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Balsamic Moon
What it is
The balsamic Moon is the last of Dane Rudhyar's eight lunation phases: the final 45° of the cycle, when the Moon is 315° to 360° ahead of the Sun — that is, within 45° behind it and closing. It covers roughly the last three and a half days before the New Moon, from about 25½ days into the cycle. It opens at the waning semi-square (315°) and ends at the conjunction.
In the sky this is the waning crescent, the "old" Moon: a thin bow, its curve facing the dawn, rising shortly before the Sun and fading into the brightening east. In its last day or two it is lost altogether in the Sun's glare, which astrologers describe as the Moon going under the beams and then combust. Astronomers' "waning crescent" is wider, running from the last quarter to the New; Rudhyar's balsamic phase is its second half.
The name
Rudhyar himself said the origin of the term "is not too clear, but is probably alchemical". A balsam is a fragrant healing resin, the balm that soothes and preserves; Rudhyar used the word for the stage at which a cycle's life withdraws into its essence, as a plant's energy withdraws in autumn into the seed. Elsewhere he calls it the "seed" period. The image is not of death but of incubation: what has been lived is distilled into something small enough to carry into the next cycle.
Some modern writers prefer the plainer name dark Moon for these last days (not to be confused with the point called Black Moon Lilith), and Demetra George, in particular, wrote at length about this phase as a time of retreat, healing and renewal — a meaning she found had been feared or neglected in a culture that prizes the growing light.
In the tradition
Older astrology had no special name for this phase, but it did not treat it lightly. The Moon here is decreasing in light, which Lilly counts among her accidental debilities, and in her last days she approaches the Sun's beams, where any planet was held to lose its strength. Elective astrology therefore avoided these days for beginnings; Nicholas deVore's window for a good start does not open until about three days after the New Moon, once the Moon is clear of the Sun. The same caution survives in the modern habit of waiting for the new crescent before launching anything that should grow.
How it is read
In Rudhyar's scheme the balsamic phase is where the cycle completes itself and points beyond itself. The waxing half built a form, the Full Moon revealed it, the waning half drew out its meaning; now that meaning is distilled, the past is brought to a close, and something is offered to a future that cannot yet be seen. The tone is release, surrender to a larger purpose, and a sense of the future pressing in.
For the person born in this phase, the balsamic type, Rudhyar described "an eagerness to serve social institutions and organized groups, to bring the past to a conclusion and to sacrifice yourself for the future's sake", a complete identification with great ideals or causes, "prophetic gifts, a sense of personal destiny", and a sense of finality in all things. Michael McMullen, following him, calls it the transition or seed state. Later writers name the visionary as its gift and feeling out of step with one's own time as its challenge. Like every lunation type, it is a tendency to recognise, not a forecast.
In the month's rhythm the balsamic days are read as a time to finish, rest, let go, reflect and prepare intentions for the New Moon, rather than to begin.
In secondary progression Rudhyar gave the progressed balsamic phase special weight: about three years before the progressed New Moon, at the close of a roughly thirty-year cycle, he saw a period in which "transformative forces are best able to operate", a time to be open, yet discriminating, to the changes that come.