an established commonsense order, protects all sentient beings.

The moon endows us with grace, wisdom, and symbolic language by means of which we retain a coherent identity as we constantly change. The moon helps us to handle the extremes of day and night, life and death, and heat and cold without losing balance. The sun is objective and universal, the moon personal and integrative. Whenever we do lose balance, we bleed, and then the moon grinds us fine or dismembers us. If the moon and cold or darkness collude against us, our lives disintegrate into a living hell of failed hopes, lost opportunities, and grinding isolation. Without her benign protection, we lose balance, coherence, meaning, and value. We become fanatical and rigid or cruel in our behavior, and then nature or the tribe destroys us out of hand.

However philosophers may speculate about our source of being, our human physiology and structures remain inseparable from nature. Nature and primate nature, in particular, fall into the province of the moon. If angular, we lean towards solar emphasis; if round, lunar. Outwardly we can appear human, but without the kindly moon, we will have no empathy, our range of feeling and intuition will be narrow, and we may lack altogether a glow of vitality. People remain a small part of the larger interdependent body of organic life of the world. The moon weaves us into that fabric. Theoretical distinctions between mind and matter, thought and feeling, or individuals and society or the world, fade in value when contrasted to the tidal pulse of lunar change and its biological effects are studied. By regulating externally—tides, weather, and atmospheric conditions—and internally—respiration, fluid pressure, and cellular exchange—the moon integrates human life with the world. Words like mood, tone, color, and feeling are useful, sophisticated notions that hint at the broader synthesizing power of the moon in human perceptions. We hypothesize that the moon regulates the emotional centers in the brain and affects the automatic sorting functions that steer human experience and impressions through the labyrinth of instincts and memories toward predictable responses to stimulation. The moon helps us to distill highly complex sensory data into specific controllable responses. Family and clan frame reproductive order and express the life-supporting conditions needed for growth and reproduction. Rape and incest would be deviations statistically from the greater lunar and mammalian order. The patterns on Earth that perfectly mirror the moon’s nature are species migration, schools of fish, and tribal, clan, and family bonds and harmony that sustain our lives.

The moon regulates and symbolizes these automatic biological functions, which until the seventeenth century constituted the vegetable souls and animal souls that were described systematically by the greatest Roman physician, Galen. All those functions that are shared with lower species, that govern reproduction, alimentation, and the template of roles upon which survival and social life depends, are lunar. The placement of the moon in a person’s chart will tell us a great deal about physiology, family relations, and how a person functions.

The effects of moon phases have always defied rational explanation, and this too is characteristic. Every facet of our instincts and comportment are involved. The astrological chart reminds us to value the unknowable, the rhythmic, the irrational as necessary to our survival and health. Song, dance, war, and inspiration have a common root that often bypasses conceptual reasoning. A propensity to order that defies analysis. A sense that life has rules, that sex has rules, that family roles have consequences and cruelty, retribution. Out of chaos and fragmentation, regeneration and renewal. These are attributes of yin and our hidden resources that preeminently are symbolized by the monthly disappearance and renewal of the lunar form. Nevertheless, lunar instincts rule automatic notions of rectitude, role, and responsibility with attendant moods and feelings. When others endanger our tribe and challenge our values, we witness a fierce response. These abilities can be as fully conscious in their motions as cognition, conceptualization, or logic. From this perspective, we have to assign real importance to the subtle senses and perceptions in people. We do not educate people in this knowledge and usually must turn to gurus and mentors. Our automatic functions consolidate and make intelligible huge amounts of sensory information. Our gut responses distill a host of sensations into warning or acceptance. It is not enough to list the five senses, conduct statistical research, and to study abnormal psychology to understand people. We have to study the emotional centers in the body and brain and record their rhythmic patterns in relation to lunations.

Societal values, not inherent qualities, have a lot to do with suppressing and biasing healthy solar and lunar traits in people. The intangibility of lunar feelings and mental aptitudes does not make them any less immediate, real, or important than cognitive, logical, or mathematical skills that may be more measurable forms of intelligence. However, in a highly specialized society, a society of extremes, or a hierarchical society dominated by solar and martial themes, people overlook the importance of the moon’s integrated, practical thinking and feeling, her lifetime of play and experimentation, or constant collaborative intradisciplinary thinking. If the moon is suppressed, then empathy, compassion, sensitivity, tenderness are suppressed along with it. Soon after, we descend into chaos and all but the strongest among us lose our trust in humanity and the basic role responsibilities that the moon has taught us. We then must flee the forum, leaving naked self-interest to govern.

The ephemeral human personality described by modern psychiatry is primarily lunar in character, but as it is developed through the solar lens of rational thinking and scientific method, astrologers find a lack of wholeness and understanding in these writings. The penumbra of interests in the unconscious,