Planets in Profile: The Moon in Virgo

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology (https://nightlightastrology.com/). Today, we are going to finally get back to our Planets in Profile Series, where I've been looking at the Moon through all 12 signs. We are currently at the sign of Virgo. So, this episode will be dedicated to the themes and symbolism of the Moon in the sign of Virgo.

If you haven't watched the other videos in this collection, we have taken the Sun, Mercury, and Venus through all 12 signs. You can find those Planets in Profile episodes under the playlist on my channel. This series will be the next. So, we're taking the Moon through the 12 signs, and then we'll continue with the other planets, year by year, sort of filling everything out.

It's a nice opportunity to dive a little bit deeper into planetary placements and signs. Of course, missing the house context in the context of a chart is an important thing to point out. Like, you need that context always when interpreting a planet, but getting to know a planet by sign is important.

So today, the Moon in Virgo. Remember, before we get into it, to like and subscribe. It really helps our channel to grow. We appreciate it when you do so. You can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on the website, which is NightlightAstrology.com.

As I am making this video right now, we have monthly webinars available. So, next week, I'm doing a talk on Venus's Retrogrades. If you want to get to know the symbolism and meaning of Venus Retrogrades, check out that talk next Thursday night under the Events page on the website NightlightAstrology.com. If you can't attend live, of course, you get the link to attend later.

Now, as I'm making this, this is coming out on Thursday, February 13. The Moon is in Virgo today, so it feels like an appropriate day to take a look at this. Now, I will let you know that some of the themes of Virgo can be darker than people often think. When people think of Virgo, they often think of people who are picky, careful, conscientious, thoughtful, and crafty—things like that. Maybe the word perfectionist comes to mind or something.

There's a lot to the sign of Virgo, and we'll be unpacking some of that. You'll see in some of the chart examples, there are actually some darker and more complicated themes that come up when planets are in the sign of Virgo—in this case, the Moon. But just to be prepared for that, because it never ceases to amaze me how the stereotypes that we have in our mind about signs can really trip us up when we're learning astrology.

There's always something to those stereotypes, but there's usually a lot more than meets the eye with the signs. So, I think there'll be a little bit more to the sign of Virgo that you'll hopefully come to appreciate in today's talk.

Let me get the little presentation I'm going to put up on the screen. Here we go, and I'm going to put this presentation into full-screen mode so that you can see it.

Okay, so the Moon in Virgo. What can we say about this beautiful lunar placement? Well, let's remember that whenever the Moon is in any given sign, we start by understanding the nature of the planet in the sign. The sign is a modifier, and in ancient astrology, planets are far more important or more primary in a delineation than a sign is.

So, you have to start by understanding the Moon. If you're going to understand the Moon in any sign, it starts with the Moon. The Moon's universal significations would be those that are broadest and most universally or philosophically relevant for the planet and have the broadest symbolic application.

For example, on the universal level, the Moon represents the realm of fortune, the material incarnate world of forms that come into being and pass out of being, the daily flow of events, the image of the wheel of fortune, the realm of karma, the material world where we live and breathe and eat and eventually die, the constant changes and fluctuations of environment, emotions, mind, body, circumstance—that constant, fluctuating, changing world was the world that the Moon represented in the broadest sense in ancient astrology.

So, when you look at the Moon universally, you're thinking about something like the karmic environment that the soul finds itself in, which comes from ancestry and family and culture and past lives and so many other things. So, it has a very broad and kind of enigmatic meaning in a chart, far beyond just your emotions or something like that, although that can be relevant when taking, say, a psychological approach.

By contrast, the Moon's topical significations are going to be those things that the Moon represents most concretely—people, places, or things. For example, the Moon represents the body, the physical body that is the temple or house of the spirit, soul. It represents mothers and women, home and family, ancestry, tribe, village, clan, and culture—all of those things that act as the sort of ground of our being, the mother, the village, the family, the home, the community, the things that we are tied together to, like an ecosystem that nurtures us, connects us, fosters our growth, etc.

This is also the womb. For example, the Moon can represent things like marriage and pregnancy and childbirth, but anything that we nurture or devote ourselves to, as well as very basic things like food and cooking. So, the significations of the Moon—these universal themes of the material world and the specific things like mothers and family, etc.—are modified according to whatever sign the Moon is in.

So, when we interpret a planet in a sign, the most primary way we delineate that is by looking at the Moon and the planet whose temple it occupies, and then secondarily, by the various qualities of that sign.

Now, when we look at the Moon in Virgo, we are thus saying that the Moon is going to be modified by the fact that it is in the temple of Hermes. First and foremost, we're talking about a Mercurial Moon. Now, it is a feminine Mercurial Moon that is double-bodied, feminine, or yin, and earthy. So, we're talking about a feminine, yin, double-bodied, earthy Mercury.

All of those qualifiers are really giving us information about what kind of Mercury we're dealing with, and the placement of Mercury in this time of year with all of these qualities has to do with the way in which the Zodiac is mapped out according to seasonal fluctuations of light and dark, the yin and yang. And so, this time of year, in terms of the light and dark, the preparation for the harvest of the Fall Equinox, is why these qualities and Hermes get placed here.

So, there are layers of logic that go into this. And when we get down to this level, basically what we're saying is we have all of the natural symbolism of the Moon, and then we modify it by knowing that it's in this earthy, feminine, double-bodied place of Hermes Mercury.

So, the sign of the Virgin, or harvest Maiden, is the third and final sign of zodiacal summer. It is the place in which we leave the light half of the year and enter the dark half of the year, which was conceptualized as the entrance of the youth into the underworld, or the initiation into adulthood—the borders between youthfulness and adulthood, or purity and innocence versus lack or loss of innocence, or just the gathering of experience that initiates us from a sort of naive, relatively blank slate into a much more complicated world.

These are all things that happen at the threshold of the sign of Virgo into the underworld, which begins in Libra. So, on this part of the Zodiac, the light-dominant half of the year is now steadily waning. And by the end of Virgo, the handover to the dark half begins.

So, you can understand again, this is an earthy, yin, Mercurial kind of Moon that is ushering the soul from the sort of youthfulness of the light half of the year into the more mature, dark, complex dark half of the year.

So, the ways that that ends up getting translated is that we see the Virgo Moon as a Moon that is on the precipice of a transformation into darkness and impending judgment or evaluation implied by the harvest. It makes it a very careful Moon.

It's thoughtful and careful, thoughtful and careful and conscientious. It's also concerned with purity and the potential that we lose purity, whether we're talking about a task that we're performing or we're talking about how we care for something, the concern with things like cleanliness or doing a good job. So broadly speaking, we think of the Moon in Virgo as having a concern with purity. There's also an anxiousness, because the sign of virgo and the Moon in Virgo is sort of standing in this tentative place where it's about to enter this initiation into darkness and the underworld. And so there's an anxiety that's there, a kind of sacred anxiety about the presence of coming darkness or evaluation or judgment. Will I get it right? Did I do something wrong? How will I be judged or evaluated? Which makes the sign the moon and the sign very caring, very nurturing, very sensitive, but also sometimes a little anxious. Judging, discerning and discriminating. Are all great qualities to describe the Moon in Virgo, which can also be like, I think a lot of the archetype of Mary Poppins with the Moon in Virgo. She's a nanny. She's magical. She's very sort of strict and stern, but also light and youthful. And so there's this, this ability to sort of, I remember, like the scene in Mary Poppins, where Mary Poppins is having them. She's. Using magic to clean up the nursery. And they're, you know, the soldiers are marching into their toy box, and all of the things are being put away. And so she's got this very careful, meticulous, but magical quality to her, and that is really the best of Hermes mercury, who is associated with magic, with astrology, and the kind of cleanliness or concern of purity that characterizes this sign. So it's a very magical sign, and a sign that is associated not just with kind of practical, earthy do the right thing, but there's a kind of magic in the craftiness and carefulness and discerning or discriminating qualities of Virgo. But of course, it can lean into a kind of perfectionism as well. There's mental, rational, meticulous qualities. These are the earthy, practical sides of mercury. Caring and cautious is also really important, because this moon is a very maternal moon, but it's like a maternal moon that's very specific about how it runs a kitchen, you might say, is use that as like an image. It's youthful. See this sign hovers between the end of summer the beginning of autumn, which was also thought of as a transition from youth to adulthood, and so the the the sort of tension between innocence and the initiation into the complexities of life, morally, spiritually, sexually, where we have to reconcile ourselves with the darkness. It can't just be good versus bad, pure versus unclean, or something like that. Those dichotomies can become a really tense source of anxiety for the Virgo moon. The Virgo moon can be a little naive, as though there have to be experiences that are had that are aren't always easy, but they have to be had somehow, skilled, intelligent, resourceful, very crafty. Virgo moons are incredibly good at doing things that require the body, the hands. You'll see people who have very particular skills with the body, or earthy, practical crafty skills can be very artistic, but usually with some kind of skilled craftsmanship involved. Now this moon, because it's related to the body and the earth and embodied life in the material world will also the moon in the sign, will tend to constellate these tensions between guilt and forgiveness, perfection and imperfection, austerity versus sensuality, youth versus adulthood, all of these, these themes, these kind of little dichotomies, are sometimes a very important part of the experience of having a Virgo moon. So here's some people to sort of illustrate. After we've laid out some of the basic archetypal qualities, let me just say a little bit about some of the people and just how these people, you can see some of the tensions at work in their life. And I picked people that I think certain aspects of their story are very noticeably Virgo in and are also like everyone probably knows the story, Madonna is a really great example. She is someone you think of you know her, her music videos in I think it was late, late 80s, early 90s. Some of them were incredibly provocative and were groundbreaking in terms of the way in which she created juxtapositions between sensual and sacred themes, like, like a virgin or what's the what's the other one? Like a prayer, I can't remember, but her material girl living in, you know, all of those, all of those Madonna songs, and I'm probably messing up the names of them, I apologize. But the tension between sort of images of Catholic purity and the desires and sensuality of the body. And he was a young girl who was pushing the conventions and holding the tensions between purity and sensuality experience and youthful naivete, and really highlighting the tensions around the the Virgo archetype that we experienced collectively. She did, she did a wonderful job of that in her artwork as a musician. Now, whether you like her or not, all we're trying to do here is notice the archetype at work. Now, Elon Musk is, you know, some people are, you know, just really, right now, he's a he's he is a trigger re person, for sure, for for some people can't stand the guy, right? Other people, depending on where you're at, politically, might really like him. The point here is not to get political, but to get archetypal. So one of the things that is he's very well known and documented about him is that he is obsessed with technology, and the Virgo Moon is often a sign of someone who's very scientific, analytical, rational, practical, and spends an enormous amount of time trying to perfect things that are sort of like crafts or sciences or skills or whatever and all. Only point that I want to make about him is that if you look at the trajectory he was on from youth to adulthood, and the transformation he's undergone from sort of the purity of youth to the complexities and darkness of adulthood, which we all go through. But if you look at that transition for him along the Virgo lines, it's pretty loud. And then the other thing that I would say about him is the sort of obsession with craft, skill, technique, science, data, and trying to like Virgos, are people who are often obsessed with crafts, and that's something that I've noticed about him in the past, that I've watched interviews with him years ago, and I haven't seen much about him lately. It's not someone I follow, but I know that he was absolutely obsessed with perfecting elements of his his technology, with cars and so forth. So that's a good example. Let's flip the page. Go to someone completely different in the Dalai Lama. So what I find really interesting about the Dalai Lama is this is someone whose childhood was marked by the tremendous burden of, you know, I mean, I imagine it as a burden. He's talked about it as a burden. I'm sure it's a sacred thing to carry, but he's a reincarnated Lama within their tradition, right? Whether you believe that's true or not, that's what he believes to be the case. That's what the tradition says is the case. And imagine the weight of that in childhood you are a pure, enlightened being. You know who's who's returned. And the amount of pressure that places on a person in childhood to be perfect, clean, pure, innocent, etc, is it must be tremendous, and so I just find it interesting that you can see little signatures like this in on the other hand, here's someone who's also a very caring, conscientious person that is just very thoughtful, and has always been talked about as having a youthful kind of innocence. So but the themes anyway, in his early childhood with him, regardless of what you what you think about any of these individuals, is archetypally noticeable. Stephen Hawking is another one where I just want to draw that parallel back to someone like Elon Musk, not on any level politically or socially, but just on the level of being absolutely obsessively focused on the refining and honing of things like science, data, technology, craft. Now for him, obviously it's like physics, math, etc, but the the way in which a Virgo Moon will often show up is through someone who has an interest in the material world, and skills, crafts, data investigation, science, analytics within that world. And so it's a it's a noticeable part of his life. Of course, he's also got a couple of other, a lot of planets in earth, kind of like got a Grand Earth Trine going on. So someone who is very earthy, and one of the signs of earthiness that we don't always talk about, because we think of the Earth as very sensual, but it's also a place that is associated with very practical things. Stephen Hawking is someone who's like, meh on the subject of God, right? But a little bit more like I look at what's directly in front of me that can be very earthy. So the other thing, of course, that happens is this, from youth to adulthood is an incredible transition in his life. You ever watched the movie about his life story from the, you know, sort of degenerative, I think it's a degenerative disease that he had. I can't remember the name of it, but anyway, the passage from youth to adulthood was fraught with all sorts of interesting challenges for him, as he was sort of initiated into adult life through disease and hardship and sickness and all sorts of stuff. So again, you'll often find that the Virgos, people with strong Virgo placements will have really archetypally vivid examples of the initiation into the darker complexities of life, the body, sexuality, etc.

 

Puff daddy, here's a triggering figure, right? We all have heard the stories recently. The thing I want to highlight about him, and I don't know, I can't remember if this is a rectified chart or not. So the moon in the 12th is interesting. But anyway, the simple point would be that there are often some really problematic issues between the dichotomy of youth and adulthood, and so when you see similar things in Michael Jackson's chart, I'm just being honest here where Virgo will sometimes show up when there are it's as though the shadow of a Moon in Virgo is sometimes issues with the dichotomy between youth hood and adulthood. And I will let you guys ruminate on that yourselves, but it's one example. I mean, you could look at him being something of a craftsman and music and different features. Of his life that are not entangled in the controversy and scandal, right? But the one thing that we could look at for sure is that when there are problematic distinctions between innocence, purity and and darkness, and they're they're put along lines of sensuality versus purity, you'll often see some, some pretty disturbing sort of perversions of those dichotomies showing up in a person's life. And again, Michael Jackson is another example with, I can't remember is the Virgo sun or moon in his chart? Anyway, let's move on. Dolly Parton is another really good example of someone who has, throughout her entire life. Like one of the things that people love about her is that she maintains this kind of youthful innocence, and she's not at all an like an asexual figure. She's very, I think she has embraced her sensuality, and her her Venusian side is like a very well established part of her personality, and yet there's something that remains very wholesome about her. And this is, again, I'm, I'm admittedly something of a Dolly Parton fan, like I've always just found her kind of like a kind of a kick ass personality. But anyway, that's a side point.

Whether you like her or not. You know, again, archetypally, someone whose life has constellated around the juxtaposition between sort of like being sort of innocent and pure and youthful and like sexy. Do you know what I mean? So that that sort of sensual versus pure theme, she's been married to the same person, I believe, for like, over 50 years, or something too, anyway. So she is an example of someone who just holds that tension between the sort of chaste themes and the very sensual and erotic themes in her personality. She's always been known for holding that tension that's a Virgo moon, and it doesn't. They don't always appear in the same ways, like you could have someone who's crafty and resourceful and meticulous. But some of these, some of the ways in which a Virgo Moon show up will be about the way in which the life expresses these different archetypal tensions. The Olsen twins both born with the Moon in Virgo. I think that's really fascinating because, and again, I'm relying on, I can't remember if this was Astro. I can't remember what the Rodan rating on this one was, so it's at zero Virgo. So if we discover that they're actually in Leo, okay, then this wouldn't, this wouldn't fit. But I'm going with the Virgo Moon chart for the two of them, right? And just if this were the case, then the way that I would see the moon at play in their lives would be in terms of look there, there they are. Looked at as the epitome of cute, innocent little girls in full house, right? And as they age, there's a way in which they're always going to carry that collective projection of being innocent, good girls. And that is something that, from what I've read in statements that they've made is complicated, right? It's like, it's not like, it's an easy thing to be constantly thought of as the cute, pure little girls from Full House. And yet, there's something about that projection that, in a sense, that youthful, the harvest maiden kind of image that they will carry, and the tension of holding that alongside of other darker themes that Virgo is actually initiating us into, will be present. So it's just a fascinating thing when you see the Moon in Virgo show up like that. Rudolph Steiner, to me, is a very fascinating one, because he's sort of like a he's a very practical, scientifically minded person, and yet, a lot of his research was was utilized in the development of children's education, as in, you know, the Waldorf schools, for example. So there's a connection between Rudolph Steiner and things like early childhood education that a lot of people don't even know about. He was such an sort of incredible, crafty, thoughtful, skilled, research, analytical type of person, but he was deeply concerned with the development and education of children and things like, wasn't he a part of biodynamic farming at some point too? I can't remember, but yeah. So another interesting example, Marquis Dasa is an interesting figure because he holds the tension with a Virgo moon, whatever you think of him, the the the tension between innocence and purity and the the sort of darker indulgence of lust and desire is constellated in his life story massively. Or watched the movie about him that came out. I don't remember who starred as who played him, but yeah, there's another example of someone whose life held these really intense tensions between purity and indulgence or lust or desire. And it always becomes more problematic when the purity part of us tells us that the sensual part of us is bad, then you often see the dichotomy between the two constellating with some real demons coming into the. Into play, if that makes sense, Alan Watts and the next one, Terence McKenna, they both played really similar roles, by the way, during the time when Uranus and Pluto were moving through Virgo and initiating an entire generation of youth into adulthood in rock and roll and free love and Woodstock and psychedelics, that whole like 1960s Uranus, Pluto and Virgo, they were figureheads of that movement, talking about the adults of the world versus the youth of the world, the establishment versus, you know, more complex themes that lie beneath the veneer of The the perfect, pure society. So when you look at both Alan Watts and Terence McKenna and you notice their moons are in Virgo. First of all, they're very thoughtful, research oriented, careful, meticulous, scholarly, scientific types of people, but they also held this juxtaposition between the sort of purity and innocence, or the projected images of purity and innocence of a like Christian society versus these deeper, darker explorations that everyone in their generation was being initiated into. It's again, another really fascinating way in which you can see the Virgo themes showing up. Jack Kerouac is similar for his generation as a beat writers, a bunch of angsty kids at really, that generation was like, you know, young angsty writers and travelers who were craftsmen, and also straddling the line between purity and innocence and loss of innocence, adulthood, etc. And very much the precursors to the 1960s Brian Wilson is a fascinating example who also has the the theme of a youth and the maintenance of some kind of purity versus the destruction of that purity or the loss of that purity of the entrance into the underworld. As a musician, he is someone who, as a young boy, was incredibly talented, and as a young boy was led into a musical group by his father with his brothers in forming the Beach Boys. And he also struggled mightily with the deterioration of his mental health and kind of through overuse of drugs and psychedelics, and also maybe just his own constitution, or what have you. He went deep into the underworld with the loss of sanity. It was a major initiation process for him that was a huge part of the transition from youth to adulthood. Like his initiation from youth to adulthood was very intense and very Virgo, and also someone who demonstrates all the meticulous craftsmanship of a Virgo. He was known as basically a virtuoso in terms of his ability to write symphonic compositions, and he was one of the first to do so, and it really inspired a whole wave of young musicians during the 60s, again, as well. Serena Williams, I don't know a lot about Serena, but I know that she has this intense childhood with her dad and her sister and the um, the way in which she was brought up with a lot of pressure to perform and be perfect and masterful with her craft playing tennis. This again, oftentimes the pressure has to do with the youth and the adult, and the dichotomy between the two. Lizzo, I'll end here because there is also the whole thing about body image. She's someone who has dealt a lot with the topic of body image and shaming and being happy with who you are, and the dichotomy between say, like,

 

you know, well, let me put it this way. I don't know much about her, but I know that the sign of virgo is very commonly implicated in people who deal with eating disorders or working out the right relationship between their appetite and their appearance, or their sensual side and their desire to try to control and look a certain way. You see, I've seen a lot of young women or older women who, at one point had an eating disorder in my astrology practice with, you know, strong, pronounced placements in Virgo. So one of the things that I find interesting about someone like her is that she's very publicly dealt with issues around you eat too much, or you look a certain way, or you should look like this, or you shouldn't look like that, or whatever. The whole thing about how do we live with a desired body that we acknowledge and honor and respect the existence of without completely losing ourselves to the tension between purity and experience, like experience is not pure. It's a complicated thing. So how do we allow ourselves to be creatures that need experience, need to honor our desires and the exploration of our desires without losing something innocent and pure, without losing. Our discrimination and better judgment, morally, spiritually, etc, how do we regulate desires while acknowledging them? How do we hold the youthful innocence while also recognizing the complexities of adulthood? Those tensions become massively important in the sign of Burgo. And as you can see there, those stories are at work in many of the examples that I shared today. Now, again, I went with some charts where, if they were rectified, it's possible the moon's in a different sign, but they make good illustrations for the purpose of this talk anyway. So we will leave it there for today. I hope this episode of planets and profile has been useful now you know a little bit more about the Moon in Virgo, you can work maybe a little more sensitively with this planetary placement if you see it in a chart and or if you have it in your own chart. So we will be moving on to the Moon in Libra in the next installment of the series that I hope to pick up the pace with. Again, got bogged down in a lot of other series and things that were happening over the last few months. So hoping to pick this up and move through the remaining six signs of the zodiac next. All right, that's it for today. Take it easy. Everyone. Bye.