Moon in Aquarius

The Moon in Aquarius is the body of feeling and instinctive response in the fixed air sign of the group. The Moon crosses a sign in two or three days, so in the passing sky it colours a short run of moods. In a birth chart it describes for life how a person reacts and what they need in order to feel at home.

The Moon governs what runs without deliberate thought: habits, conditioned reactions, the self-image, the past carried into the present as reflex. It works through attachment and the familiar. The old tradition counts it moist, feminine and nocturnal, the part of the psyche that adjusts to life before reason arrives. In a birth chart, its house shows where a person looks for comfort.

Aquarius is air, fixed and positive. Its traditional ruler is Saturn, and modern practice adds Uranus. We follow Saturn in any chain of rulership and read Uranus as a second colour in the sign. Aquarius describes the individual as a working member of a group. It is gregarious, impartial and idealistic, unweighted by tradition. Being fixed, it holds a view once it reaches one.

Put the two together and the reason for the usual reading is plain. The Moon wants the familiar and the felt, and Aquarius is emotionally dry and free of the past. The emotional planets are less at ease here, and the Moon in Aquarius is rarely a typical Moon, pulled between the need to attach and the sign's distance. Security tends to come from belonging to a circle, a cause or a shared idea. Friendship comes more easily than closeness with one person.

At full strength this gives a feeling life that is fair-minded, quick to see through motives, staunch once attached and alert to what people need together. The same placement can hold feeling at arm's length, ask a reason even for an ideal, keep an opinion past its use and let shifting moods scatter its effort. A flare of temper can cool into reserve that is hard to cross, and someone always in company can still feel alone. Any body in this sign takes a colour of individual freedom and of extremism.

None of this is beyond reach. What the Moon runs on without thinking can be made conscious and worked with.

The kabbalistic reading places the Moon at Yesod, the foundation and cradle of the emotions. It gives Aquarius the letter Tsade and the sense of taste. Rectified, that taste feels full with little and finds the spark of life in what it already has. In its lower form it is never satisfied. Joined to the Moon, it asks whether a mind that lives by ideals can let ordinary feeling nourish it.