Vertcliff Publishing · the Moon's houses

The Moon's Twenty-Eight Houses

Why the mansions of the Moon belong beside the fixed stars, and what it means to be born in one

The Sun takes a year to walk the circle of the sky, and the twelve signs are the twelve months of that walk. The Moon takes a month, and she walks it in twenty-eight steps of about a day each. Long before anyone divided the sky into signs, people who slept outdoors watched where the Moon stood each night among the stars, and gave a name to each of her stopping-places. The Arabs called them the manazil, the stations or mansions, and they kept the oldest and most complete record of them: twenty-eight houses along the Moon's road, each one marked by a star or a small group of stars that the eye can find.

These are the same stars that the Book of Fixed Stars already holds. The fourth mansion is Aldebaran, the Bull's eye; the eighteenth, directly across the sky from it, is Antares, the Scorpion's heart; the third is the Pleiades, and the fourteenth is Spica, the ear of grain in the Virgin's hand. The mansions were never a separate sky. They are the fixed stars seen from the Moon's point of view, strung along her path like lamps along a road, and a reading of them is the natural companion to a reading of the stars that stood beside your planets.

What the old watchers made of them

For the desert peoples the mansions were first a calendar. Each one rose at dawn in its season and set at dawn half a year later, and the whole year of rain and heat and pasture was told by them: when the Pleiades rose, the heat was coming; when the Lion's tail rose, the heat would break; the four lucky stars of the winter sky brought the rains. Only later did the astrologers take the twenty-eight houses and ask what it meant for the Moon to be standing in one at the hour of a birth, or on the day a thing was begun.

Their answers survive in a handful of books. The medieval Arab astrologers kept lists of what each mansion was good for and poor for: this one for journeys, that one for planting, another for medicines, another for marriage. The Picatrix, the great compendium of star-lore that passed from Arabic into Latin, gave each mansion an image, a figure made under its light for a particular purpose, and these were copied by Agrippa into the book from which most of Europe learned its magic. And the mystic Ibn Arabi laid the twenty-eight mansions over the whole ladder of creation, from the first intellect to the last and humblest being, so that the Moon's monthly walk became a picture of everything that exists.

Why the Moon

Of all the bodies in a birth chart the Moon is the most intimate. She is the part of a person that answers before the mind has finished its sentence: the habits, the comforts, the way one is held and holds others, the weather of the inner life. The Sun says what a life is for; the Moon says how it feels to live it from inside. To know the mansion the Moon was born in is to know the particular house that feeling was raised in, and the star that kept it.

This is also what makes the reading personal in a way a list of contacts is not. Everyone's Moon stands in exactly one mansion. There is no orb to argue over and no question of whether a star was close enough; the Moon was in the house of the Follower or the house of the Barking Dogs or the house of the Belly of the Fish, and that is the house she comes home to, once in every month, for the rest of a life.

Measured against the stars

There is one choice to make in laying out the mansions, and it is the same choice that runs through the whole of this site. Many modern books count the twenty-eight houses from the spring equinox, as the signs are counted, and because the equinox slowly drifts against the stars, those houses have moved about two stations away from the stars they were named for; in that reckoning Aldebaran no longer stands in the house of Aldebaran. This reading keeps the mansions where the old watchers found them, measured against the stars themselves, so that the Bull's eye is in the middle of the fourth house and the Scorpion's heart in the middle of the eighteenth, each exactly opposite the other.

The houses are equal, as every old text makes them, a little under thirteen degrees each, and the sky does not quite agree to be divided so neatly. Twenty-seven of the twenty-eight stars sit inside their own houses. The last, the Belly of the Fish, has its star a few degrees past the border, inside the first house, because the Fish's belly and the Ram's horns crowd together in the sky; the end of the circle is already reaching for its beginning. The reading says so, where it applies, and leaves the stars where they are.

What the reading gives

The Mansion of Your Moon finds the house the Moon stood in at the minute of your birth and gives you its whole chapter: the stars that keep it, what the old books made of it, what it gives and what to watch for in a Moon raised there, and how to live easily with it.

It gives you the days in the coming year on which the Moon comes home to that house. Once in every month, for a little under a day, she passes again through the mansion she was born in, and on that day the inner weather returns to its first note: whatever the house gives a Moon raised there lies nearer the surface than usual, and so does whatever it asks one to watch for. The old books treated these homecomings as a person's own good days for the things the house favours, a day to begin what it begins well, to rest where it counsels rest, and to go gently where it warns of heat or of holding on; each chapter closes with a page on what that day is for. The Moon gives no notice of her return, and it is over before the next evening, so the reading names each one for you, with the hour she enters the house and the hour she leaves it, in your own clock's time. They can be written into a calendar just as they stand, twelve or thirteen small appointments with yourself across the year, each marked “the Moon comes home” and each carrying a line from your chapter about what to give that day to.

It tells you, more briefly, the mansions of your Sun, your rising degree and your planets, since each of them stands in one of the twenty-eight houses too. And it links every star of your mansion to its chapter in the Book, so that the two readings answer each other.

It needs the hour and place of your birth, because the Moon moves her own width every hour, and a mansion is only a day wide. It comes with a small book to keep, made for you in your own browser, with the chapter set out as it would be on a printed page. If you have already called upon the stars that walk with you, this is the other half of the same sky, seen by the light of the Moon.