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New Moon
What it is
A New Moon is the moment the Moon catches up with the Sun and the two stand at the same degree of the zodiac — a conjunction of the two lights. The Moon's lit side faces away from the Earth, so for a night or two it cannot be seen at all. It happens about every 29½ days, a period called a lunation or synodic month; Nicholas deVore notes that "lunation" is often used to mean the New Moon itself.
Each New Moon falls in the sign the Sun is passing through, about one sign further on than the last, so the year carries twelve or thirteen of them.
The lunation cycle
The New Moon begins the cycle of phases: the waxing crescent, the first quarter (Moon square Sun), the Full Moon (opposition), the last quarter and back to the dark. Dane Rudhyar read the whole cycle as one process: at the New Moon a new impulse is released, still unseen; it grows into form through the waxing half and comes to full awareness at the Full Moon. A New Moon that falls close to the Moon's nodes is a solar eclipse.
How it is read
The tradition reads a New Moon as a seed: a time for starting, planting, setting intentions, rather than for harvest. Its sign gives the tone of the month to come, and its degree is the sensitive point. In a personal chart, attention goes to:
- the house the New Moon falls in — the area of life most likely to see something begin;
- contacts to natal planets — a New Moon on the Ascendant, or conjunct the natal Sun, is felt more personally.
In world astrology, a New Moon is cast for a capital city, and the planets that land on its angles are read for that country, since the same lunation has a different Ascendant everywhere on Earth.
The prenatal New Moon — the last one before birth — and the progressed New Moon, which comes about every thirty years in secondary progression, are read as larger beginnings in the same spirit.