CHAPTER SIX
STANDING
ON THE MOON: ANOTHER VIEW OF OUR WORLD
"Mommy,
did you know that we live inside the moon?"
My son Gregory,
age 4
"Why
don't you come in, Curdie?" said the voice. "Did you never see moonlight
before?"
"Never
without a moon," answered Curdie, in a trembling tone, but gathering
courage.
"Certainly
not," returned the voice, which was thin and quivering: "I never saw
moonlight without a moon."
"But
there's no moon outside," said Curdie.
"Ah!
but you're inside now," said the voice.
The Princess and Curdie
George MacDonald
There
is something magical about the Moon.
Unlike the Sun which we cannot look at directly, we instinctively turn
our eyes toward the Moon when we look at the night sky. The Moon attracts our attention. The
Moon symbolizes the Imaginal Realm where thought-forms, archetypes and stories
take shape. Always shifting, always
mysterious, light and dark, delusions and imagination are at play. Life itself revealed in images! What possibilities will you chose to live?
What story, what symbol will you follow?
When we stand on the Moon, we stand at the doorway of creation, the
bubbling cauldron of creativity. What
will we make of our lives? What will
satisfy us? The Moon holds sway
here. Change is the only constant. She is process and growth, transparent and
veiled. She is our light through the
darkness of creation.
We Live Inside the Moon
Like the Moon in this
fairy tale, women tend to think of others even when we're enjoying
ourselves. Like the Moon, women are
nurturers. Throughout the ages though,
when comparing women to the moon, men have most often berated us for our
changeability. But changing our minds
about something, or being caught up in different emotions throughout a day,
doesn't take away the fact of our essential reliability and caring concern. In the midst of our changes, women stay
centered in what's important to us: love, family, work, creativity. That's why it is women who will put our minds
and hearts into creating change in the world.
After all, we do know something about it!
Allerleirauh's dress that shines like the Moon
symbolizes this gift of change-ability, as well as the psychic component that
engenders this type of flexibility: the power of the unconscious, which picks
up clues from our environment and tells us what we need to know to survive, to
prosper and to regenerate. Psychic
abilities, intuitive flashes, visions, dreams, feelings all find their source
in the unconscious. This Moon dress
symbolizes the realm of the Creative Imagination. When Allerleirauh wears her dress of
moonlight, she uses her imagination to understand her world. And when she listens, she channels that
wisdom into her life.
The Woman Clothed with the Sun STANDS on the Moon. What does
it mean to take this Moon consciousness as our standpoint? To take our stand on the Moon might appear to
be risky, since constant change seems to be pretty shaky ground. A masculine perspective on this image of the
Woman has interpreted it as having
domination over that changeability. Men
are often afraid of the unconscious. But
don't forget that the Woman also has
the Earth as her center, and it gives her the balance to go with the flow and
ebb of life.
When my son Gregory told me we live inside the
Moon, he spoke with a child's imagination, and he spoke the truth. Jesus said, “Unless you become like little
children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” I believe it is this childlike imagination
that he spoke of. We have to play more with our imagination if we want to
become wise.
This imagination is how we understand our part in
Earth’s ecology. When we are in touch
with the natural rhythms of life, we more easily find the balance between work,
pleasure, family and creativity. The
rhythms of life still beat strongly within us and when we disregard them, we
find ourselves ill or at odds with ourselves.
My dream of stealing the calendar and being called to stay by the
children called me back to the rhythms of life.
To understand what these rhythms are, we have to understand the impact
the Moon has on us, as it helps to set the rhythms of life on Earth.
The Moon Mother
When we lost touch with the feminine mysteries of
the ancient Goddess, we were banished from our home inside the Moon. Small children know and remember their true
home, but as we grow up, we forget for the most part, how to live in the
natural rhythms of life which the Moon Goddess - perpetual renewal, the measure
of time, the weaver of fate - represented to her ancient worshipers. Most of us have no idea what power and effect
the Moon has over us or the world around us.
However, what was lost can be found, for the Moon still travels across
the night sky and still sheds her silvery light upon our darkness.
The first thing we
observe about the Moon is that it changes shape, unlike the Sun, which appears
the same every day and never fails to rise and set, full and round all through
the day. The Moon grows larger, then
smaller, waxing and waning as it travels across the sky. It rises at different times during the night
and at different spots on the horizon.
And it even completely disappears for three nights. But it comes back, and begins the process
over again. Small wonder that early
humanity projected its imagination onto the Moon, since they experienced it as
a monthly cycle that regulated time, its rhythms governing the tides, women's
menstrual cycles, plant life and weather.
Ancient peoples
observed that the Moon made the fertilizing moisture that makes living things
grow and thrive: plants and animals as well as human beings. The Moon Mother, imagined as a vessel of
water, fertility and fecundity, was the source of being and becoming. It was an aspect of the Great Mother who
"established a unifying pattern for all living things, living and
breathing in harmony, existing in an intricate and ineffable web."2 And because they could live with
contradictions, these ancient peoples also believed the Moon was the land of
the dead, the place souls went to between incarnations. Just as the Moon dies and is reborn, so souls
go to the Moon to await rebirth. The
creative life cycle of birth-death-rebirth is prefigured in the changing
Moon.
As
I mentioned, women naturally understand this rhythm of change, because our
bodies respond to these changing rhythms.
Men have a harder time adjusting to this cycle. They don’t know how to relate to their own
changing moods, and so ignore them as inconsequential. Women's greatest gift, our ability to adapt
to change, has been used against us to demonstrate that we are not as rational, and therefore not as reliable
or responsible as men. Many of us,
adapting to the role of good Father’s Daughter, have tried to become more
consistent. But at what cost?
Once again, men used themselves as
the measure of all things, and their own lack of adaptability became the
standard. But not anymore. Now the world needs people who can change,
who can let go of what is outdated and open to new ideas and new possibilities. It is a perfect time for women to step
forward and use our strengths and set new standards for what makes a full and
rich life. Life is about change and if
women want to live up to our potentials, we have to consciously take our
standpoint on the Moon. When the ancient Goddess religions were suppressed under Christianity,
her manifestations were split up. On one
hand, some of her light qualities were attributed to the Church and to the
Virgin Mary. Her darker, mysterious
qualities, however, were soon associated with the Devil and with witchcraft,
for Christianity accepted the heavenly attributes of the feminine while rejecting
the earthy spirit of the Goddess. The
Earth and women, who were seen as creatures of the earth and of the body, were
relegated to the darkness of sin.
Consequently, our culture developed a split between the heavenly
feminine and the earthy feminine. This
is the problem the fairy tale Allerleirauh is trying to solve. How do women reunite our earthy wisdom with
the heavenly wisdom we've inherited?
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