The Moon
in the Fifth House
You are willing to take chances with your emotional security. At times, you may even put your emotional well-being at risk for the sake of a momentary thrill. More conservative types might call you foolish, and often this might seem to be true. But you know that the boundaries of safety and security can become a prison for the fearful. It is only those who are willing to test those boundaries now and again who know real freedom.
This position of the Moon favors creativity. Creative people are risk-takers and you identify with them. They are also people who know the value of holding on to the childish ability to play. The ability to play, to step away from the stern necessities of life and just have fun, is important to you. Because of your playful nature, people sometimes see you as childish, but you don’t think of that as a problem. It is in your childish moments, when you are at play, that your intuition flows and you feel safe and protected. In the nonjudgmental realm of play, away from the “serious” adult world, your insecurities and vulnerability don’t matter.
Typically, you like being around children, and you are unusually adept at communicating with them. This is partly because the inner child in your own nature is so strong, but it also has to do with the fact that you feel emotionally at peace in the company of the very young. Children pose no threat to your fragile inner life. Like the creatives you seek to emulate or just admire, they have an agenda in life that is closer to yours. It is an agenda that emphasizes simplicity, freedom, joy, and, most of all, fun.
The Moon in the Fifth House with the Sun in the First
Who says it’s not all about you? Obviously someone who does not know you that well and has seriously underestimated your courage, your energy, and your self-confidence. You have a way of making yourself the center of attention, and you also have a way of putting yourself in control of everything that is happening around you. Because you do this with such charm and aplomb, usually no one complains.
Of course, being the center of attention does come with a degree of risk. People might criticize you. They might argue with the fact that it’s all about you and seek to push you aside. But you’re not put off by these risks. In fact, that’s part of what makes it all so exciting. You get a bit of a kick out of putting your tender feelings in harm’s way. As far as you’re concerned, it’s better to have your feelings hurt and your ego fractured than to be ignored.
At your best, your efforts to make yourself the center of attention are informed by your natural creativity and your instinctive understanding of and concern for the feelings of other people. Your problems begin when you put aside your intuition and empathy and try to get attention by means of your boldness and your ego alone. It isn’t just about winning people’s attention. In order to really make it all about you, you must also win their hearts.
The Moon in the Fifth with the Sun in the Second
You don’t necessarily ignore your feelings, but they can slip your mind at some very unfortunate times. You value stability. You value consistency. You just want to spend your time honing the skills, talents, and other resources that allow you to make your way through life. The constant flux and restlessness that characterize your emotional life bother you. They might even be an embarrassment. You would like to think of them as unimportant.
And this might be an option if you weren’t prone to putting your emotional stability at risk in a thousand ways—if you didn’t take chances with your heart and occasionally leave the inner depths your psyche unguarded and vulnerable to all sorts of outside negativity. No matter how desperately you want to focus on the practical necessities of the outer world, your emotional life keeps demanding your attention.
Instead of trying to forget about your erratic Fifth House Moon, it might be better to think of it as one of your resources. You could make a place in your material world for intuition and emotionality and start thinking of creativity and instinct as two of your tools. Doing this might not make your lunar life any more stable or add to your bottom line, but it will force you to pay more attention to how you feel, and, if nothing else, maybe you’ll be little less surprised when those feelings overflow.
The Moon in the Fifth House with the Sun in the Third
You have a unique ability to find beauty and inspiration in the most mundane environments. Where others see boring sameness, you see endless variety. Where others see utilitarian dullness, you see elements of romance and mystery. Where others see the all-too-familiar, you see the exotic. In some cases this knack can spark extraordinary creativity, but even when it doesn’t, it gives you endless reasons to be joyous.
You will probably have to deal with a lot of instability in your emotional life. Your optimism and playful attitude make this almost inevitable. Typically, you are flexible enough to roll with the punches, even those that make contact with the most tender areas of your inner self, but there will be moments when you wish you were more cautious and less inclined to lead with an open heart.
There is often something unusual about the way in which you express your feelings. People often remark on your originality. Part of this originality comes out of the fact that you tend to reflect, in a very specific way, the environment in which you live. However, it can also be attributed to the freedom and creativity that characterize your emotional life. Even when you are communicating the most commonplace emotions, you do it with a flair that is all your own.
The Moon in the Fifth House with the Sun in the Fourth
You may think that the structure (or in some cases, the lack of structure) of your upbringing prevented you from actualizing your true self, that it in some way limited your creativity and emotional development. This may have caused you to look for emotional support outside your family. You might have seemed like a rebel to your parents, but, in reality, your actions had little to do with your attitude toward authority. Instead, you just never quite felt at home when you were at home.
As an adult, you have likely sought to create a home in which these perceived gaps in your upbringing are filled, both for yourself and for your children. Often this means allowing yourself and your children more freedom than you had growing up, but in some cases it can mean adding more restrictions. It all depends on what you feel you missed.
However, if you look closely, you may find that the home you create as an adult is surprisingly similar to the one in which you grew up. If you look even closer, you might see that the restrictions you struggled against in your youth had less to do with your parents than with your own inborn conservatism. You might seek to defy and escape this cautious, conventional side of your nature, but it will always call you back. In a sense, it is your real home, and you need it more than you probably care to admit.
The Moon in the Fifth House with the Sun in the Fifth
Boy oh boy, if only you had the guts to do everything you dream about doing—to throw aside the confines of decorum, politeness, and dignity and just go for it, whatever “it” happens to be. But then you think of rules you’d have to break and the emotional connections that would likely be severed. There would be criticism, disapproval, and maybe even a court appearance or two, and all of your obsessions and vulnerabilities would be exposed to the world. Could you endure it? You have to wonder.
Some of you may be up to this challenge. You push ahead with your creative agenda regardless of the risk of disapproval, rejection, or embarrassment. However, many others (perhaps most) with this placement will hold back. You want to first perfect your creation, your plan, your style, or whatever it is you wish to express. You want to embellish and polish it until it is impervious to all criticism, until it is a shining emblem of your pride, your talent, your skill, and your passion.
Whether you are in the first or second category of this combination will greatly depend on other factors in the horoscope. However, it is unlikely that even the most cautious of you will escape some embarrassing moments. You are just too prone to experimentation, too ready to put your delicate inner self at risk. Your overriding need to express your feelings will always leave you at least somewhat exposed to criticism and disapproval.
The Moon in the Fifth House with the Sun in the Sixth
You possess an essential humility that not only keeps you grounded, it also helps you avoid taking extraordinary risks with your emotional security. You understand you cannot be effective if you are constantly feeling vulnerable and exposed. Risks taken at an intimate, emotional level can destroy, or at least damage, any achievement you experience elsewhere in your life. So, you play it safe.
Or at least you try. Having the Moon in the Fifth means that you can never totally escape the temptation to put everything—all your feelings, insecurities, and fears—on the line. The fact is that most people with this combination get themselves in trouble by being too open, too trusting, and too much in love at least once or twice in their lives. It is those experiences that keep you humble. It is also those experiences that remind you of both the thrills you’re missing and the pain you are avoiding.
There are those who will tell you that you are too humble and too risk-averse. They will say that you are trading the exhilaration of blind passion for emotional security, that you are stifling your creativity and dealing yourself out of the great game of life. But you are wise enough to know that life is not a game, that it is full of painful realities like heartache, humiliation, and emotional trauma. Avoiding these realities, or at least mitigating them, just makes sense.
The Moon in the Fifth House with the Sun in the Seventh
Relationships can be difficult for you. You often appear too ready to open up your heart and surrender your will. Your need for the “other,” for a partner in life, is such that it can blind you to more immediate needs and important realities. For this reason, every relationship is a gamble for you. Sometimes you win and win big. And sometimes you lose. The condition of the Sun in the Seventh and the situation with Venus and Mars will tell us which is most likely, but the risk is always there.
Even when you win, it’s not always for the best. Winning too easily can inspire you to spin the wheel again and take a chance on someone else who might, for one reason or another, be more desirable. It’s not that you are fickle or disloyal. It’s just that the thrill of making that big bet once again and maybe winning again is hard to resist. It can almost become addictive.
If winning the roulette of relationships is dangerous for you, losing can seem disastrous. You might withdraw into sour acrimony and swear never to play the game again. But not for long. Your need for a partner and the joy you find in taking the big risk keep you coming back to the table. This is probably the greatest strength of this combination. You may call it optimism. You may call it persistence. You may call it pure insanity. But, no matter how many times or how badly you lose, you keep on playing.
The Moon in the Fifth House with the Sun in the Eighth
You sometimes scare yourself. The openness of your Moon in the Fifth puts at risk the mystery that typically surrounds your feelings and motivations. You resist this openness because you understand the complexity of your emotional life too well to casually open it up to strangers, or even to close friends. They might misunderstand your goals and misconstrue your opinions. They might become as lost in the complexity that is you as you often are.
For this reason, you often play a double game. With a flourish and a smile, you seem to offer up all your warts and blemishes and you pretend that you don’t care. You let people see what seems to be the worst of you while, behind the scenes, you are busy hiding the really important stuff. This is particularly easy for people who are creative, who can hide behind a work of art or a character they play on stage, but even for them, this is a dangerous ploy.
What’s dangerous about this double game is that, while other people are diverted and maybe even entertained by your self-deprecating display, you are left alone with your real complexity, your real fear, your real subconscious demons. You were not meant to work on this mystery by yourself. That’s what your Fifth House Moon is trying to tell you. It is only by taking the risk and introducing people to the real you that this enigma will be brought to light and the creative potential hiding within its shadows will be released to the world.
The Moon in the Fifth House with the Sun in the Ninth
You have strong beliefs and you are willing to stand tall and declare those beliefs to all and sundry. Your emotional life is something you prefer not to think about. Feelings, fears, and all that irrational, subconscious junk may have their place, but they mustn’t interfere with the clarity of your thoughts and your ability to articulate your beliefs. This is particularly the case when Air and Fire signs dominate the horoscope, but even when they do not, there is always a part of you that wishes the Moon would just shut up and let you get back to preaching.
Of course, being in the Fifth House, your Moon is not going to shut up. It’s going to continue to test boundaries and reach out. It may make itself heard through creativity, either in the arts or other activities, but if this avenue is not available, the Moon will resort to tantrums, silly sentimentality, and unfortunate love affairs. You may find yourself working desperately to preserve the purity of your ideas against a relentless tide of emotional need and subjectivity.
The way to avoid this kind of inner warfare is by honoring your emotional life and accepting the fact that ideas that don’t touch the heart have limited value. Your Fifth House Moon can be a means of reaching out to other people, of charming them and applying human scale to your grand plans. More importantly, it makes you a more empathetic and approachable person, someone who can stand tall and declare his or her beliefs and actually have people listen.
The Moon in the Fifth House with the Sun in the Tenth
People generally identify you as an ambitious person and respect your work ethic, creativity, and determination to succeed. What they may not notice, however, is the degree to which your successes are linked to your emotionality. Your willingness to expose your vulnerabilities to the world, to risk rejection and humiliation, is as much a part of your rise in life as any talent or skill.
That’s why it’s so painful for you when you don’t succeed. It is also why you keep striving even after, by any practical measure, you’ve accomplished as much as or more than anyone could want. Success is proof that you can offer the world your heart, and the world will not only accept you, it will hand you great rewards. Failure, on the other hand, is like an affidavit declaring to the world that you are not worthy of love.
How you will react to the burning indictment of failure is something we can only know by looking at the rest of the horoscope. However, the most common reaction for people with this combination is to try again, and again, and again. This is not a matter of determination. Nor is it, as some people might say, a matter of stubborn pride. You keep on striving for success because that is the only way you can prove to the world (and also to yourself ) that you are worthy of love and the comfort and security that come with it.
The Moon in the Fifth House with the Sun in the Eleventh
You are not the sort of person who expects to fit in just anywhere. You recognize that your innate creativity and somewhat reckless attitude can make you seem like an oddball and a rebel. Still, like most people with the Sun in the Eleventh, you are looking for a community. You are looking for a group of people who share your boldness and sense of play, a group in which you will not feel odd or out of place.
Of course, this community will have to respect your individuality and your need to be creative. You have a deep desire to be part of something larger than yourself, but only on your terms and only if it fits into your agenda. The group that allows you this kind of freedom and autonomy can count on your eternal loyalty, even though the ways in which you display this loyalty might be unpredictable.
Even though it would seem that you are exceptionally picky when it comes to pledging your loyalty to a group or cause, the possibility of choosing the wrong one is always there. Choosing a community simply because it appeals to your vanity or gives you a sense of control and grandeur is never going to work out well for you. You need to be aware of your own weaknesses and stay clear of any group that might exaggerate them.
The Moon in the Fifth House with the Sun in the Twelfth
Life imposes limitations on us all, but, as far as you are concerned, the ones it has imposed on you are simply not fair. You feel you have the right, even the obligation, to fight against these limitations in every way you can. This is an all-out, no-holds-barred battle, and, at times, it requires you to behave in ways that are startling and extreme. This might cause some people, particularly people close to you, to wonder about the wisdom of your fight.
Listening to these people might not be a bad idea. The fact is that most of the restrictions you are so determined to crash through are actually there to guide you. They are there to keep your energy and your ego focused on the only path that is meaningful for a person with the Sun in the Twelfth House. That is the inward journey toward spiritual understanding and self-knowledge.
You may feel that such a journey leaves you little room to exercise the creativity and sense of play that come with your Moon in the Fifth, but the same limitations that direct your inward journey can also help you focus your creativity. Once you agree to live within these restrictions, they can add substance and inspiration to your creative endeavors and make those creations a reflection of your inward journey.