Moon phases

The eight phases of the Moon

Every month the Moon moves through the same eight shapes. Here is what each one looks like, and what the tradition makes of a birthday spent underneath it.

Which one is yours?

Enter the day you were born and see the exact shape the Moon held that night.

Find your birthday moon

The Moon makes no light of its own. Everything we see of it is sunlight landing on one side of a rocky sphere, and the shape we call a phase is simply how much of that lit half is turned towards us on a given night. Over roughly twenty nine and a half days the angle between Sun, Earth and Moon works its way all the way round, and the familiar sequence follows from that geometry alone.

The tradition has always read those shapes as a kind of calendar of temperament. A birthday sits at one point on the round, and the phase you were born under is treated as a way of describing rhythm: whether you begin easily, whether you finish easily, whether you work best seen or unseen. None of that is prediction, and none of it is science. It is a reflective frame, offered as one.