← Encyclopedia of Astrology · lesson 150/235
Last quarter
What it is
The last quarter — also called the third quarter — is the moment, about seven days after a Full Moon and a week before the next New Moon, when the Moon stands 270° ahead of the Sun, which is the same as 90° behind it. It is a square between the two lights: the waning square, made on the way back towards the conjunction. Three quarters of the cycle are done. Seen from Earth it is again a half Moon, lit on the opposite side from the first quarter — on the left in the northern hemisphere, on the right in the southern.
A last-quarter Moon rises around midnight, is highest in the south (in the northern hemisphere) around sunrise and sets around midday, so it is the half Moon of the small hours and the morning sky. Like every square it usually joins two signs of the same mode: a Sun in Cancer has its last-quarter Moon in Aries.
As with the first quarter, the name covers a moment and a span. Astronomers mean the instant of the exact waning square. In Dane Rudhyar's eight phases the last quarter phase begins there and runs to 315° ahead of the Sun (45° behind it), after which the balsamic phase begins.
In the tradition
For Ptolemy the last quarter is a hinge in the Moon's qualities: from the Full to the last quarter she is more productive of dryness, and from the last quarter to her disappearance, of cold. The tradition treats the quarter as one of the Moon's stressed points, like the first quarter, but the Moon here is decreasing in light, which Lilly counts against her. Electional astrology, accordingly, has rarely chosen the last quarter for beginnings, and has used the waning days for what should end or diminish.
How it is read
Rudhyar insisted that the two lunar squares are not the same thing. Most astrologers, he complained, make no distinction between a first-quarter and a last-quarter square, yet in the life-process the lunation cycle measures they are opposite situations. The first quarter is a crisis in action: a new form must be built or abandoned. The last quarter is a crisis in consciousness: a form that has done its work is now outgrown, and the beliefs and structures that grew up around it must be reoriented, reformed or released, so that room is made for what is coming. The movement is from outer achievement to inner understanding. Michael Erlewine makes the same distinction for every pair of waxing and waning aspects: one leads towards the light of the Full, the other towards the dark of the New.
For the person born in this phase, the last quarter type, Rudhyar described the ability to manage and organise people on the basis of ideas, "the eagerness to force issues and to produce crises, to change people's beliefs, to reform and transform", to build systems of ideas and to work hard toward a future goal regardless of immediate results; and at the negative pole an inability to take criticism or a dictatorial streak. Later writers call it the reformer's phase: principled, willing to question what everyone assumes, sometimes stuck between an old worldview and a new one.
In the month's rhythm the last-quarter days are read as a time for reassessing, cutting back, ending what has run its course and clearing space, rather than for launching. In secondary progression, Rudhyar saw the progressed last quarter as a time when a final confrontation with what remains of the past often occurs, some seven years before the next progressed New Moon.
In a personal chart attention goes, as with any lunation, to the houses the Sun and Moon occupy at the quarter and to natal planets the Moon crosses.