The Moon sign changes every 2.5 days, going through all twelve of the signs in a month. It, along with the ascendant, accounts for many of the differences between people of the same sign, even if born in the same year. The Moon sign rules your past, what you need, and your innate sense of self. It rules the relationship we had with our mother, how we experienced nurturing and how that experience influences our feelings and attitudes today. It impacts how secure or insecure we feel and also how we nurture others.
My first fictional case study is of The Girl With the Collywobbles protagonist, Aletheia. Aletheia has a Virgo Moon and Aries Sun. A Virgo Moon often manifests as a worrying and cautious personality that overanalyzes situations, themselves and their relationships. They can be critical and fault-finding but also analytical, and they need to guard against developing a martyr complex. This is in marked contrast to her Aries sun sign, which is associated with such qualities as being headstrong, impatient, impulsive and even reckless. Because her sun sign is so different from her moon sign, she experiences an inner conflict between risk-taking and caution. In Aletheia, this manifests as a tendency to take action but analyzing after the fact and sometimes becoming self-critical if that action was foolish or violated her values in some way.
My second fictional case study is of our male lead, Edgar. Edgar has a Pisces Sun and Scorpio Moon. Scorpio Moon people tend to be very intense emotionally. They need to be deeply involved in whatever they're doing and relationships are of absolute importance. Any strong Scorpio placement makes one fascinated by others' emotional motivations as well as their own, but they can also be jealous and possessive, reacting strongly to feelings of betrayal. Sometimes the desire for emotional intensity is so strong that they create drama unnecessarily, and if done to the extreme, this can result in scenarios that create those same feelings of betrayal and disappointment. In Edgar's case, he has a Pisces Sun, already a highly emotional placement. Pisces tend to be moody, sensitive, empathetic, and fantasizing. They're prone to self-pity and are often very escapist. The combination of the two makes for an extremely emotional person, but because of Edgar's Pisces sun, he tries to escape the intense emotions through drug abuse. This, of course, creates more problems than it solves. As the Moon is representative of what one needs, what he needs to be doing is using his Scorpio Moon to probe deeply into his own motivations and to develop a greater sense of his private self.
As you can see, whether the Moon sign is characteristically similar or markedly different from the Sun sign, it presents challenges. It's what we need, but that need is often trumped by our Sun sign. In my opinion the Moon sign is really the most psychoanalytic element of astrology. It's through that where we can see what is really driving us, how we reacted to our early childhood experiences and why we react emotionally the way that we do now.
Next: the ascendant
