The First Quarter is the first truly informative milestone of each lunar cycle, usually occurring about a week after the Dark Moon. This is the halfway point between Dark Moon and Full Moon, when the Moon squares the Sun during the waxing, exploratory half of the lunar cycle. So what information can we understand from what happens under this Moon phase?
In short, by the time the First Quarter comes around, we should have a clear grasp on what subject matter we are looking at this cycle. In the sign of Capricorn this is likely to be an earthly topic, and may relate to our big-picture career – not our employment, but our life’s vocation, the purpose of being a human being outside of our relationship with the capitalist dream.
With each lunar cycle, we get to process one major manifestation in the emotional body. Under the Full Moon next week, whatever we are spending this cycle on will reach the point of maximum illumination. As the Full Moon passes overhead, we move on from the exploratory half of the lunar cycle into the introspective, waning half. What we discovered during the waxing phase starts knitting together until it coheres into a big picture understanding that we digest under the following Dark Moon.
This particular First Quarter Moon in Capricorn brings the cardinal modality sequence full circle. By the time the Full Moon arrives on the 26th, the Sun will be in Scorpio, bringing us into the fixed modality sequence. So even though this is still very much the beginning portion of the lunar cycle, the nature of the energy is changing.
Cardinal modality has an unstoppable forward movement, and fixed modality is the opposite: stoic and immovable. So even though the lunar cycle is escalating, we may feel our energy slowing down and stopping. This energy can feel like a kind of internal dissonance or blockage if we aren’t aware of it, especially for powerfully cardinal natal charts that prefer a fast-moving energy. But the reality is that this is a natural change. As the Sun moves into the fixed water sign of Scorpio, the Moon’s quarter phases will also happen in the fixed signs. After today, the next four emotional milestones will be in the fixed signs.
We need to understand that stillness is not the same thing as stagnancy. The fixed modality may not feel like progress in the same easy-to-perceive way as the forward-moving cardinal modality, but that’s because it serves a different purpose. During the fixed seasons, we get to sink more deeply into the feelings we are experiencing. We get to sit with divine messages and absorb them slowly and osmotically through the skin, attuning slowly to a greater depth of self-knowledge. Our roots are growing. We are calibrating.
As this energetic shift begins to process in the coming days, do your best to surrender to its energy instead of trying to resist. The fixed seasons are actually the times we experience the greatest change, because these are the liminal months when the Otherworld boundary crosses the material plane. Magic is in the air. The seasons are changing.
This First Quarter brings Chiron into the loop through a wide opposition with both Sun and Venus Rx and a wide square with Moon. Moon is also about to experience conjunction with Pluto. Meanwhile Sun begins a trine with the North Node.
What this means will be different person to person, depending on your natal chart, your past and present efforts towards self-development over time, and your intentional relationships with each of the heavenly bodies and their respective domains. People who try harder generally are given an easier time. The energies we can expect to meet are as follows:
The primal and reactive emotional body
Our objective net impact on other people (distinct from the felt sense of self)
Our core wound (which we must remember has the potential to become the place of deepest healing)
Our personal ethics (after individuating from social norms)
Our relationship with both power and responsibility (think of the famous Spider-Man quote)
The kind of fate and divine intervention that can’t be influenced by our actions (like the opposite of karma)
