Moon Magic
Where we see nightmare
terrors, once people saw strangeness and otherworldliness, imagining the
moonlit night as the realm of the Faerie Folk.
The Hollow Hills, lit by the silvery light of the Moon, were inhabited
by the beautiful, magical fays or the People of the Sidhe, very like the
magical elves of Tolkien's Middle-Earth.
Although the faeries have been connected with the spirits of the dead,
they are rarely depicted as truly malevolent.
At most they are tricksters who make fun of clumsy humans. Like the land of the dead, their land exists
out of time; there is no death, no age, no sickness, no ugliness. It is a moonlit land where its inhabitants
feast, dance and make music, and while there is no death there, there are many
accounts of births.5
While there is a
psychological danger of getting lost in such a fantasy world, the real peril
for a mortal going to the Faerie realm is that you lose your sense of
time. The tales say that humans who go
there for a night of feasting and rejoicing soon find out upon returning to
this world that many years have passed away.
We fear getting lost in such a world, but we also fear losing the world
as we know it, which is the price of living with this new vision. Faerie is the land of our hopes and
dreams. Inevitably, it is the gifts we
bring back to our own world from that realm that make the lost time fruitful.
But this realm of
feminine, lunar consciousness does not lead to lunacy if we approach it with
consciousness. We have to wear the
golden dress of the Sun before we can dance in the silvery dress of the Moon.
The Moon symbolizes the light in the unconscious, the ability to bring
conscious awareness to the unconscious, a necessary task if we want to nurture
our Souls. We do this when we pay
respectful attention to our dreams and intuitions, our feelings and instincts;
listening to their wisdom gives us greater insights into our life choices and
those of others.
If we can look at our nocturnal nature, with
its strangeness (which really isn't so strange) and its otherworldliness
(worlds which are open for exploration), if we can look at it without fear and
terror, we might find its true magic and learn to integrate it in
consciousness. Anyone who has worked
with her own dreams will understand this.
Our unconscious visions and dreams can fertilize our daily lives, and
give us direction and wisdom. As a
source of our dreams, and therefore of our creativity, the Moon was revered as
the Muse of the Arts. And as the cyclic
pattern governing all life and renewal, the Moon shows us that times of rest,
meditation, vision and gestation (the fallow times) are as important a part of
life as times of growth and production.
The time spent in Faerie is well spent if we return with creative vision
and birth it in this world.
Possibly the reason the
moonlight is potentially so frightening to us is that it covers over our
daylight reality with enchantment, giving everything a new look, an unfamiliar
shaping, an unrealistic blending. The
night is alive with shapes and sounds that we do not see or hear in the
daylight world, or shut up within our houses.
As a culture, we have chosen the daylight and rationality, so we devalue
a light and a consciousness which is unfocused and ever-changing.
In the moonlight, the
boundaries of things are blurred; new relationships are imaginable. Things flow in and out of each other as the
light moves. Dark and light interact in
one sphere to create wholeness, unlike the Sun which creates an opposition of
light and darkness. Solar consciousness
is the driving force behind our culture, and it is associated with the
masculine principle. It is a consciousness
that separates and discriminates, makes boundaries and creates shadows. Lunar consciousness, associated with the
feminine principle, dissolves those boundaries and unites things. It takes in discrimination and transforms it
into discernment, turns boundaries into transitions and shadows into
doorways. Just as the world needs both
lights in the sky, we need both types of consciousness. To honor both types of light equally, we have
to learn how to feel our way in the dark until it is just as comfortable as
moving through the light.
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