The waning half-Moon
A Last Quarter Moon falls when the Moon has travelled three-quarters of the way around from the Sun — ninety degrees behind it, a square (a tense right angle) on the shrinking side of the cycle. The lunar face is half-lit and diminishing, and it keeps the opposite hours from its waxing twin: rising around midnight, climbing to its highest at dawn, and hanging pale in the morning daylight. A half-Moon seen in the morning sky is always a Last Quarter. Astronomically it is a point of tension; symbolically it is the moment of release — the turn toward the dark, when what was learned in the cycle is kept and what is finished is cleared. The whole arc is in .
Tradition calls this the crisis of consciousness — the waning counterpart to the First Quarter's crisis of action. The question is no longer can I push through? but what do I let go of?
The cut against the keeping
The anchor of this Last Quarter is the axis it draws. When the Moon is in Aries, the Sun is square it in Cancer — two cardinal signs (signs that initiate; see ) crossed at a right angle in midsummer. Aries is cardinal fire, fast and unsentimental; Cancer is cardinal water, protective and slow to release. So the friction here is precise: the Aries Moon wants to end the thing cleanly, and the Cancer Sun wants to keep it, shelter it, give it one more chance.
The rulers make the argument explicit. The Aries Moon answers to Mars, planet of the cut. The Cancer Sun answers to the Moon herself, keeper of what has been gathered and held. The square is between the hand that ends and the hand that holds — and at this waning phase the tradition sides with the cut. Clearing is the work of the shrinking Moon, and Aries is the zodiac's best demolition crew: fast, clean, unattached to structures whose time is over. This pairing belongs to no other quarter Moon.
Cutting cleanly
Respect the Cancer half of the sky while you cut. The feelings about the ending are real and allowed — Cancer is right that something is being lost. Only the postponement is the enemy: the weeks of feeling about an ending used as a substitute for making it. The Aries-shaped sequence is decide, act, then let the feeling arrive afterward, in the quiet waning days before the next New Moon.
What this phase punishes is the reverse order — mourning a thing for a fortnight instead of ending it. So make the clean cut now, and give the grief its proper place: after the act, not in front of it.