Everyone knows about their sun sign, the sign you look up when you're checking out your horoscope. What people don't know is that your moon sign may hold the most influence over your life, and outside of major astrology enthusiasts, most people don't even know what that is. Your moon sign can be easily looked up if you have an accurate time of birth, and birth location.
It's easy to find out — just go to any birth chart calculator online, plug in all your birth details, and you've got your answer. Your birth chart will show your rising sign (also known as your ascendant) your moon sign, and the houses and planetary positions of everything in your chart. Some astrologers believe that your moon sign is actually who you become as you grow into yourself and become more comfortable in your own skin. Some astrologers believe you become more like your rising sign.
I don't personally believe either of these, because even as an astrologer I think we have control over our own destiny. Regardless of whether or not you "become" your moon sign, what I do believe is that the moon signs' influence over us is more powerful than any other influence in our astrological charts. The question then, is how?
Our Subconscious Beliefs
Your moon sign is associated with your subconscious. It represents the pervasive beliefs we adopt in childhood that we often leave unexamined until well into our adult lives. The influence of our subconscious (our moon) has over us is extremely powerful, because it governs our deepest understanding of the world, what we feel in our gut, and that understanding governs our actions.
As an example: if you grew up having been lied to by your parental figure and you never explored that wound, you can grow up with a subconscious expectation that no one is trustworthy. Relationships in your life might be prematurely cut off because of your own belief that trusting others will lead you to disappointment.
Relationship To Our Mother
The moon sign governs our relationship to being nurtured, and how we nurture others and ourselves. It's associated with the mother, and with a female influence, though I think that gender, as our civilization evolves, has less of a place in this theory. If the moon sign governs our ability to nurture and be nurtured, then it stands to reason that it also has the single greatest influence over our ability to relate to others on the most intimate, emotional level. In fact, having compatible moon signs can make a relationship work between two sun signs that would otherwise be considered incompatible.
There are certainly moon signs that will struggle with this. Having a moon sign in Virgo is particularly tough because it's a sign that is caustically unemotional. This sign has a difficult time understanding emotions because feelings don't often make logical sense.
Your Deepest Desires
Your moon sign also governs your deepest desires; those things you want in life so badly that it borders on need. When you want something so badly that it drives every action, you end up getting it, whether you're aware of that desire or not. Your moon sign is like a planetary psychiatrist. The deeper you explore your moon sign, you'll get into and discover the truth of your subconscious — which will allow you to strip away the artificial "mask" of your personality (aka your rising sign) and become your most authentic self.
In this way, your moon sign always wins in the end. The planetary influence over your desires, beliefs, and ability to nurture — combined with the characteristics of the sign your moon is in — have such a deep impact on the environment within you, which eventually impacts the environment you create around yourself.
