A Forgotten Method of Forecasting with New Moons

Perhaps it’s serendipity, but recently I was reviewing the literature on forecasting with lunations for a class I’m teaching on solar returns when Alphee Lavoie posted on Facebook an AstroCartoGraphy chart of the New Moon of 30 April 2022 in Washington, DC, being “progessed” diurnally to 24 May 2022, the date of the school shootings in Uvalde, Texas. The Mars/Dsc line of this May 24th diurnal chart cast for Washington, DC, goes directly through Uvalde. Alphee calls this the “Diurnal New Moon” chart, and he has been testing its astro-mapping in mundane astrology for a number of years.

What fascinated me about Alphee’s post was that the previous day I was re-reading an old book in my astrological library: Leigh Hope Milburn’s The Progressed Horoscope Simplified, written in 1928. In her discussion of forecasting with the New Moon, she writes:

“A chart made up on the day of the New Moon as though it were the native’s own birthday (time, place, etc. of the real birth) and read in conjunction with the radical chart will often throw considerable light on the conditions for the month ahead. Also, a chart made up for the exact moment of the New Moon for the particular locality in which one is interested will reveal, in quite some detail, the conditions for that locality for the next 28 days.”

Alphee’s method is very similar to that of Leigh Hope Milburn. The difference is that in applying the idea to mundane astrology, Alphee uses the actual time of the New Moon in Washington, DC, rather than the “birth time” of the nation. Milburn used the method with charts of individuals and utilized the native’s birth time to create the diurnal chart rather than the actual hour and minute of the New Moon.

Like Alphee, however, she also used the charts of localities of the New Moon to judge conditions at those localities in the month ahead. Alphee appears to have extended this latter technique by using astro-mapping along with a diurnal chart for the New Moon. The use of lunations in astrological forecasting is well-established in the classical literature. Alphee’s application of lunations to mundane astrology via astro-mapping is a valuable contribution, worth knowing about.

Here are the charts:

New Moon in Washington, DC, on left and the “diurnal” chart of the New Moon on the right. The same time and place is used in both charts, only the dates are different.

Alphee’s decision to use astro-mapping with this diurnal technique was brilliant and highly informative. To make clear how it works, I will list the steps to be followed when using this mapping technique with New Moons:

Calculate the chart of the most recent New Moon for the capital of the nation, country, state or particular region you wish to study.For the date of interest in the month following the New Moon, calculate the chart for that day, using the time and place of the New Moon but the date being investigated. In this example, the New Moon occurred on 20 April 2022 in Washington, DC. at 4:28:05 PM EDT. Using the same place and time, we would calculate the “diurnal” chart for 24 May 2022, the day of the massacre.Create an AstroCartoGraphy map of the region being studied, using the diurnal chart.

As Alphee noted in his Facebook post, the resulting astro-map (the one here is calculated in mundo) is shown below. The Mars/Dsc line passes directly through Uvalde, which lies to the left of San Antonio. In the original New Moon chart, Mars rules the 3rd house of early education and the 8th house of human mortality.

In mundo astro-map of the diurnal New Moon chart. The Mars/Dsc line passes directly through Uvalde.

I’ve known Alphee for many years, and he is always coming up with and experimenting with innovative ideas. His use of local space maps in horary astrology to find lost objects is a technique which I now often use. I’m eager to experiment with his astro-mapping of diurnal New Moon charts to see what they reveal about mundane events.