The full moon is the night of meeting. The rest of the month has its uses too, and a witch learns to know where the moon is without looking it up.
The page on esbats and the moon describes the coven's full moon meeting and the rite of Drawing Down the Moon. This page is about the moon's whole round: how its phases are used in the timing of magic, what the dark of the moon is for, and how a person working alone may keep the full moon. It is the work of the season of water in our outer court, when seekers are asked to watch the moon every night they can for three months and to write down what they see.
The tides of the month
The moon goes from dark to full and back in a little under thirty days, twenty-nine and a half on average. The Craft treats the month as a tide, flowing and ebbing, and the old rule is that work goes better with the tide than against it.
| Phase | How long | Traditionally used for |
|---|---|---|
| Waxing | About two weeks, from the first crescent to the full | Beginnings, growth and increase. Work to bring something into being: health, a new venture, a skill, a friendship. The nearer the full, the stronger. |
| Full | The night itself, and the night either side | Every kind of working, and above all worship. Power is most easily raised. Divination, healing, and the blessing of anything that matters. |
| Waning | About two weeks, from the full to the last crescent | Decrease and release. Work to end what needs ending: a habit, an illness, a quarrel, a fear. Clearing, banishing and letting go. |
| Dark | Two or three nights with no moon to be seen | Rest, reflection, dreams and divination. Little active magic is done. |
A useful habit, for the first year, is to note the phase in your diary every day, and the time of moonrise when you can. The dates of the full moons for the year are on the page for the coven year.
New moon and dark moon
These two names cause endless confusion, so it is worth being exact.
In astronomy the new moon is a moment, not a night: the moment when the moon passes between the earth and the sun, so that its lit side faces wholly away from us and it cannot be seen at all. Almanacs and calendars give that moment as the new moon. Witches generally call the moonless nights around it the dark of the moon, and keep the name new moon for the first thin crescent that appears low in the west after sunset, a day or two later, which is what the phrase meant to most people for most of history. When a witch speaks of starting something at the new moon, it is usually that first crescent they mean.
In the nights before and after the dark, the unlit part of the moon can often be seen faintly glowing beside the crescent. That is earthshine, sunlight reflected from the earth onto the moon and back again. The old name for it is the old moon in the new moon's arms, and it is in one of the great ballads of these islands:
I saw the new moon late yestreen,
From the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens
Wi' the auld moon in her arm.
In the ballad it is a sign of a storm coming, and the sailors who see it are drowned. Nobody now thinks it means that.
Timing a working
Within the tide, a coven works on the most convenient night near the right phase. A day either way makes little difference, and a working done at the wrong moment with full attention is better than one done at the perfect moment by tired people who have rearranged their lives to be there.
Some teachers give very exact rules: that a working must be done within so many hours of the full, or never in the day after it, or never while the moon is passing from one sign of the zodiac to the next. Some witches also time their work by the sign the moon is in, which changes every two days or so. That is a craft in itself, and those who have learned astrology properly use it to good effect. Done from a table without understanding, it is mostly another way of worrying. We would rather a beginner learned the phases thoroughly first. One astronomical point is worth knowing: the full moon always stands in the sign opposite the sun, and the new moon in the same sign as the sun.
If something must be begun on the wrong tide, it can usually be turned round. A spell for health in the waning moon can be framed as the banishing of illness. A spell to end a bad habit in the waxing moon can be framed as the growth of a good one. This is not cheating. It is the kind of thinking the tides are meant to teach.
The dark of the moon
Covens differ more over the dark moon than over any other phase. Many leave it alone, on the principle that the tide is out and there is nothing to work with. Others value it precisely for that reason, as a time to turn inward: for divination, for dreams, for the hardest kind of self-examination, and for the quiet that comes before beginning again. Some teachers warn beginners away from it, and some say that the warning is itself a superstition that has kept witches out of the darkest and most fruitful part of the month.
Our own custom lies between. The coven does not meet at the dark moon. Our outer court keeps it as a night for dream work and for the cards, and finds it a good one.
The moon and the Goddess
The moon is the Goddess's oldest image in the Craft, and many witches see her three faces in its phases: the Maiden in the waxing crescent, the Mother at the full, and the Crone in the waning and the dark. The idea is a modern one, as the page on Maiden, Mother and Crone explains, but it is a beautiful one, and it gives each part of the month a character that is easy to feel.
Blue moons
Most months have one full moon. Because the moon's cycle is a little shorter than the calendar month, now and then a month has two, roughly seven times in every nineteen years. The second is now popularly called a blue moon.
That definition is surprisingly recent. It comes from a misreading, in an American astronomy magazine of 1946, of an older almanac rule, under which a blue moon was the third full moon in a season of the year that happened to have four. Either way, the name has nothing to do with colour, except on the very rare occasions when smoke or ash in the air really does turn the moon blue. Our own coven calls the second full moon of a month the Thirteenth Moon, and keeps it like any other.
What the moon does not do
The moon raises the tides, with help from the sun: the highest tides of the month come at the new and full moons, when the two pull together. It is widely believed to do a great deal more: to make people wild, accident-prone or unwell at the full, and to rule the cycles of the body. Our High Priestess, who has worked nights on a hospital ward, says that every nurse believes it and that nobody has ever managed to show it. The moon of the Craft is a religious image and a measure of time. It does not need to be a force acting on our moods to be either.
A full moon rite for one
This is a simple outline for a person working alone. Nothing in it is taken from the Book, and the words are left to you, which is as it should be.
- Choose a time when the moon is up. Prepare a quiet place, out of doors if you can, or by a window that shows the moon.
- Set out a white candle, unscented, a bowl of water, and something to eat and drink.
- Centre yourself, and mark out your space in whatever way you have learned, if only by walking round it once, sunwise, with the candle.
- Stand facing the moon. Look at it for a while without saying anything.
- Greet the Goddess in the moon, in a few plain words. Say who you are and why you have come.
- Light the candle. Hold up the bowl so that the moon is reflected in the water, and look at the reflection.
- Think back over the month since the last full moon. Say aloud what you are grateful for in it, what has ended, and what you would like to be different by the next.
- If you have a working to do, do it now, while the image is clear.
- Eat and drink, and pour a little of each on the ground, or the water from the bowl.
- Thank whoever you have called on, put out the candle, and make a note of the night in your diary.
Done every month for a year, this will teach a great deal. Done once, it will mostly teach that it is cold outside at night.