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Your Lunation Birthday by Dane Rudhyar

YOUR LUNATION BIRTHDAY
Dane Rudhyar

First Published
Horoscope Magazine
December 1949



This four-part article is a short, popular version of some of the material which appeared in Rudhyar's 1946 book The Moon and Its Cycles - which was a precursor of sorts to Rudhyar's seminal 1967 book The Lunation Cycle.

Your Lunation Birthday provides an abbreviated and accessible introduction to the lunation cycle and the eight lunation types. If you find Your Lunation Birthday useful, please refer to The Lunation Cycle - use the link below to purchased it from Amazon.com - for a fuller and more significant treatment of the subject.


YOUR LUNATION BIRTHDAY
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Your Lunation Birthday by Dane Rudhyar.

Part Two
Solar and Lunation Birthdays

At the New Moon, the Moon is united, as it were, with the Sun (i.e., in conjunction). It is being impregnated by the ray of the Sun. This ray of spirit impresses upon it a new purpose, a new act of spiritual will, a new creative impulse — indeed, a new answer to a vital need which had become outstanding at the close of the lunation cycle just ended.

Spirit is that which provides answers to every vital need, solutions to the pressing problems of living organisms and human personalities born of the earth. But these answers to needs and prayers, these spirit-emanated solutions must be made understandable and acceptable for human beings. They must be formed or formulated as new techniques, new organizations, new words, ideas or laws. It is as the light of the Moon waxes toward Full Moon that this process of organic and social formation or intellectual-mental foundation takes place.

At Full Moon, this process reaches a climax and fulfillment or else the failure of the process is revealed and separation or disintegration begins. If there has been fulfillment, then the purpose released at the New Moon, as an act of spirit and a creative impulse from the heart of the Sun, now becomes a conscious realization, an objective image, a clear concept, a "vision" or illumination. As the light of the Moon wanes, what has been fully realized has to be disseminated. The consciousness of the illumined individual, of the clear mind is to be spread among men. New systems, new meanings, new philosophies are to be built.

The individual can live consciously what he "saw" because his mind, once truly awakened or illumined, has power over material substances and organic processes, because the clearly realized meaning can indeed transform both the past — which, by becoming significant, is entirely renewed or "redeemed" — and the future — which is determined according to the character of the understanding (positive or negative, constructive or destructive, as the case may be) which the individual has extracted from his previous experiences.

What has been left undone during a cycle is responsible for new needs or problems arising as the last phases of the lunation cycle occur. The failures have to be dissolved, the inertia challenged; the ineffectual techniques have to be given up. The last quarter phase of the lunation cycle is filled with revolutionary challenges, reform, self-overcoming, self-sacrifice; these total up to new essential needs, for which the creative Sun-ray, impregnating the Moon at the New Moon, will once more give solutions and harmonizing, healing answers.

The point which must be stressed is that this complete monthly cycle of the soli-lunar relationship can and should be considered as a celestial framework within which the birth of an individual occurs — a framework as significant as the zodiac.

A person's birth moment can be referred to the zodiacal cycle, and the particular character of his birth is then defined by the degree of the zodiac on which his natal Sun is placed. He is a "Leo type" or "Pisces type", which means that he is born at a particular point, moment or phase of the "cycle of positions" which begins every year at the vernal equinox. This is his "solar birthday".

But a person's birth can be referred also to the lunation cycle. He may be born just after New Moon or at the first quarter (Moon square Sun) or near Full Moon or late in the waning period of this lunation cycle. This point, moment or phase of the cycle at which his birth occurred determines his "lunation birthday". Every month, he will experience a new "lunation birthday", as every year a man has a solar birthday.

Both types of birthday are equally significant. Indeed, the lunation birthday may give a more practical and more vital key to an understanding of how this person meets the challenges of everyday life, orients himself to society and to the business of participating in the "work of the world", how he faces "reality" — as we, men on earth, can actually and personally experience it.

If this be true — and the truth of such an assertion is, I believe, both logical and validated by experience — then it constitutes a real challenge to the astrologer. The latter has been accustomed to interpreting the solar birthday of a person by dividing the zodiac into twelve signs of 30 degrees each and by giving a great variety and wealth of meanings to the position of the natal Sun in any one of these zodiacal signs. He has divided all human beings into twelve categories and types, according to the zodiacal position of their natal Sun: this "typing" is the basis for the type of personal guidance or forecasts found in present-day astrological magazines.

If the astrologer now seeks to give meaning to the "lunation birthday" of a person, he has also to "type" all human beings in some manner, according to the phase of the soli-lunar relationship (the so-called "phases of the Moon") at or near which birth occurred.

The simplest and most understandable way of doing this seems to be to speak of a "New-Moon type" of birth, a "first" and "last quarter type", a "Full Moon type" — simply because these four most characteristic appearances of the Moon in the sky are matters of common and universal experience among men of all continents. But such a fourfold division is not quite sufficient for practical purposes; besides, the way of using it and its scope must be carefully determined.

It is many years ago now since I published a series of articles discussing this matter of phase analysis of "cycles of relationship"; I still consider valid the eightfold type of division I presented then. It applies particularly to the soli-lunar cycle from New Moon to New Moon. A twelvefold division of the cycle is entirely sound whenever one deals with "cycles of positions" — as in the cases of the solar year and the sidereal day. An eightfold division seems to me philosophically valid and supported by tradition whenever we deal with the cyclic interplay between two moving factors and, thus, with the constantly changing results of their relationship.


Relationship generates power; without relationship, there is no power available for release. The rhythm of basic releases of power, at least in the realm of "life" (i.e., biopsychic, organic activity), seems to be essentially symbolized and measured by the number 8. This was so in Hindu, Chinese and Christian Gnostic symbolism; and the eightfold division of a circular field of electro-magnetic energy is a very basic one, even in modern scientific technique. The fourfold cross, foundation of both the twelvefold and the eightfold divisions of the circle (or cycle), establishes the points of basic crises in the relationship between the two polar factors being considered. But four more points, bisecting the four quarters, are necessary to mark the positions (or moments) of greatest momentum or most critical release.

Thus, eight sectors are constituted, each encompassing 45 degrees of the complete circle — just as the familiar solar zodiac and the wheel of houses include twelve divisions of 30 degrees each. As a result — the "lunation birthday" of a person is to be found located in one of these eight lunation sectors, and the lunation type of the individual can be determined. There are eight such types — instead of twelve, as in the familiar solar-zodiacal method of typing.

As we shall see presently, it is easy to ascertain the type to which one belongs simply by finding out how many days from the preceding New Moon one was born — or, more precisely and accurately, what is the distance (arc or angle) between one's natal Moon and one's natal Sun, which can be done by referring to your birth chart. [You can also use the Aspectarian section of the online KhaldeaEphemeris to determine your lunation type.]

The next thing is to define, as broadly and inclusively (yet also as significantly and practically) as is possible within the limited space at our disposal, the characteristics of each type. The solar Aries type, Cancer type, Sagittarius type of persons have been described almost endlessly in recent astrological books and magazine articles. A vast amount of observations and the study of thousands of birth-charts in relation to the known character and destiny of the persons to which they refer will be necessary before an equal wealth of data, type characteristics and referent occurrences can be available with regard to the eight "lunation types". Yet a basic start can be made, to which much will have to be added as this new approach arouses an increasing amount of interest.

I have no doubt that this eightfold kind of typing will prove illuminating and will serve the most desirable end of an ever more thorough and more vital understanding of basic human responses to life and of the intricacies of man's psychological approach to what is, to him, actual and concretely experienced reality. One of its great advantages, considering our modern twentieth-century *mentality, is that such a type classification deals with factors the importance of which in human life, human growth, human moods, etc., can be readily accepted.





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