Moon conjunction Jupiter

The Moon is conjunct Jupiter in Leo today. The two are all but exactly aligned and already pulling apart as the Moon's quick motion carries her on through the sign. Jupiter holds Leo as a standing condition, for months rather than hours, while the Moon passes over him in a single day. That is the lesson: a long condition briefly touched by the fastest body in the sky.

Start with the bodies. Sepharial, writing in 1920, gives the Moon gracefulness of manner, suavity of speech, adaptability, and a love of change and adventure. He gives Jupiter joviality, optimism, bountifulness, generosity and "a rich and fruitful mind." He ranks Jupiter first among the benefics in his action on people, and makes him the significator of increase.

Ptolemy gives the reason underneath, and it is a physical one. Jupiter, he says, moves in a sphere between the extreme cold of Saturn and the burning heat of Mars. His influence is therefore temperate: he promotes both warmth and moisture, with warmth predominating, and he produces breezes that make the land productive. The Moon, in Ptolemy's account, principally generates moisture.

So when the two meet, the Moon's moist quality is warmed by Jupiter's moderate heat, neither scorched nor chilled. Jupiter's good name in the tradition rests on that position between extremes.

There is a second reason the contact matters. Ptolemy holds that the planets derive their energy from the positions they hold with regard to the Sun and Moon. Sepharial counts the Moon among the general significators of any chart, the chief points to which an aspect is thrown, and gives her the personal fortunes and the changes incident to them. A planet meeting the Moon is not touching a minor point. When that planet is Jupiter, what the Moon carries, manner, speech and the ordinary changes of a day, takes on his tone of increase and openhandedness.

The Moon also brings her variableness, and Sepharial names it plainly among her gifts. Whatever warmth she lends is as changeable as she is. The exact meeting passes within hours, and she keeps moving. Jupiter stays where he is; her touch on him does not.

That gives the practice. A generous impulse that arrives with the Moon tends to move on with her. So where one surfaces today, give it a form that outlasts the hour. Make the offer concretely, with a time, a task or a sum attached, rather than leaving it as warm feeling. The Moon supplies the impulse and the easy speech to voice it. Jupiter, as the significator of increase, is served by something that can actually grow once it has been given.