The Story of The Moon

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She remembers a dream from long ago, a story half finished, or perhaps finished but never begun, echoing in the distant reaches of her memories, calling to her, inviting her back in, luring her with promises of understanding. She has never liked to leave anything unfinished, so she feels that the time has come for the story to emerge, like a wrinkled brown moth from a crusty chrysalis; she must let it out into the light of life so that it can dry its beautiful wings and fly unfettered and free into the light of the moon. Walking up the stairs, each step brings her closer to her annihilation, closer to the hang man’s noose. Fear clanks silently around her ankles, filling her ears with the thin feral scream of a mother, grieving for a long lost child. The door stands like a loathed headmaster, forbidding and stern, but the devil is in her now, and with a bid for bravery, she pushes open the door to expose the fluttering shroud of the portal.

Walking mystified disorientated and confused into the summer light, she studies the land before her, finding that she is standing in front of an ancient temple complex. The sand of millennia encroaches upon its dry, desiccated walls, perhaps the ruins of some forgotten deity, or more likely the architectural pride of some long forsaken King of antiquity. She stands for what seems to be an age, rooted in place like a stubborn desert plant, waiting for water, waiting for nourishment and counting the grains of sand as they measure the infinity of time passing in this immortal realm. Finally, she senses a change, a slight difference in the temperature, a cooling of the sun perhaps, and she turns to see that the sun is now setting towards the horizon, with a rapidity that she finds alarming.

Shivering suddenly, she feels a deep coldness growing behind her, a lurking presence that grows with each second, rising up like a child’s nameless monster to overwhelm and devour her, to engulf her life and to toss it carelessly, unnamed and unknown, into a void of oblivion, to sink without trace for eternity into an ink dark sea. Turning slowly and inexorably, as she knows that she must, she turns full circle to meet with her nightmare, her nemesis her saviour, she turns to face the beauty and the horror that is The Moon.

Tall towers rise up before her, their jackal headed sentries, silent and foreboding, and she walks into a land of encroaching darkness, suffocating fear and the terror that she always knew was here. Strange shapes loom and magnify, cloaked in unidentifiable sounds, soft, tearing, rooting noises, terrifying in their obscurity. Rapacious animal grunts, and their incoherent moaning retaliations, stutter from behind shadowy rocks whilst she trips, stumbles and feels her way into the darkening maw. In the end she is lost, completely subdued by fear and immobilized with helpless horror. She crouches, with her back against a rock, not knowing what to do, and like a small child, she wonders that if she shuts her eyes, whether everything will go away.

Closing her eyes, she asks for help, guessing that in some distant part of herself, that she is asking for her mother to come, to save her from the monsters, to make it all go away, and she begins to imagine herself as a malleable golden form, soft and featureless, sitting in her head. She finds a small hole at the bottom of her skull, and begins to squeeze and inch her way through it, sliding down into the cavity behind her heart. The soft golden form that is her, elongates and morphs, stretching like elastic, gathering momentum until suddenly it drops down, filling the space behind her heart comfortably, like a marmalade cat, purring gently in a chair. The golden ball brings silence, she is at peace, her new vision enabling her to see directly into the heart of the matter, unencumbered by fear; the world looks entirely different.

The sun rises above the distant hills and she walks with renewed confidence towards the beautifully carved statues that guard the valley, her fears fragment into ashes beneath her feet, becoming dust on the lifting breeze. With her golden heart, she journeys into the sunrise, the blessed rays shining on the teardrops sliding down her sandstone cheeks. Like a statue of Nefertiti that she had once seen in Egypt, she stands sentry, gazing into the royal majesty of the Atlas Mountains, bewitched and inconspicuous.

As the sun rises, chasing away the desert of darkness that had seemed so powerful, the difficult memories flutter like moths wings into her mind, but like moths, they fly away from the darkness and into the light, and she notices the heavy blocks at the beginning of the temple complex, and the way some small plants have started to grow in the slight dampness of their shade, helped by the dung that has been left behind by passing camels. Even here in the searing aridity, are the beginnings of fertility.

Challenging you to face what you are most afraid of, The Moon can also mask your fears with the illusion that everything is just fine; or you may refrain from asking questions, due to a fear of discovering an uncomfortable truth. The Moon is also strongly connected to life cycles, and the difficult journeys of physical change that lead us into the unknown, rites of passage which all of us must venture through.

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XVIII The Moon
Zodiacal Trump of Pisces
The ruler of the Flux & Reflux
The Child of the Sons of the Mighty

Jupiter & Neptune Rule
Venus in Exaltation

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