Moon Out Of Bounds

There is actually a site titled OUT OF BOUNDS ASTROLOGY that discusses the topic of the Moon being "out of bounds", defining it to be when "the declination of the moon in a chart is greater than 23 degrees and 27 minutes north or south". Declination measures the angular distance of an object north or south of the Celestial Equator, the maximum declination of the Sun being ±23°27'. North declination is regarded as positive and south as negative. This is depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1

The site gives this explanation of Moon out of bounds on the psychology of an individual:

If you or someone you know has a moon out of bounds–found predominantly in the signs of Gemini, Cancer, Sagittarius, and Capricorn–they are likely to exist emotionally in a realm outside of traditional expectations. The emotional outlaw, one with a moon out of bounds tends to make their own rules concerning how to feel about/react to a given stimulus. If living within the bounds of societal constructs, they often tire of dominant trends and experience a pull to escape to a new or remote place. In the city or the country, these are the people who live on society’s fringes in some way or another.

Another site, FORREST ASTROLOGY, notes that:

Earth’s angle of tilt varies over very long scales of time, but it is currently at about 23°28′ according to the Solar Fire Help files. Wikipedia gives 23°26′ ... This maximum limit of 23°28′ declination, south or north, applies rigidly to the Sun. But not to the Moon or the planets. They can go beyond it. Mercury and Mars can reach 27° and Venus can, occasionally, go a degree further. The rest tend to stay within the tropics.

Figure 2 illustrates the situation where the Moon is out of bounds and where it is not.

Figure 2

So interestingly, Mercury, Venus and Mars can also be out of bounds, not just the Moon. The author of the site then goes on to say this about the effects of this lunar phenomenon on an individual:

What does it mean astrologically for the Moon to be Out of Bounds? Start with one merrily anarchic notion: when the Moon’s declination exceeds 23°28′ North or 23°28′ South, it has escaped the physical space dominated by the gravitational “boss” of the solar system, the Sun.

Let the metaphors free-associate.

The Moon is then, in other words, out of the King’s sight. No longer under Daddy’s thumb. We might say that has moved beyond the Pale. Gone out of control. Or gone wild. It has broken the rules. It has shattered the boundaries, broken the mould, crossed the Rubicon. Bravely, or drunkenly, the Moon has said, “Roll the dice.”

The Out of Bounds Moon is spontaneous, emancipated, liberated, released in its own recognisance, and utterly on its own. It has loudly proclaimed, “You can take this job (. . . marriage, church, obligation, moral principle, town, duty . . .) and shove it.” The Moon has claimed its genius, its passion, and its right to be itself. No need to obfuscate, to be diplomatic, or to lie to anyone anymore—unless you feel like it. No more coprophagous grin. No need to worry about staying in anyone’s good graces. Out of Bounds, the Moon no longer plays the game. It rejects all rules that are not of its own making. “Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are finally free at last!,” said Martin Luther King, Jr.

The words stir the blood. But we need to let them stir the mind as well.

Structure, discipline, and a world in which our actions have consequences—these are not purely negative things. Society and its values can have a steadying effect upon us, even when we feel frustrated by them. The Out of Bounds Moon, like everything else in astrology, has an unpleasant, dangerous side as well as a divine purpose. Its dark side is sociopathic, even criminal—or merely selfish and insensitive to others. It can be cold, even inhuman.

You may detect some of the underlying spirit of the planet Uranus and the sign Aquarius in these words. That is quite accurate. In my experience, an Out of Bounds Moon has distinctly Aquarian quality. We see the familiar Uranian “holy trinity” at work—the Genius, the Revolutionary and the Criminal. All three of them stand outside the normal structure of society, applying leverage to it—and meeting resistance, condemnation, and consequences for it.

As with Aquarian or Uranian influences, the Out of Bounds Moon often thrusts alienating circumstances upon a person from outside. This is of course the classic working of synchronicity—what we meet (or fail to face) in our inner world is encountered in the “random” realities of our outer lives.

Inwardly, the Out of Bounds Moon often correlates with feelings of being an outsider, of not fitting in, of not having a place in this world. This can be painful—and it can also lead to an attitude of not giving a damn. Or to passivity. Or to resentment. And to radical forms of existential creativity.

The site's author also discusses the frequency with which Moon out of bounds occurs: 

More broadly, there are some years in which many babies are born with Out of Bounds Moons, and some years in which none at all are. This is related to the 18.6 year retrograde cycle of the Moon’s orbital plane—what creates the lunar nodes. (9) We will spare you the details, but here is the bottom line. Every 18.6 years, the Moon reaches its maximum possible declination of 28.5E, a full five degrees outside the tropics. In the years halfway between, we get a kind of “low tide” effect, with the Moon never getting more than 18.5E from the celestial equator. Under those latter conditions the Out of Bounds Moon cannot exist at all. No one born in those years has one.

Thus, over the time-scale of 18.6 years, about half the people born might have an Out of Bounds Moon and about half them could not possibly have one. Furthermore, some of the “good” years for Out of Bounds Moons are more productive than others. That is because times when the Moon goes further Out of Bounds, it stays that way for longer as well. The odds improve.

Even in the “good” years, every couple of weeks the Moon’s monthly orbit brings it back “within bounds” as it passes through the neutral ground between maximum northern and maximum southern declination. It may, in other words, be wildly Out of Bounds in one person’s natal chart—but in the chart of a person born just a week later, the Moon is in 0E declination, as normal as vanilla ice cream. But then a week after that, it is wildly Out of Bounds again.

You really have to calculate it, is the bottom line.

Remembering all our caveats, here are the absolute peak years for Out of Bounds Moon births in living memory: 1913, 1931-32, 1950, 1969, 1987-88, 2006. We will have another one in 2024-25. Remember to give it at least a couple of years on either side. During those years a lot of kids were born with Out of Bounds Moons. But they were mixed in with a large population of more steady, conventional types. Looking at those years, note how the correlations with periods of social unrest and social creativity are rather unmistakable. As ever in astrology, what is “in the air” at given moment lives on for decades longer in holographic form in the children.

The author has a lot more to say on the topic so it's best to go the site and read it all. Another site of interest that I discovered is an Out of Bounds Planet Calculator. Once a date of birth is entered, the determination is made as to what planets were out of bounds at birth but also when progressed planets ceased to be out of bounds and became out of bounds. According to the calculator, it turns out that my Moon was out of bounds at the time of my birth. Here are the details:

Date of Birth: 04/03/49

Natal Out-of-Bounds Planets

Moon     24.59 N 

Progressed Out-of-Bounds Status

Age 5

Moon ceased to be out-of-bounds.

Age 13

Moon became out-of-bounds.

Age 18

Moon ceased to be out-of-bounds.

Age 27

Moon became out-of-bounds.

Age 32

Moon ceased to be out-of-bounds.

Mercury became out-of-bounds.

Age 40

Moon became out-of-bounds.

Age 45

Moon ceased to be out-of-bounds.

Age 51

Mercury ceased to be out-of-bounds.

Age 55

Moon became out-of-bounds.

Age 56

Venus became out-of-bounds.

Age 60

Moon ceased to be out-of-bounds.

Age 68

Moon became out-of-bounds.

Age 72

Moon ceased to be out-of-bounds.

Age 80

Venus ceased to be out-of-bounds.

Age 82

Moon became out-of-bounds.

Age 87

Moon ceased to be out-of-bounds.

Age 95

Moon became out-of-bounds.

Age 98

Mars became out-of-bounds.

Age 100

Moon ceased to be out-of-bounds.

Interesting stuff. However, astro.com provides additional tables for birth charts that show the declinations of natal planets. This reveals that my natal Moon is not out of bounds at all. See Figure 3.

Figure 3

As can be seen, the Moon is listed as being at a declination of 22°54'30'' N. This is close to the limit of 23°27' but not outside it. Only Uranus at 23°37'17"N and Pluto at 24°1'0''N are out of bounds. The problem with the Out of Bounds Planet Calculator can be seen in Figure 4:

Figure 4

As can be seen, there is no input for time or place, only the date. This is not good enough in the case of the Moon because it moves so swiftly. I was born at about 6:56am and I suspect that later in the day, the Moon did move out of bounds. However, when I was born, it was clearly within bounds. Thus all the other data from the Out of Bounds Planet Calculator is to be treated with suspicion.

Astrolog is the program that I use for my astrology calculations and I was curious to see if it would display the declinations of planets. At first sight it doesn't but there is a command line switch -sr0 that instructs the program to display declinations instead of latitudes (the default). The output is shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5

As can seen, the results are the same as those shown in Figure 3, when taken to the nearest minute. Further investigation, using Astrolog, shows that the Moon had a declination of 23°28' N at 10:40am on the day of my birth and only then was it out of bounds.

Once again, Astrolog has shown its capabilities, albeit latent in this case, which is all the more remarkable given that the program was developed in 1994 or possibly earlier.

The Problem of Houses

I've been meaning to make another post about the astrological houses for some time now but I've had difficulty finding the focus. Before starting I'll link to an earlier blog about house division above the Arctic Circle in which I looked at the topocentric house system.

The trouble with houses is that there's a temptation to view them in the same way as one does the signs. A planet is either in the fifth house or it's not. However, because there's a variety of house systems, this means that a planet might be the fifth house using one system but in the sixth using another. This problem doesn't exist using the tropical zodiac, where a planet's longitude places it definitely in one sign or another. For example, my natal Saturn is in 0°01' of Virgo but it is nonetheless in Virgo and not in some grey area between the two signs.

The confusion arises from having to project the circle of the celestial equator onto the circle of the tropical zodiac and then deciding how to divide up the projection of the former. A radical solution is to abandon the use of the celestial equator altogether and to simply use what is known as a whole house system. In this system, the sign in which the Ascendant is located becomes the first house and subsequent signs become the houses. Figure 1 shows the situation in my own chart:

Figure 1: showing Whole Houses for my natal chart

I have the 25th degree of Aries rising and, while this is marked on the chart along with the MC (27th degree of Capricorn), these two points do not represent the start of the 1st and 10th houses respectively. Instead 0° Aries and 0° Capricorn form the starting points. Some astrologers highly recommend this system but in my own case it just doesn't fit. Using Koch houses, my chart is shown in Figure 2:

Figure 2: showing Koch houses for my natal chart

I've always felt that my Aries planets manifest through the twelfth house. Finding out what's really going on behind the scenes has always interested me and the placement of these planets in the first house doesn't fit me. Another approach, called in Astrolog the Vedic house system, places the Ascendant in the middle of the 1st house, so that my chart now appears as in Figure 3:

Figure 3: showing Vedic houses for my natal chart

This is more acceptable and the MC in this system falls where it will, in my case around the middle of the 10th house. It's essentially the equal house system except that the Ascendant does not mark the beginning of the 1st house. Figure 4 shows my chart as it appears in the equal house system:

Figure 4: showing equal houses for my natal chart

In my case, the difference between my Koch chart and my equal house chart is only slight because of the latitude and time of year. I like the Vedic house system except that I'm so used to the Ascendant - Descendant axis marking the horizontal and dividing what's above the horizon from what's below. I'd prefer it to look more like that shown, very roughly, in Figure 5:

Figure 5: Vedic chart rotated so that
Ascendant-Descendant axis is roughly horizontal

With the Vedic house system, my Pluto moves from the middle of the 4th house to the beginning of the 5th house. Neptune, in the middle of the 6th, moves to the beginning of the 7th. Mercury remains in the 12th while my Venus-Mars lies right on the 1st house cusp and the Sun moves a little into the 1st. Chiron is on the cusp of the 9th, having moved from the 8th house. 

I certainly don't think that the division between the houses should be as distinct as that between the zodiacal signs. With the Vedic system, it's more that the centre of gravity of the house shifts to the halfway point within that house. It's something I need to explore further in my own chart and in the chart of others. No decisions are being made in this post! I'm just exploring possibilities.

Canopus

I've been taking more interest in the night sky lately and using Stellarium it's been easy to identify the major stars. In this post I'll examine some of the facts and related information about the star Canopus. In my natal chart, the star is located at 14˚16' Cancer, forming a T-square with the Sun and Neptune.

The only problem with this placement is that Canopus is nowhere near the ecliptic and needs to be mapped on to it by drawing an arc from its position in the sky that meets the ecliptic at a right angle This is shown in the diagram below:

This is the problem that bedevils the two dimensional horoscope. The ecliptic is the backbone of a chart but only rarely are astronomical objects located exactly on it. In most cases, they are at some distance from it and need to be mapped on to it as has been done for Canopus in the diagram above.

How exactly is this mapping done? Well, an astronomical object's position can be measured in terms of celestial longitude and celestial latitude. The latter shows the angular distance of the object from the ecliptic. The former measures the object's angular distance from its orthogonal projection on the ecliptic to the First Point of Aries. It is the celestial longitude of an object that is considered when placing it in the two dimensional horoscope.

This celestial latitude however, is displayed in the Astrolog chart. For example, in my natal chart shown earlier, the longitude of Canopus can be read to the right of the longitude. It is -75°50', the negative sign indicating south latitude. Stellarium also shows this information but from a topocentric rather than geocentric perspective. The difference between these two positions would be very slight for fixed stars but would be most significant for the Moon. The magnitude of the difference for the Moon will be explored in a future post. Stellarium shows that the latitude of Canopus tonight, 14th February 2018 at 8:38pm, is -75°49'25.4" and its longitude is 105°13'31.1" (or 15°13'31.1" Cancer).

Here are some interesting astronomical facts about Canopus (from Wikipedia):

• it is the brightest star in the southern constellation of Carina (Alpha Carinae)
• it is the second-brightest star in the night-time sky, after Sirius
• it is 310 light years distant
• it has a radius 71 times that of the Sun
• it is a circumpolar star when seen from points with latitude south of 37°18' S
• its northern limit of visibility is latitude 37°18' N

Here is a shot of Canopus as it appears in Stellarium:

The constellation Carina is described as follows in Wikipedia:

Carina is a constellation in the southern sky. Its name is Latin for the keel of a ship, and it was formerly part of the larger constellation of Argo Navis (the ship Argo) until that constellation was divided into three pieces, the other two being Puppis (the poop deck), and Vela (the sails of the ship).

Carina was once a part of Argo Navis, the great ship of Jason and the Argonauts who searched for the Golden Fleece. The constellation of Argo was introduced in ancient Greece. However, due to the massive size of Argo Navis and the sheer number of stars that required separate designation, Nicolas Louis de Lacaille divided Argo into three sections in 1763, including Carina (the keel). In the 19th century, these three became established as separate constellations, and were formally included in the list of 88 modern IAU constellations in 1930. Lacaille kept a single set of Greek letters for the whole of Argo, and separate sets of Latin letter designations for each of the three sections. Therefore, Carina has the α, β and ε, Vela has γ and δ, Puppis has ζ, and so on.

Here's some information about the astrological significance of Canopus (source):

Astrologically, the keywords for Canopus, the keel, are: the navigator and the pathfinder and it is linked to the story of the Argo and the rescue of Helen of Troy but there is much more to Canopus. When linked to natal planets, Ptolemy associated the star with Saturn and Jupiter, Robson with 'piety, conservatism, and turning evil into good'. Ebertin connects Canopus to 'a love of travel' while Rigor adds the more negative potential of 'domestic problems'. 

(Ex: if the natal planet linked to Canopus is fussy Mars, the potential for domestic problems would be more likely to occur due to conflicts and quarrels.)

Some cultures, including certain Native American tribes, linked the precession of Canopus with timing the end of the world, and other ancient cultures considered it the weight at the end of the plumb line that defined earth's poles so that the plumb line's movement explained the effects of precession on Canopus, sometimes known as the Point of Stillness in the south. Plus, the star was once worshiped in desert cultures as the Star of Egypt (instead of Sirius!) and in China, the red star is associated with happiness, success, and a long life which makes it the Star of Old Age. 

For as Brady's Book of Fixed Stars relates, "In about 6,000 B.C.E. {Canopus} was the heliacal rising star for the autumn equinox and a series of temples were built in Egypt in alignment with these risings. Modern people see this star now being claimed by NASA, as they use this ancient location point as a navigational aid for spacecraft." Canopus--still the navigator! 

In natal horoscopes, Canopus (14 Cancer) is a powerful star which can provide leadership skills. New directions may be inspired by Canopus which acts in similar fashion as the royal stars which always include a 'caution' (ex: royal Regulus: success if revenge is avoided--otherwise all gains will be lost). With Canopus linked to a natal chart, success is possible but its caution lies within the flaw of needing too much control.