Planetary Personalities: The Moon

In October of 2024, I began working with an incredible illustrator and visual artist, Alex Raguso (@crumb_eater on insta), to transmute my written descriptions of the 7 primary planets into a series of Tarot Card style illustrations. We spent months talking through mythology, etymology, and astrology to find the cultural common threads. We did draft after draft of both the text and the illustrations until these cards were born. I am grateful and proud and hope this collaboration helps contextualize why celestial bodies and their rich cultural histories have always, and will always be celebrated as important to human's understanding of themselves and their power. Below, you will find the fruits of that labor in all their HQ glory. We posted version on social media meant to poison AI, so please refrain from reposting the unpoisoned version in this post anywhere else. I've also included the collage I made after writing each planetary profile at the very end. Next up, The Moon!

The Moon: Rules the sign Cancer

Every sun casts a shadow. Every kingdom, regardless of its external representation or affairs, functions as a home that must reckon with its power. The nurturing of a space, a land, and of a people, requires more than just the power it took to take up space and call it your own. This power that exists beyond plain reach, is the Moon’s power. If the root word for the Sun is “Dom”/”Dominion”, the Moon is “Domus”/”Domes”, meaning the house. If the Sun rules a kingdom, the Moon rules the home at the heart of that kingdom.

Where the sun might get caught up in vitality as a force, the Moon considers quality of life beyond the lust for it. This is because The Moon is connected to the earth in a more physical way than the Sun’s light could ever reach. It is not enough to create the conditions for life to exist, The Moon must care for that life as an actionable practice. Sunlight is needed for something to grow, but a plant needs watering. Through the ocean, the moon can carve the very bedrock of reality with its power. Beyond sustaining life through lighting the environment, as both The Sun and The Moon do, the Moon nurtures life by being an active participant in it.

Just like the Sun, it is important we don’t see this planet as distinctly one gender. The moon is not a literal mother, but a representation of mothering. It’s never about an individual’s ability to mother, it’s about the act of mothering. Mothering is a deeply physical power, and one we might better understand through observing the strength and beauty of the ocean and its archetype, the crab, who lives inside its waters and stands protective on the shore. The crab, a creature with both shell and claw, carries its home everywhere it goes. It has the power to access that deep, comfortable, nurtured space anytime and anywhere, but it also has the courage to protect it. That’s a mother.

Beyond the nurturing and protecting of a space, one that might be its own body, a mother is a keeper of memory. It is the memory of the Sun’s light that allows The Moon to shine and sustain life even when the Sun is gone. The Moon is a mother remembering those days when you both shared a body. The ocean is the body we currently share with the moon. It connects us all, but it also remembers when our continents were one. It has such a deep memory that the water still moves in old cycles as if the land hasn’t shifted since. What kind of power is it to hold memory this way? What does memory provide if not the ability to return to connections we thought we’d lost? The reason the ocean can carve stone is because the water remembers where it’s been and returns there over and over until the land eventually gives. This is the process we employ when we heal too. We return to where the pain lives over and over until we can move through it, past it, carve it down and absorb it into our memory. This learning, healing, and growing is how The Moon sustains life. More introverted than the Sun, but arguably more active. The moon doesn’t just burst with life, it remembers how to live when vision fails and all examples have disappeared. We feel it out and recall what we already know from when we were one with our mother. This remembering provides clarity even in the darkest night.

There is a fallacy of representation in Astrology that favors the bold expression of the Sun, but anyone who recoils from the responsibilities of a work day into the comfortable joy of their home at night knows: we express ourselves just as much unseen, maybe more, than we do when we show up. The shell and the claw. The Moon’s power is to illuminate the side of ourselves that values carving out a space in the world just for us, but it never forgets its connection to everyone else. It asks us to reflect on how we show up when no one is looking. It asks us to carve out a space to do our healing, and when we find it, it asks us to protect it with fervor, but resist isolation. It reminds us of the power of connecting with others, with ourselves, and with our own past. Memory keeps us alive.