Pulling out the spring jewelry collection, I discovered it was time to polish the silver. “Polish the silver” is something you hear often in British period pieces, done by servants and exclusively with dinnerware. It definitely can be a tedious task, especially with tiny earrings.

“I’m a cheap date,” was my first thought as I pulled out the silver cleaner. Silver is so much cheaper than gold. But silver is my metal in look and feel and I have lots of it due to relatives in Colorado and travels in Mexico. Silver likes me I suppose as much as I like it – it finds me.

In astrology moon is silver. Gold is the sun.

That makes sense both visually and symbolically. The moon looks more like silver, white and changing, as silver does when it tarnishes due to contact with moisture and sulfur in the air. The sun looks more like gold and is always shining and bright, even if we can’t see it behind the clouds. Fly on a commercial jet and you discover it’s always sunny at 30,000 feet.

Moon Polishing

The sun in astrology represents our conscious self, the one we identify with. The “I am” self and “me” of “you did this to me.” It’s the one you dress every morning to look like an executive. It’s the one you take to the party and describe to others “I’m a baseball player.” It’s the one on your resume who worked here, volunteered there, sings in a choir.

The moon in astrology is the reactive self, the one that holds all impressions and can act without the conscious self’s authority or approval. The moon is more evident when one is experiencing stress and forgets to maintain the “resume self.”

Teaching astrology, I ask folks to describe what they do after a stressful day. This is a good way to guess and learn about others’ moon signs.

Because the moon is reactive, it gets “tarnished” in the emotional sense. Like silver, it often needs cleaning. The moon is receptive, a very lovely thing if you are a musician connecting with your band members during a concert. Receptivity to an abusive or disruptive early environment, unfortunately, stays with the moon. The reactions of early childhood are the strongest impressions retained by the moon.

So it’s important to understand your moon and what it “picks up” from daily life and clean it off. The tarnish is not yours.

How does your moon react?

There are four elements – fire, earth, air and water. Moon reactions follow the same energies as sun conscious action. The difference is the trigger from external event; the reaction may be appropriate or a set of responses developed from past events that do not apply.

The moon reactions often have a manipulation to them because the moon “needs.” It’s reactive.

Fire signs (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius) react with passion, energy, anger. Aries fights. Leo looks for recognition. Sagittarius often flees for freedom.

Earth signs (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn) react slowly with practical concerns. Taurus maintains the peace. Virgo rationalizes. Capricorn tries not to “burn bridges.”

Air signs (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius) react with thoughts. Gemini is best at dissociating. Libra seeks partnership. Aquarius develops its own, internal rules.

Water signs (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) reacts with emotion. Cancer cries and can make you cry too. Scorpio obsesses and broods. Pisces becomes what you want it to be.

Is the moon feminine?

The sun and moon are also related to male (sun) and female (moon). This can seem obvious as women menstruate with the cycles of the moon. And the last two thousand years have been dominated by externally-focused males who established femininity as “emotional.”

I would argue the moon is not feminine. I prefer the Chinese concepts of yin and yang which are internal and external respectively. Female organs are internal and male organs are external. I believe this is the root of gathering, which is at peace with the external world and hunting which uses tools (external senses) and tries to conquer “out there.”

We all have the same horoscope – 10 planets, 12 signs.

Both males and females have a sun and moon with active and reactive principles. Menstruation just like respiration or heart beating is involuntary. It’s the moon.

For me, the historical trait of males viewing women as emotional, which I still hear today in the “crazy ex-wife” stories is the externalizing of the moon. It’s also very clearly evident in psychological political war where a group of people, for example, is enslaved, whipped, raped for hundreds of years and then when freed somehow become the “violent” ones. If you look closely, you will see this pattern repeat over and over.

Males are as “emotional” as females they just don’t have the menstruation to prove it. But they do have other hints of this such as violence or other “external” acts of emotion which are rationalized into “conscious” actions. If war is emotional, consider how that balances the scales.

The Universe is Female

According to a Western view of history, Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ahkenaten in 1300s BC established “monotheism” asking his people to worship Aten – the sun – only. Archeological interpretation often stays within the paradigms of one’s own cultural thinking. Ideas of “monotheism” are our own.

I believe Aten was focusing his people toward our true energy source – the sun. Eating food is to eat the sun. The moon does not generate energy, only the sun does.

Associating females with the moon assigns women to an inert body that generates its “light” from the sun. Ahkenaten may have been the first feminist.

There’s only one theory of male dominance that makes sense to me and it’s from Carlos Castaneda. His mentor, Don Juan, explains that the universe is primarily female. The earth is clearly female – it feeds us. We couldn’t live without the sun either.

Male energy, then, is rarer and somehow became privileged.

That makes sense to me. That we look at the earth as an external thing made for our use is imbalance of male and female energy. It’s too focused on yang or external. In a sense, we are raping the earth. But as female energy is the energy of the earth and universe, I expect the earth will eventually win.

As we learned during the pandemic, when humans retreat nature returns. Thoughts of an earth without people does not unsettle me as it does some.

Why should it?

We will all still be in the earth, in the soil. Then we will all be “feminine.”