The Moon occupies a position of singular complexity within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as cosmological symbol, archetypal image, psychological function, and astrological significator. Across the library’s major voices — Jung, Greene and Sasportas, Moore, Rudhyar, von Franz, Pollack, Nichols, and Cunningham — the Moon consistently marks the domain of cyclical change, instinctual embodiment, and the pre-egoic substrate of personality. Jung’s seminars establish the Moon’s three phases as a morphology of psychic rhythm, linking lunar waxing and waning to archaic emotional life and the anima principle. Greene and Sasportas extend this into astrological psychology, reading the natal Moon as the ‘primal substance on which the personality is built’ — the vessel of bodily reception, childhood imprinting, and the mother complex. Moore, drawing on Ficino, emphasises Luna’s reflective character and the cultivation of a consciousness attuned to beginning, fullness, and emptiness as a rhythm rather than a goal. Von Franz and Jung both locate the Moon within alchemical symbolism, where it stands opposite the solar principle in the fundamental duality of psychic life. The tension between the Moon’s paradoxical nature — reliable in cycle yet treacherous in moment — and the ego’s desire for stable illumination constitutes one of the corpus’s enduring dialectics.
The Sun and Moon symbolise two very basic but very different psychological processes which operate within all of us. The lunar light which lures
Greene and Sasportas establish the Moon as one of two fundamental psychological luminaries, its light distinct in quality and function from the solar principle operating within the same psyche.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992thesis
The Moon is our vessel of physical embodiment and our instrument of reception; it is our connection to the temporal world. Through the Moon we respond to life through the body, the feelings and the instincts
Greene defines the Moon’s core psychological function as the organ of bodily and instinctual reception, grounding the self in temporal, cyclical existence.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992thesis
The Moon is a paradox: It is unreliable at the same time that its cycle is utterly reliable. Sometimes it gives light, but not quite enough to clarify anything
Greene argues that the Moon’s paradoxical character — changeable yet rhythmically constant — is the original basis for its projection as a treacherous yet numinous symbol in ancient mythology.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992thesis
familiarity with these lunar phases: knowing the colors and aromas of beginning and of ending, recognizing fullness for what it is — part of a rhythm, not a goal; and appreciating emptiness.
Moore, drawing on Ficino, argues that genuine lunar consciousness demands an intimate acquaintance with all phases of the cycle, resisting the reduction of fullness to a goal and honoring emptiness as equally valid.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990thesis
Moon and snake have often been closely related because of the moon’s dying and rising and the snake’s capacity to slough its skin in an image of dying and rising.
Moore identifies the Moon’s mythological kinship with the serpent through shared imagery of cyclic death and regeneration, linking Luna’s phases to the primordial symbol of transformation.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982thesis
the waning moon is felt as unfavourable. It predicts evil and destruction. It is the time of ghosts, when all is dark … everything undertaken under the waning moon is appointed to decay, it is sterile from the beginning.
Jung documents the universal affective differentiation between waxing and waning lunar phases in folk custom, anchoring this differentiation in millions of years of psychic impression.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis
Man, by the very fact of becoming man and ceasing to be wholly animal, was precipitated into this predicament; he is still animal, but by becoming human he became also a conscious, that is, a spiritual being.
Jung contextualizes the Moon’s symbolic domain within the perennial human conflict between animal instinct and spiritual consciousness, which the lunar symbol has historically mediated.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
The moon symbolizes this aspect of woman which, in spite of its lack of warmth, is so terribly attractive to men. The more the woman is outside the game of love, playing it as a game, the more effectively does she play her role of siren
Jung connects the Moon to the psychically cold yet magnetically compelling dimension of the feminine — the siren aspect — grounded in the biological fact of the lunar menstrual cycle.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
when he comes to dealing with the moon, whether within himself as his own anima principle, or in the woman he is closely associated with, say his wife, he is compelled to submit to an order that is different.
Jung argues that engagement with the lunar principle — whether as inner anima or outer feminine — requires the masculine ego to relinquish its solar imperative to act and yield to a different temporal order.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
The moon appears in art and symbols in three forms: a) The crescent or waxing moon … b) The full moon … c) The dark or waning moon
Jung systematically catalogues the Moon’s three iconographic phases across world art and religious symbolism, establishing their psychological differentiation within the Jungian seminars.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
The Moon’s eerie half-light has always brought out strange feelings in people and animals. One word for madness, ‘lunacy’, derives from ‘luna’, Latin for moon
Pollack situates the Tarot Moon card within the history of lunar association with madness and disturbed emotion, arguing that its eerie half-light activates the unconscious animal self.
, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980supporting
In divinatory readings the Moon indicates an excitement of the unconscious. We begin to experience strange emotions, dreams, fears, even hallucinations. We find ourselves more intuitive, more psychic.
Pollack interprets the Tarot Moon as a signifier of unconscious activation — the arousal of intuition, dream, and fear — whose acceptance or resistance determines whether the experience enriches or disturbs.
, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980supporting
His only hope lies in the face within the darkened moon, which is framed in a rainbow collar, symbolic of hope and promise. As the moon, reborn from darkness, will transform herself to shine again so, too, may he emerge reborn
Nichols reads the dark Moon in the Tarot as the archetypal threshold of the Dark Night of the Soul, where the lunar promise of cyclic rebirth sustains the hero through the ordeal of self-realization.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting
This is the dark of the moon. A time of mystery, wonder, and terror. The witching hour when Hecate haunts the crossroads and her hounds stand guard, baying.
Nichols evokes the Hecatean dimension of the dark moon — its terror, numinosity, and proximity to the underworld — as the psychic ground of depression and the threshold of unconscious revelation.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting
the sun causes constancy and wisdom, while the moon is the cause of change and folly (including lunacy). Augustine attaches to his remarks about the moon a moral observation concerning the relationship of man to the spiritual sun
Jung traces the medieval theological opposition of solar constancy to lunar folly through Augustine, revealing how the Moon’s symbolic range encompassed moral inconstancy, the Church, and the wounded soul.
, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955supporting
the Moon remains the Moon, the primal substance on which the personality is built, because it describes our capacity to mother ourselves.
Greene asserts that no planetary aspect can displace the Moon’s foundational psychological role, which she identifies as the capacity for self-mothering and the substrate of all personality formation.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992supporting
The Moon was associated in medieval times with the goddess Fortuna … O Fortune, changeable as the Moon! You always wax or wane; Hateful life is one moment hard / And the next moment favours the gambler.
Greene connects the astrological Moon to the goddess Fortuna and to Orff’s Carmina Burana, establishing the lunar principle as the archetype of fortune’s cyclical reversals in human experience.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992supporting
Such characteristic scenarios are present with every Moon placement. They are simply dimensions of the particular archetypal pattern at work in one’s early life.
Greene argues that each Moon sign placement generates characteristic childhood relational scenarios that, if unexamined, are unconsciously repeated as archetypal patterns in adult emotional life.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992supporting
those who utterly reject this facet of the Moon … the Party unconsciously metamorphosed into the Family, and the prodigal children, whether individual dissidents or recalcitrant countries … were whipped into submission.
Greene illustrates the danger of repressing the Moon’s ancestral and collective dimension through the example of Soviet Marxism, which unconsciously reinstated the very familial compulsion it sought to overthrow.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992supporting
Life itself would present the conflict, on the one hand in the sphere of the moon, and on the other in the sphere of the sun; the one is a conscious and the other an unconscious conflict.
Von Franz positions the alchemical moon and sun as the two poles of a fundamental psychological duality, with the lunar sphere representing the unconscious dimension of life’s central conflict.
, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980supporting
Behind the shut door the moon receives its soul from the sun and the sun takes away the beauty of the moon, which becomes quite thin and weak. That means the coniunctio takes place in the new moon
Von Franz interprets the alchemical image of the shut house as the coniunctio occurring at new moon, where the lunar principle receives the solar soul — a figure of the creative union of opposites within the psyche.
, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980supporting
everyone with the Sun in opposition to the Moon is born under a Full Moon. The Moon then begins to wane, to decrease in light, as it travels back toward the Sun
Greene provides an astrological-psychological account of the lunation cycle, mapping the Moon’s phases from new to full and back as a framework for understanding the solar-lunar dynamic in the birth chart.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992supporting
The Moon also aspects itself by hard angle (conjunction, square, opposition) every seven years, so it has a cycle in relation to its natal placement just like transiting Saturn does.
Greene identifies a seven-year progressed lunar cycle that runs parallel to the Saturn cycle, providing a developmental rhythm for tracking emotional and instinctual maturation across the lifespan.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992supporting
the body needs which are of paramount importance for the Moon in earth … one’s home is a kind of body, a womb within which we feel safe and protected.
Greene reads the earthy Moon placements through the symbolism of bodily security and ritual, with the home as a womb-surrogate whose disruption can provoke profound lunar anxiety.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992supporting
a radar screen is shaped like the symbol for the Moon … It does act like a radar screen, whereby we scan, receive, and respond to subtle impressions from the outside.
Cunningham derives the Moon’s psychological meaning from its symbol’s shape, likening it to a radar screen and thus emphasising the lunar function as an instrument of intuitive, receptive scanning.
, An Astrological Guide to Self-Awareness, 1982supporting
the individual with Moon-Saturn is usually cut off from both his literal roots and his psychic roots and must develop his own sense of continuity and emotional security.
Greene describes the Moon-Saturn contact as isolating the individual from both ancestral and psychic roots, making the construction of inner emotional continuity an autonomous developmental task.
, Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil, 1976supporting
At New Moon, the Moon is at its innermost point within the Earth-orbit. At Full Moon, it is at its outermost point outside of the Earth-orbit. Subjectivity and objectivity.
Rudhyar establishes the new/full Moon polarity as a cosmological axis of subjectivity and objectivity, integrating lunar phases into his broader reformulation of astrology through contemporary psychology.
, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting
he unsuspectingly partook of the drink of forgetfulness, which had been mixed for him at the court of King Gunter (The Moon). Because of it, he forgot the beautiful Valkyrie
Banzhaf reads the Tarot Moon as the archetypal force of forgetting and unconscious enchantment, illustrating its danger through the hero Siegfried’s fatal loss of anima connection.
, Tarot and the Journey of the Hero, 2000supporting
Unlike the Sun signs, which are in effect for a month at a time, the Moon changes signs every 2½ days, so that it moves through the entire zodiac in less than a month. The Moon is as significant a part of your astrological makeup as your Sun sign.
Cunningham makes a pedagogical case for the Moon’s astrological parity with the Sun sign, underscoring its rapid movement and hence its fine-grained differentiation of personality.
, An Astrological Guide to Self-Awareness, 1982aside
I look at the Moon-Pluto contact in the birth chart and think to myself … there must have been a proper volcano building up pressure inside.
Greene illustrates how Moon-Pluto contacts in the natal chart reflect the emotional intensity inherited from the mother, establishing the Moon as the medium through which parental complexes are transmitted.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992aside
For the married pairs the median amounts to 8 cases … Moon ♂ Moon 10.9% … Moon ♂ Sun 6.8%
Jung presents statistical data from his astrological marriage study showing that Moon conjunctions — particularly Moon-Moon — appear with elevated frequency among married couples, lending empirical texture to the lunar association with intimate bonding.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960aside