Last Quarter

Last Quarter is the mirror of First Quarter: the disc is again exactly half lit, but now the left-hand side is bright and the right in shadow, and the Moon is shrinking rather than growing.

It rises around midnight and sets around midday, which makes it the phase most often noticed in the morning sky — a pale half-Moon hanging over a bright blue morning, looking faintly out of place.

As at First Quarter, sunlight arrives at a shallow angle along the terminator, so the surface detail is at its most dramatic; but the lit hemisphere is the opposite one, showing a different set of craters and maria. It is sometimes called Third Quarter, since the Moon has now completed three quarters of its circuit.

Last Quarter is the phase of reckoning — the honest look back, and the decision about what to carry forward.

The traditions attached to it are all about review and release: forgiveness, the settling of debts, the ending of things that have finished but not yet been acknowledged. It is the counterpart to First Quarter's push, and it asks a harder question. Not what should I do, but what was this actually.

For those born under it, that turns into a genuine talent for endings — a thing almost nobody is good at. You can say what something really was, without bitterness and without dressing it up, so that everyone involved is free to move. The lesson of the phase is discernment: not everything gathered deserves to come with you into the next cycle.

The Last Quarter is symbolised by the ledger, the swept floor, the closing door, the letter written and not sent.

It is balance again, but balance tipping the other way — and where First Quarter's equilibrium was about to become action, this one is about to become rest.

It belongs to the hours before dawn, to the west, and to the element of air in its clearing form: the wind that takes the last leaves off. Old calendars used it for weeding, clearing and settling accounts. Nothing was planted and nothing was celebrated.

Its colour is grey — not a drab grey, but the honest colour of things seen in full light without flattery.

You were born at the Moon’s second balance point, when light and dark are equal again but the direction has reversed. The Last Quarter is the phase of reckoning — the honest look back, the decision about what to keep. To arrive here is to be constitutionally unable to leave things unexamined, and to have a talent for endings that most people lack entirely.

The Last Quarter is the turn toward the dark, and its lesson is discernment. Not everything you have gathered deserves to come with you into the next cycle. Your practice is review without self-punishment: name what happened, name your part in it, keep what was true, and let the rest go without a ceremony.