The Moon
in the Ninth House
You look to a belief system or ideal for your emotional security. It may be a religion, a political party, or a philosophical system. It might also be a social cause or a lifestyle choice. You may share this belief with a worldwide organization, or it may exist nowhere but inside your own head. All that matters is that the ideals or beliefs you’ve espoused lift you above the day-to-day grind to a place where you feel pure, free, and invulnerable.
Your association with these ideals and beliefs is personal. It is emotional and highly subjective. For that reason, you have to be very careful about the ideals and beliefs with which you align yourself. Ideas change. They flow into broader streams of thinking. You, on the other hand, are often too emotionally invested in the ideas you follow to notice this change. Therefore, if you are not wary, you can find yourself committed to aims that have nothing to do with your overall morality or to ideals that have become devalued and corrupted.
Because of the emotionality with which you approach your faith or your ideals, there is no room for halfway measures. Whether it is a hot political issue or a perceived social injustice, you hold nothing back. You express your fervor openly and with pride. This kind of loyalty and willingness to fight for what you believe can be a wonderful thing, but it can also cause you to take any attack or questioning of your belief system or enthusiasm as a personal affront. There’s a fine line between fervor and fanaticism, and, with the Moon in the Ninth, you have to be constantly aware of it.
The Moon in the Ninth House with the Sun in the First
You have a lot of confidence in yourself and in your ideals. This can give you a certain authority. People respond to your commitment and your enthusiasm. Sometimes they join you. Sometimes they support you. Sometimes they just get out of your way, but they will always have a sense that, in a world in which so many people drift without a plan or a guiding principle, you know precisely where you are going.
This may not be exactly true. Your ideas might give you guidance, but, because your association with those ideas is emotional, where that guidance takes you is not always predictable or definite. There may be times when this mixture of idealism and emotionality will betray you, when they lead you to expound ideas and beliefs that are bad both for the world and for you.
This is one reason why you need to be extra careful about the ideas you pursue. The other reason is because your ideals and beliefs tend to become part of your identity. You express what you believe so forcefully and with such confidence that people tend to see you and the idea as synonymous. That’s fine when it’s a good idea that you want to hold on to for life. It’s not so fine when it’s a flawed idea that you wish people would forget you mentioned.
The Moon in the Ninth House with the Sun in the Second
There is often a fair amount of pragmatism in the way you choose your beliefs, ideals, and enthusiasms. For you, these ideals aren’t just a way of lifting your inner being to a point above the hard knocks of real life, they are also a way of making a profit in real life. When this works it can be a marvelous thing, combining your emotionality with your practical instincts. However, when it doesn’t, it can make sustaining those beliefs difficult.
Your ideals and beliefs, along with the emotions that guide them, do not always do well in a practical, worldly setting. There, they are measured and weighed. They become commodities, trivialized and handled by people who could never understand the emotional connection you have with these beliefs. You might think that this won’t matter, but, taken out of the context of your emotionality, those ideals and beliefs that were once so dear to you will never look the same.
With this combination, a lot will depend on the rest of the horoscope, whether it is the realist in you or the idealist that is emphasized. However, no matter how much of a realist you are, you won’t get far without some connection to a higher ideal or power. Without such a belief system, you will feel emotionally adrift and exposed. No amount of material success will satisfy you. You will always be looking for that thrill, that sense of infinite possibilities that only comes from reaching out to something outside your world of practical concerns.
The Moon in the Ninth House with the Sun in the Third
Your idealism often gets tangled up in the specific. You need to believe, you need to reach out to a higher purpose or commit to a philosophical system, but your focus on the immediate, on the day-to-day issues of your small world, seems to always trip you up. You are forced into halfway belief and halfway idealism, and you are left feeling cramped and frustrated.
This is not to say that you cannot accomplish great things with this combination. When your attention to detail and your understanding of the big issues are working together, there’s little that can stop you. But they don’t always work together. Very often they pull you in opposite directions. This can cause you to seem ambivalent and slow in making commitments.
The reason you are often slow to make definitive decisions is because you need to see a problem from both above and below, from a broad, generalized perspective and from an intimate, practical viewpoint. Some may tell you that you think about things too much, but thinking about problems in this way is actually your greatest strength. It allows you to understand the way problems fit into a larger context and also to see the immediate, practical things you can do to fix them. Your way of doing things may be slow and indirect, but, when used properly, it gets result.
The Moon in the Ninth House with the Sun in the Fourth
What you believe has a lot to do with how you were brought up, and your attitude toward your upbringing is, to a large extent, the product of what you believe. At times this can be a great advantage, allowing you to blend your highest hopes for the future with your fondest memories of the past. At other times this can be an impediment, making it difficult for you to adapt your ideas to a changing world.
It is possible that following your beliefs will take you far away from your home, either physically or in terms of lifestyle or attitude. This might produce a rift between you and your parents or the world in which you grew up. However, your ideals and beliefs are always going to have a strong emotional component, and these emotions are going to eventually take you back to the nurturing and security you felt (or wish that you felt) in your childhood home.
Essentially, you are conservative. This may not always be evident in your politics or your principles. In these matters, you will tend to follow the example of your parents or, in some cases, react against it. However, regardless of the beliefs you declare or the candidates you vote for, you are driven by a deep respect for tradition and stability. In the end, these are the values that will guide you.
The Moon in the Ninth House with the Sun in the Fifth
You appreciate the thrill of being emotionally invested in your ideals and beliefs. It fits in well with the passionate way you live your life, and it often helps stimulate your creativity. Still, there are moments when your high-minded sense of purpose interferes with your fun, when you are torn between doing what you want to do (which usually means following your passion) and living up to your ideals.
How you react to this dilemma, whether you are more drawn to the pleasure or the principle, will depend on other factors in your horoscope, but the theme of passion versus idealism will likely be a constant in your life. It will complicate what might otherwise seem like obvious choices and sometimes cause you to question your moral standing. Even when you appear most sure of yourself, a part of you either mourns a passion that was thwarted or feels guilty over an ideal or belief that was soiled.
Despite this difficulty, there is much to like about this combination. The idealism represented by your Ninth House Moon can lift your passions above the commonplace and give purpose to your creative endeavors. This placement of the Moon gives you something outside yourself to be passionate about. It intermingles intuition with inspiration and idealism with desire. You may not always be consistent or precise, but you will never be boring.
The Moon in the Ninth House with the Sun in the Sixth
You would like to live your life in accordance with the ideas and beliefs of your Ninth House Moon, but sometimes it’s just not convenient. You have to go another way, even though you know that later on you will pay with feelings of guilt and a sense that your insistence on expedience has cost you something in terms of both self-respect and purity.
You might tell yourself and others that you will do better next time, but, very often, next times come and go and you repeat the same pattern. It’s not that you don’t see the value of your higher instincts. It’s not that you don’t feel better when you do the things that your ideals demand. It’s that your measure of success and rightness is efficiency, and being a paragon of some belief system is not always conducive to that aim.
You do better when your ideals and beliefs are directed toward service to others. This takes your motivation out of the rarified realm of the higher mind and brings it down to basic human interactions. Efficiency in the pursuit of service is as laudable an idea as anyone could imagine, and it gives you the sense of rectitude and purity that your emotionality requires.
The Moon in the Ninth House with the Sun in the Seventh
Since your emotional connection with your belief structure is strong, you tend to seek out partners who think like you do. The image of two minds in endless agreement going down the same path, thinking the same thoughts at the same time, comforts you. It might even become part of your ideology. Of course, like many ideals, this dream is unlikely to ever be matched by reality.
Actually, this kind of idyllic compatibility probably would not be in your best interest. You need disagreement, argument, and criticism. Argument is the means by which ideas are sharpened and beliefs tested. Without someone with contrary opinions in your life, your thought processes soften and your ideals grow stale and irrelevant. Despite the comfort and security you feel in the presence of the person who always agrees with you, you are often better off with a partner whose ideas and experiences differ from yours.
Of course, people don’t always do what is best for them, particularly when it requires work and compromise. It will be easy for you to settle into a relationship with someone who shares your point of view. You might be very happy for a while, but at some point you are likely to get bored with all that agreement. What this does to your relationship will depend on other factors in the horoscope. Generally, though, for a person with the Moon in the Ninth, boredom is the ultimate deal-breaker.
The Moon in the Ninth House with the Sun in the Eighth
You tend to look upon your own idealism with profound mistrust. You want to believe. You need to believe. But there’s an optimism in those beliefs and ideals that simply does not match the way you feel about the world. In some cases, this doubt can make you a wiser believer, an idealist who understands the limits of his or her ideals. In others, it can lead to cynicism and a sense that these big ideas and high-minded principles don’t matter.
When you do believe, however, you tend to gravitate toward extreme ideas and theories. Your general mistrust of other people makes it easy for you to mistrust authority figures, and you are always going to be prone to doubt whatever is the most popular or accepted notion. Because of this contrarian attitude, people might label you a rebel or a troublemaker, but your loyalty to these extreme opinions is neither deep nor particularly fervent. More than anything, it amuses you to see how other people react to these extreme opinions.
The ideas that really grip your emotions are of a different order. They are not found among the clouds of philosophy or religion. They live in the darkest depths of the human soul. They are questions about life and death and good and evil—about pain, suffering, and futility. It is only when you are talking and thinking about these issues that your cynicism falls away and you are able to say, without hesitation or irony, “I believe.”
The Moon in the Ninth House with the Sun in the Ninth
You are a seeker. You seek answers to the big questions and explore the broad issues that relate to all of humanity. The ways in which you pursue this search will vary. Some of you might turn to philosophy or religion, others to politics and social movements. Still others might seek thrills and adventure in the real world. How you approach this search doesn’t matter. What matters is that you never stop seeking.
It’s not easy being a seeker. To other people, you often seem restless and distracted. It’s hard for you to focus on mundane problems and necessities. You might have to count on other people to attend to these matters for you. On the other hand, you tend to be a couple steps ahead of everyone else when it come to understanding the overarching issues of life. This can make you a prophet, but it can also leave you standing alone, proclaiming all the great things your search has revealed to no one in particular.
Since your emotional life is intertwined with your idealism, your feelings sometimes seem to float above the normal discourse of human interactions. You might feel like an emotional misfit and sustaining a relationship might be difficult for you. However, you do need other people in your life. Your relationships with other people keep your search relevant and tied to basic human concerns. While the goal you are seeking might be purity in faith and thought, seeking out a friend or two along the way is not a bad idea.
The Moon in the Ninth House with the Sun in the Tenth
You understand that what you believe has a great bearing on how people see you, so you choose your causes and beliefs with care. You want to be seen as a good person, as a person with firm convictions and high moral standards. Of course, a lot of people want to be seen in this way, but for you, it is more than just an act. It is an emotional necessity.
When it comes to your beliefs and ideals, you often present yourself with an air of superiority. The manner in which you identify with your principles seems to place you on a higher moral plane. This attitude carries with it a certain degree of responsibility. Others might be allowed to slack off on their ideals, but not you. For you, holding to your beliefs is a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week job. Even when no one is looking, you feel compelled to stay true.
There are times when this hardcore attitude toward your principles and beliefs will set you apart from the crowd, when it will make you seem odd and out of step. You accept this as part of your role, part of your task as a paragon and a leader. You may see yourself as teaching people through your example. This is fine, as long as you recognize that being a paragon and a teacher is a tough job and, most of the time, a very lonely one.
The Moon in the Ninth House with the Sun in the Eleventh
You need to share your ideals with a community of people who think and feel as you do. You will likely identify strongly with this community, and the beliefs and principles of this group will greatly influence your own. In many cases, your extreme devotion to these principles will make you a leader within the group. At other times, it will just cause people to look at you funny.
You tend to see issues that seem purely intellectual and objective to other people as deeply personal. It is often difficult for you to argue these points with an intellectual distance. Your extraordinary fervor might make you feel superior, and, in some cases, you might feel resentment toward members of your community who don’t share your steadfastness and outspoken loyalty.
This blend of idealism and emotionality will always make you stand out in any group or community. However, if you really want to become a force within that group and actually get things done, you are going to have to play some politics. You are going to have to step back from your emotionality and make compromises. Depending on your horoscope, this might be difficult for you, but it is the only means by which you will ever turn your ideals into realities.
The Moon in the Ninth House with the Sun in the Twelfth
It’s hard for you to take any philosophy or system of belief that depends totally on the rational mind seriously. For you, the true search for meaning goes on deep within the psyche. It is a matter of feelings, spirituality, and the code of the unconscious. You can certainly play with these rational belief systems. You can argue with and against them and even pretend that your are convinced by them for a short time, but sooner or later your attention will be drawn back to your own personal search for truth.
Other people may misread your motivations. They might see the playful attitude with which you treat seemingly momentous concepts and call you insincere, uninformed, or simply foolish. They don’t understand that the big ideas that drive you don’t float high among the clouds. They are not things you can argue about over a beer. They involve the mysteries of the universe and the even greater mystery of human consciousness.
Still, you often find comfort and emotional release in hashing over these more intellectual systems. Holding on to some element of rational discourse can be a great help to you. There are moments in any inward journey when a touch of objectivity can keep you from getting lost in some subjective cul-de-sac or foolishly assuming you’ve found the answer to questions that are unanswerable. Let your higher mind be your backstop, your tether to objective reality, while the inward journey that is your true mission goes on beneath the surface.