New Moons / Full Moons & Fires

[Jim Eshelman]

The mainstays of Tropical mundane astrology, month in and out, are charts for the Full Moon and New Moon for a given location. I thought it only fair to test these charts for a category of event documented in SMA. I picked fires, because (1) I have a larger selection than for many other kinds of events and (2) the indications are simple, straightforward - if syzygy charts are going to show these major events, should be easy.

Here are the angularities etc. for the 19 first included in the Fires chapter of SMA.

1. Jupiter. NewMoon-Uranus.
2. (Dormant.) FullMoon-Venus-Uranus.
3. Pluto (Saturn, Uranus). FullMoon-Mercury, FullMoon-Jupiter, Uranus-Pluto.
4. Sun, Pluto (Sun, Mercury). Moon-Sun, FullMoon-Pluto.
5. (Dormant.)
6. Moon, Mercury (Sun). Moon-Sun, FUllMoon-Saturn.
7. Moon, Sun (Saturn, Pluto). Moon-Sun.
8. Saturn (Moon, Sun, Mercury, Pluto). Moon-Sun-Saturn.
9. Mars, Pluto. NewMoon-Mars.
10. Mercury (Moon, Sun). Moon-Sun.
11. (Dormant).
12. (Dormant.) FullMoon-Mercury.
13. Moon, Sun. Mercury (Mars). Moon-Sun, Mercury-Mars.
14. (Dormant.)
15. Moon, Sun, Mercury (Uranus, Neptune). Moon-Sun, Mercury-Uranus, Uranus-Neptune.
16. (Dormant.)
17. Moon, Neptune (Sun). Moon-Sun.
18. (Dormant.)
19. (Dormant.)

[Jim Eshelman]

The raw breakdown of what was found is this:

7.0 Moon
5.5 Sun
5.0 Mercury
4.0 Pluto
1.5 Mars
1.5 Neptune
2.0 Saturn
1.0 Jupiter
1.0 Uranus

7.0 Moon-Sun
2.0 Syzygy-Mercury, Syzygy-Saturn, Syzygy-Uranus
1.0 lots of things

[Jim Eshelman]

Check Chapter 11 of Sidereal Mundane Astrology, and you will see graphed the fact that, in SMA techniques, the three malefics plus Sun dominate the events for fires, with Mars having the lead.

I am aware that it could be criticized that I am not interpreting New Moon and Full Moon charts the way their proponents would do. I am, in fact, treating them exactly the same as Sidereal ingresses. If the syzygy charts fail to produce as well as the SMA charts, then one of two things is true: Either they are not as effective, or they are not as simple. I have always claimed that the value of SMA charts is that they are both accurate and elegantly simple.

For the most part, these New Moon and Full Moon charts are pretty boring. There's an occasional interesting one. The frequency of these is pretty random. However, as I'll mention in a minute, they are not a lost cause.

In terms of close angularities, one thing that interests me is how prominent Mercury is. This isn't very effective in predicting fires.

But here's the one fascinating result to my eyes: Of these 19 fires, the New Moon or Full Moon right before was dormant 8 times, leaving 11 charts which had something tightly angular. Of these 11 charts, seven - basically two-thirds! - had the New Moon or Full Moon itself angular.

Also, this isn't an idle result because Moon-Sun aspects have shown themselves in SMA to be specifically aspects for major fires!

I find this... interesting indeed.