Moon Phase at Birth

In an earlier post A Vision - The Phases of the Moon I promised that I would present some data to see how the system works in relation to the birth chart. Yeats has 28 phases of the Moon, one for each day of the lunar cycle, He points out in his book A Vision that people with an early Moon phase are learning about the world and that people born at full-Moon know how to function in the public domain. For people born in the last quarter, there is a wish to leave worldly matters behind and to turn inward.
Here is a small study using the birth charts of 300 people involved in Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy.


The study showed:
62 people born during 1st quarter Moon,
89 during 2nd quarter,
70 during 3rd quarter and
79 during 4th quarter.




I wondered if there would be a tendency for people involved in a lifestyle encompassing a spiritual perspective to be born during a late moon phase. The results however show that the largest segment is the second quarter which would indicate a striving outward into the world. It is of course true that most of these people were actively involved in the world, caring for sick and the needy, active in business, teaching or the arts.



This bar graph shows the number of people born at each of the 28 phases of the Moon.
Click on the graph for a larger, clearer image.

Below is a list showing how many people were born at each phase together with the Yeats' descriptions for each phase of what he called the Will.

10 people at Phase 1-Complete Objectivity
12 people at Phase 2-Beginning of Energy
2 person at Phase 3-Beginning of Ambition
10 people at Phase 4-Desire for Exterior World
7 people at Phase 5-Separation from Innocence
11 people at Phase 6-Artificial Individuality
10 people at Phase 7-Assertion of Individuality
14 people at Phase 8-War Between Individual and Race
7 people at Phase 9-Belief Instead of Individual
14 people at Phase 10-The Image-Breaker
14 people at phase 11-The Consumer, Pyre Builder
11 people at Phase 12-The Forerunner
15 people at phase 13-The Sensuous Man
14 people at Phase 14-The Obsessed Man
10 people at Phase 15-Complete Beauty
11 people at Phase 16-The Positive Man
10 people at Phase 17-The Daimonic Man
6 people at Phase 18-The Emotional Man
11 people at Phase 19-The Assertive Man
11 people at Phase 20-The Concrete Man
11 people at Phase 21-The Acquisitive Man
8 people at Phase 22-Balance of Ambition/Contemplation
12 people at Phase 23-The Receptive Man
16 people at Phase 24-The End of Ambition
11 people at Phase 25-The Conditional Man
9 people at Phase 26-The Hunchback
11 people at Phase 27-The Saint
12 people at Phase 28-The Fool

Only two people showed up in Phase 3 and this Yeats calls a phase of self sacrifice.

He who bends to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy,
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

The sample is relatively small, taken from the birth charts of 300 people. The time-of-birth was available for about 50% of the people which means that the phase could be off by ‘one’ in some instances. However, since my objective was to look for larger trends, I felt that this would not unduly distort the results.

W.B.Yeats A Vision Moon Phases

A Vision - The Phases of the Moon

I have been working on the book A Vision about the phases of the moon by W.B.Yeats and his wife George. It describes 28 phases of the moon—one for each day of the moon cycle.

George was a member of the Golden Dawn. She was also an anthroposophist or a Steiner theosophist as they were called in those days. Four days after their wedding, George started to do automatic writing. It is said that she first did this to convince WB that, after so many years mooning over Maude Gonne, he did the right thing in marrying her. She was surprised however when, as she put herself into a kind of trance state, her pen took on a life of its own. Over a period of time, she worked on this together with her husband, he would pose questions and she would act as a kind of medium to provide the answers. Later she was able to answer the questions verbally rather than in writing. The result was an elaborate system involving the phases of the moon.

The premise is that an individuality progresses through the moon phases from one incarnation to the next. It is unclear though how Yeats calculated a person’s moon phase. One would assume that the phase would be determined by the moment of birth. This however does not work for several examples in the book. His examples for Phase 25 includes AE but if you look at AE's birth chart it shows him to be a Phase 6 and Martin Luther also shown as a Phase 25 was born at Phase 11. It is hard to believe that the Yeats would be mistaken about this but it is also hard to imagine how else to calculate the phase. I would be grateful for any comments on this.

I am preparing a database of well-known people showing the Moon Phase based on the birth chart. I don’t have enough data yet but there does seem to be a pattern. People with early moon phases seem to have certain freshness, people struggle at Phase 8 and by full-moon seem to really know how to function in the world. There is a struggle again at Phase 22 and a tendency to turn inward towards the final phases.

There is an extensive website on the subject put up by an advanced English studies professor in England.

There is an excellent poem called The Phases of the Moon that leads into the section on the The Great Wheel.

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