← Encyclopedia of Astrology · lesson 145/235
Crescent Moon
What it is
A crescent Moon is the Moon when only a thin curved sliver of it is lit. There are two crescents in every month: the waxing crescent, seen in the west after sunset in the days after a New Moon, and the waning crescent, seen in the east before dawn in the days before the next one. Nicholas deVore defines the crescent simply as the shape "shortly before and after lunation". This entry is about the first of the two, the growing crescent; the closing sliver belongs to the balsamic Moon.
Astrologers use the word in two slightly different ways, and it helps to keep them apart:
- In the sky, the waxing crescent is everything between the New Moon and the first quarter, from 0° to 90° of separation, the whole first week of the cycle.
- In Dane Rudhyar's eight phases, the crescent phase is narrower: from 45° to 90° ahead of the Sun, roughly the fourth to the seventh day after the New Moon. The first 45° belong to the New Moon phase itself.
The first light
The crescent has always mattered because it is the first thing anyone sees of a new cycle. For a day or two around the conjunction the Moon is lost in the Sun's glare (astrologers call a planet that close under the beams or, closer still, combust), and then, once it has drawn far enough away, a fine bow appears low in the evening twilight. Lunar calendars around the world still begin the month at the sighting of the new crescent, as the Islamic calendar does with the hilal. Al-Biruni describes the month as a natural life: the Moon appears as a crescent "after the moonless nights", grows, stands still at its fullest, and wanes back to nothing.
The crescent is also among the oldest symbols in astrology. The glyph of the Moon, ☽, is a crescent, and a crescent was the emblem of moon gods and goddesses long before horoscopes were cast.
How it is read
Rudhyar read the crescent phase as the moment a new impulse first meets the weight of the past. What was released at the New Moon is still fragile; to survive it has to push against old habits and inertia, and it needs faith and effort to do so. For the person born in this phase — the crescent type — he described "determined self-assertiveness, active faith", an eager desire to carry out an inwardly felt urge and to clear a way for it, and, at its worst, a sense of frustration and of struggling against too heavy odds.
Later writers, Tracy Marks among them, keep that sense of momentum against resistance: the pioneer who must break free of what was, building something from almost nothing. The challenge is impatience, or the feeling of being held back; the gift is tenacity.
In the month's rhythm, the crescent days are the time when an intention set at the New Moon is either acted on or quietly dropped. Many people treat them as the moment for first concrete steps — gathering what is needed, asking for help, committing — before the push of the first quarter.
The phase is measured by the angle, not by appearance, so a person can be "a crescent type" whether or not the Moon was visible where they were born, and whichever hemisphere they were born in.