Eclipses

Why eclipses are treated differently

An eclipse is a New or Full Moon that happens close enough to the lunar nodes — the points where the Moon's orbit crosses the Earth's — for the three bodies to line up. Astronomically it is a shadow. Astrologically it is the one event traditional practice treats as genuinely disruptive rather than merely notable.

The dates above are computed, not copied from a list: solar eclipses from the global eclipse search, lunar eclipses from the umbral search, each with the sign the eclipsed body occupies.

Solar and lunar, and how they read

• Solar eclipse — a New Moon with the light cut off. Read as a beginning that arrives by removing something first. Traditionally the more consequential of the two.
• Lunar eclipse — a Full Moon with the Earth's shadow across it. Read as a culmination or an ending, often one that has been coming for months and finally becomes undeniable.

Total, annular, partial and penumbral describe the geometry rather than the significance, though totality is conventionally read as stronger.

Eclipse seasons

Eclipses come in pairs or triples roughly every six months, in what is called an eclipse season — about a month either side of the nodes aligning with the Sun. The signs involved shift slowly: the nodes move backwards through the zodiac, spending about eighteen months on each axis.

That axis is what makes a given eclipse season personal. If the eclipses are falling in your own sign or its opposite, they land on your first and seventh houses, and the traditional reading is that identity and partnership are both up for renegotiation. If they fall elsewhere, they land on whichever pair of houses that axis occupies from your sign.

The two-week rule

The most commonly repeated piece of practical eclipse advice is not to force decisions in the days immediately around one. The reasoning is that eclipses tend to reveal information late — the thing you did not know surfaces a week or two after, and decisions made without it need revisiting.

Whether or not you accept the mechanism, the behavioural version is sound: when a situation is actively changing, waiting a fortnight before committing rarely costs much.

Seeing one

The list gives the astrological picture. Whether an eclipse is visible from where you live depends on the geometry of the shadow track, which is a different question — a total solar eclipse is total only along a narrow band and partial for a much wider one.