Synastry contact

Moon Opposition Moon Synastry: When Your Feelings Face Theirs

Short answer: Moon opposition Moon synastry (comparing two birth charts) means that how each of you feels, your moods, needs and comforting habits, faces the other's from across the circle. Each of you has a Moon, so the contact is the same from either side. An opposition usually joins opposite signs, which move at the same pace but come from elements that complement each other, so it tends to read as polarity: each of you often has what the other lacks, which can draw you to each other and wear on you at the same time. "Raphael" in 1905 writes that quarrelling and enmity follow when the Sun or Moon in one chart is in a square or opposition with the lights in the other. Reading his "lights" as covering Moon to Moon is an inference. This page reads what he says as a tendency, and the friction as energy, not a flaw. It is one contact among many.

Two Moons, facing each other

Every chart has a Moon. It is how you feel: your moods and needs, the habits that comfort you, what it takes for you to feel safe, and what you do when you are tired, hurt or just want things to be familiar. Moon opposition Moon in synastry means your Moon and their Moon are about 180° apart, straight across the zodiac. Each of you has a Moon, so the contact is the same from either side: your Moon and their Moon, their Moon and your Moon.

An opposition usually joins two opposite signs. Opposite signs share a mode, which is the pace a sign moves at: cardinal signs start things, fixed signs keep them going, mutable signs adapt as they go. Their elements complement each other: fire faces air, and earth faces water. (Usually, not always: an opposition that starts near the edge of a sign can reach past the pattern.)

That is why this contact tends to read as polarity. You are not strangers, because you tend to move at the same pace. But you come at feeling from opposite sides, so each of you often has what the other lacks. That is the pull, and it is also the friction: the person who has what you lack does not have it your way.

It can turn up between friends, siblings, colleagues or a parent and their child as well as between partners, and it is only one of many contacts in any two charts.

Because both of you have a Moon in this contact, there is no one who feels and one who is felt about. Each of you is the one with moods, and each of you lives near someone else's.

Living near a Moon that faces yours often means your needs get noticed, because they are not the other person's needs. One of you may want company when low, and the other a closed door. One may want to be asked how they are, and the other to be left to say.

Habits show it most. How warm a room should be, when to eat, how much noise a home can hold, whether a bad day gets discussed or left alone: these are the small things a Moon cares about, and across an opposition they tend to be the things you notice first. When one of you comes home flat or edgy, the other often reacts strongly, sometimes by moving toward it, sometimes by stepping back, sometimes both within the hour.

What each gives, and what each may want

Put simply, each of you tends to give the other a view of their own feelings from the outside. A mood you have always had can look different when someone near you has the opposite one and gets through the day fine. You may learn what is yours and what is only habit.

What each of you often gives without trying is the other half of a response. If one of you is quick to feel and quick to say, the other may supply the pause. If one is slow to open up, the other may supply the plain statement.

What each of you may want in return is to have your way of feeling taken as real, not as a problem to be solved. That often matters to both of you, and it is often the hardest thing to give, because the other's way looks, from where you stand, like what you would do wrong.

How it might look

These are sketches, not reports: illustrations of how the contact might show up across different kinds of pairs.

Housemates. Two people sharing a house disagree about the thermostat. One runs warm and the other cool, and each tends to read the other's setting as a mood: too cold means unfriendly, too hot means smothering.
Parent and child. A parent and their adult child are waiting on exam results. The parent opens with questions. The child wants to eat first and answer later, and the parent may hear that as being shut out.
Colleagues. A big client leaves. One colleague talks it over with anyone who will listen. The other starts drafting a replacement plan. Each can find the other's response hard to watch.
Siblings. Their ferry is delayed. One sibling paces the deck and reads the timetable updates aloud. The other settles on a bench with a book. Each finds the other's way tiring to be near.
Friends. One friend has just missed a place on a course and wants noise and company. The other offers a quiet walk. They try the walk first, then a cafe, and may not agree afterwards which helped.

In each sketch one person's way of handling a feeling is exactly what the other would not do, and both of them notice.

Fire and air, earth and water

An opposition usually joins a fire sign to the air sign across from it, or an earth sign to the water sign across from it. In plain terms: fire is enthusiasm and action, air is talk and ideas, earth is practical steadiness, water is feeling.

Fire and air. This version is quick and sometimes noisy, and it turns on acting against talking it over. Whoever has the fire Moon tends to feel fast and want to move on it: say it, go out, change the plan. Whoever has the air Moon tends to settle a feeling by thinking and talking, and may want to hear what others think before they know how they feel. To the air Moon the fire Moon can seem to rush, and to the fire Moon the air Moon can seem to keep weighing things up without deciding. It might look like two neighbours planning a litter-pick: one has already printed the sign-up sheet before the other has finished asking who will come, and both are partly pleased and partly irritated.

Earth and water. This version is slower and deeper, and it turns on what is solid against what is felt. Whoever has the earth Moon tends to feel safe when things are practical and in place. Whoever has the water Moon tends to feel safe when feelings are acknowledged, and may take on the mood of a room. To the water Moon the earth Moon can seem to miss the point of a feeling, and to the earth Moon the water Moon can seem upset about nothing in particular. It might look like two members of a school board after a vote goes against them: one is already redrafting the timetable, the other is asking how staff are taking it, and the meeting may need both questions.

Neither side is the better one.

What the pull gives, and what the friction asks of you

Facing each other is not restful, and it is not nothing. Between two Moons it gives some things an easier contact does not.

It gives each of you a clear view of your own way of feeling. Across an opposition, the other person is what your way leaves out, in front of you.

It gives each of you a supply of what you lack: one may get someone who can slow a feeling down, the other someone who can say it aloud. And it gives you range as a pair, since between you, you can often cover both halves of a mood.

The friction asks something of you, and it belongs to this kind of contact. Because you may notice each other's reactions sharply, a small difference over a habit can feel larger than it is, and either of you may take the other's way of coping as a comment on yours.

None of this is a flaw in the contact or in either of you. It is energy: what this kind of closeness is like to live with, and what two people with different Moons often have to work with.

From the sources

What the older sources say

"Raphael" (*The Guide to Astrology*, 1905, p. 96) is the source for this contact. He writes that if the Sun or Moon in one chart is in conjunction or a friendly aspect with "the lights in the other nativity", friendship follows. If the two are instead in a square or an opposition, he says "quarrelling and enmity will occur". His page prints the aspects as symbols, so those words are not quoted. (A nativity is the old word for a birth chart, and "the lights" is his word for the Sun and Moon.) He does not say Moon to Moon: his line speaks of the Sun or Moon in one chart and the lights in the other. Reading it as covering Moon to Moon is an inference from his wording, not something he spells out. His line names the square and the opposition together, and not the opposition alone.

Ptolemy is used as supporting, and each passage speaks of aspects or of the luminaries (the Sun and Moon) in general, not of the Moon to the Moon. His *Tetrabiblos* calls the opposition and the quartile, his word for the square, "discordant", because they join signs "not of the same kind, but of different natures and sexes" (Ashmand, 1822, p. 38, I.16). That is a statement about aspects in general, not about two people. "Sexes" here means masculine and feminine, the old names for the two halves of the zodiac, which alternate sign by sign. Half his reason does not fit an opposition: opposite signs are usually both masculine or both feminine. That is a fact about the zodiac's layout, not something he says. He gives the two aspects the same label all the same.

His chapter on friends and enemies (IV.7) looks, on p. 192, at four places in both charts together: the Sun, the Moon, the ascendant (the sign rising at birth) and the part of fortune (a point worked out from the Sun, Moon and ascendant). Where those places are only at an angle to each other, he expects minor friendship from a trine or sextile, but "if by quartile, they will excite minor enmity". That grading is for the four places as a set, so a single Moon–Moon contact does not earn it by itself, and the passage names the quartile, not the opposition. He then adds (pp. 192–193) that where familiarity, or its absence, exists "only as regards the places of the luminaries", the friendship that follows is "the best and most secure" and the enmity "the worst and most dangerous". He speaks there of the luminaries in general, not of the opposition in particular.

Two older English writers have a rule on the opposition. It concerns the Sun or Mars opposite Mercury or the Moon, not Moon to Moon, so it is not used here, and neither writer is cited.

None of these sources tells a square from an opposition: Raphael and Ptolemy on p. 38 name the two together, and Ptolemy's p. 192 passage names only the quartile. The difference this page draws, that an opposition reads as polarity, each having what the other lacks, because it usually joins opposite signs of the same mode and of elements that complement each other, is this site's reading, based on the kinds of sign each aspect usually joins. The older books do not say it.

The sources state their readings flatly: "quarrelling and enmity will occur". Reading that as a tendency, not a description of a relationship or a promise of how it turns out, is this site's reading, and so is reading the friction as energy, something two people can have and use. So is everything in the other sections about moods and habits, what each of you gives and may want, and what the friction asks of you: none of the sources says it. The sources give the contact no direction that is needed here, since each of you has a Moon.

Is this you two?

You can tell what the other is feeling, and it is usually the opposite of what you would feel.
You argue about small habits more often than big things, and the habits are never really the point.
One of you wants to talk it through and the other wants to sleep on it, and you each know which is which.
It is hard for either of you to forget the other's mood is in the room.