Dance of the Moon

dance

of the

moon

About the Author Dan Furst has worked as an actor, singer, storyteller, announcer, and narrator, and also as a writer, journalist, teacher, and ceremonial artist in his native New York, as well as in Japan, India, Hawaii, and Egypt. He’s created ritual theatre at many Earth festivals, and has played Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, the Green Man, King Harvest, the Holly King, Pan, the Sun Banana, and other roles. He now lives the Dance of the Moon in Cusco, Peru.

Dan has been a professional astrologer for thirty-two years. His writing on astrology, myth, and celebration appears on his Hermes3 .net website, along with his holistic theatre piece “When It Rained in Egypt,” and his most widely-read work, the “Universal Festival Calendar,” which has been cited and reprinted in many websites and publications, and has made him one of the world’s respected authorities on the common elements of meaning and sacred practice in the spiritual calendars and ritual time of Earth’s peoples.

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DAN FURST

d a n c e

of the

moon

CELEBRATING THE SACRED CYCLES OF THE EARTH

Llewellyn Publications Woodbury, Minnesota

Dance of the Moon: Celebrating the Sacred Cycles of the Earth © 2009 by Dan Furst. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First Edition First Printing, 2009 Book design by Donna Burch Cover art © 2008 by Chris Cocozza Cover design by Kevin R. Brown Editing by Connie Hill For a complete list of art credits, see pages 289–290 Editorial Note: Because this work encompasses myriad cultures and belief systems throughout the earth’s history, the publisher has elected to use the era designations: BCE and CE (Before Common Era, Common Era).

Llewellyn is a registered trademark of Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Furst, Dan. Dance of the moon : celebrating the sacred cycles of the earth / Dan Furst. ­­— 1st ed. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

ISBN 978-0-7387-1510-0 1. Occultism. 2. Time­—Miscellanea. 3. Calendar—Miscellanea. 4.

Moon­—Phases—Miscellanea. I. Title.

BF1999.F87 2009 203'.6—dc22

2009008477

Llewellyn Worldwide does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business transactions between our authors and the public.

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Llewellyn Publications A Division of Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd. 2143 Wooddale Drive, Dept. 978-0-7387-1510-0 Woodbury, Minnesota 55125-2989, U.S.A. www.llewellyn.com Printed in the United States of America

Contents Acknowledgments . . . ix List of Illustrations . . . xi Introduction . . . xiii Chapter 1: The Circle is Cast: Living in the Moon’s Time . . . 1 Chapter 2: The Earth Time of

the Celts . . . 15 Chapter 3: Four Beasts: The Great Mid-Season Festivals . . . 35 Chapter 4: Enter the Snow Dragon: Lunisolar Calendars . . . 61 Chapter 5: Going Like 60: Solstices and Equinoxes . . . 87 Chapter 6: The Zodiac Gets Official . . . 115 Chapter 7: Time Out! How 13 Got Unlucky . . . 143 Chapter 8: The Sacred Time of the Maya . . . 161 Chapter 9: Insh’allah, the Moon Appears: The Muslim Calendar . . . 181 Chapter 10: The Circle Is Cast Again: The Wheel of the Year . . . 199 Chapter 11: The Year According to Those Who Know . . . 213 Chapter 12: 2012 and Spiral Time . . . 259 Chapter 13: The Circle Opens . . . 275 Permissions . . . 283 Bibliography . . . 285

Acknowledgments The author is grateful to all the generous souls who have helped in the intending and birthing of this book: Elysia Gallo, Lynne Menturweck, Connie Hill, Kevin R. Brown, and Donna Burch at Llewellyn Worldwide for having shepherded the book into production and beautified it with superb illustrations.

Susan Lee Cohen for her encouragement in developing the idea of the book, and for her many useful suggestions on editing and content.

Pat Paquette, Alex Howard, Jane Randolph, and Katie Fisher for reading and commenting on the material of this book in its various sprouts of unfolding.

James Marcus for his invaluable help in facilitating communications with publishers, agents and the bank, and for dancing, not just walking, the talk of celebration.

Kevin Hughes for his guidance on communicating by computer from anywhere, even a desert during Sleep Month.

Adam Lebow, Rachael Angelese, Sheldan Collins and Valerie Shepherd, Mark Wilcox and Rebecca Sweet, Charles Priest, Kathleen, Van and Joya Fleming, Willow Chang and Sue Chang, Amy Sophia Marashinsky, Kelly Furst, Kevin Furst, Fodiaba and Kauakea Winston, Tjalle Eugster, Paula Martin, and Alan Moyers for many years of friendship, and for their kind hospitality to me on my journeys.

Michael Saiz, Dr. Samantha Tavares, Steven Rosenthal, Rob Kinslow, and Mark Simons for their examples of quiet warriorship and conscious living.

Nihal Schawky, Mahmoud Adel, Nihal Soliman, Sherifa Mostafa, and Nagham Osman for kindly helping me to “ride the wheel� of living in Egypt and get through a computer crisis three months before deadline.

Stephen Urgola of the American University in Cairo Rare Book Collections, and Karen Muldoon-Hules for help in locating and scanning illustrations. ix

/ Acknowledgments

M. Temple Richmond for superb and accurate astrological guidance through the time of writing and publishing.

Laura LaMetterey for preparing the final manuscript.

Leslie Zehr for the wisest advice of all on Egypt: “This is the country of the River. Go where she wants to take you, and you’ll be fine.”

List of Illustrations Figure 3-1: Fixed Cross of

Earth Seasonal Festivals . . . 37

Figure 4-1: Tao Yin-Yang Symbol . . . 67 Figure 5-1: Sun Elevations at Solstices and Equinoxes . . . 92 Figure 5-2: Cardinal Cross of

the Four Great Solar Festivals . . . 96

Figure 6-1: Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer, from John Flamsteed,

Atlas Coelestis (1729) . . . 126 Figure 6-2: Dendera Zodiac Detail . . . 130 Figure 6-3: Pole Stars Circle . . . 132 Figure 6-4: Precession of

Equinoxes . . . 133

Figure 6-5: Hellenistic Astrology Chart . . . 137 Figure 6-6: Ptolemy’s Cosmos . . . 140 Figure 8-1: Mayan Calendar Round . . . 165 Figure 8-2: Mayan Kin Day Glyphs . . . 167 Figure 10-1: Wheel of

Eight Sabbats . . . 204

Figure 12-1: The Dark Rift in the Milky Way . . . 264 Figure 12-2: 2012 at Tacana . . . 265 Figure 12-3: Yin Yang and Hunab-Ku . . . 271 Figure 12-4: Triple Spiral at Newgrange . . . 272

xi

Introduction

W

elcome to the Dance of the Moon. There’s room for you in the circle right here. We’re about to take a long trip in time over a span of about nine thousand years, from the ancient Age of Cancer farmers who first understood how to work with Earth for food, to our situation today, as a food and water crisis is but one of the environmental emergencies that people living in the early Age of Aquarius will have no choice but to address.

Like all dance stories, this one is full of turns and spirals as we keep traveling the same circle—in this case the wheel of the year.

We will track it by the Moon’s time, the seasons of the Earth year, the Sun’s time with and without the Moon, then religious and spiritual time, commercial and machine time, leading to where we are now. Our story, we hope, moves in the shape of a V. First, human beings are living healthy, happy communal lives; then they somehow bargain their happiness away, and now have unhealthy, unhappy, and insular lives. But in the end they have a choice. They can decide that human beings can never live in kindness and peace, and they will never get back out of the V. Others, though, can awaken and redirect their intentions to gain again the communities of peace and abundance that we once knew. Those people are the ones most likely to uncork the change for their own benefit, for others and the Earth.

They will all exit the V at the top. xiii

xiv / Introduction

While this book aspires to provide insight for the pleasure of people who still remain observers in these times, it is aimed mainly at celebrants who love and delight in the beauty of living things and the living body of Mother Earth. Those who are celebrants now will be the people most actively engaged in living the change they wish to see in others. They are likely to act in service to increase the happiness and relieve the suffering of other beings, and to see the transformative years ahead as humanity’s awakening into a new, spiritually-conscious era in which love and compassion are the arts of peace, and the dawn of our possibilities is not just a change we witness. We intend it. We bring it about.

So this book is more activist than analytical, aimed to assist those who’d like to clean up Mother Earth and live joyously with her. These people, from every culture and religious background on Earth, are already creating the sustainable new—in fact old—economy that once kept us well, and will do so again. They are also discovering and reinventing the rites of annual passage and order, celebrating them in ceremonies at the year’s great Sabbats and at the full Moon. One of their emerging communal skills is in making the transition from life in straight lines to life in circles. This is, in fact, the most serene way to live from now through 2012, and beyond.

No matter what dramatic changes occur, the linear, material rhythm of construction and collapse is no longer what applies. Those who perceive the world in terms of physical mass and weight can only imagine that the daring delicate feat of piling matter upward must be followed by ruin and fall: what goes up must come down.

But those who see the cosmos as circular and spiritual envision the laws of change as a cyclical dance in which what goes around must come around. It may take the shape of a circle, like the disc of the full Moon. Or the ellipse of a planet’s path. Or, as is most fitting in relation to our lives now, it may resemble the oscillating path of a pendulum, which only looks like a straight line when observed for a short time. A pendulum free to swing where it will can trace in time a cycle of thin, pointed ellipses that look like the petals of a chrysanthemum.

Introduction / xv

The very long back-and-forth swing of history’s pendulum that we are imagining begins some 8,600 years ago as the Great Year moves from the Age of Cancer to the Age of Gemini. The lunar, matriarchal old cultures who live in an intimate interdependency with the Earth have pulled off an agricultural revolution that enables them to irrigate more land, grow more food, and nurture more people and animals. We are living by the time of the Moon and the life cycle of the Earth, but we haven’t figured out the Sun’s time yet.

Nor do we know how to smelt metals, much less coin and count them. Our wealth and well-being are in the soil and water, and in the sacred mystery of the womb.

By 4,300 years ago, the pendulum reaches the bottom of its downward arc as the Age of Taurus swings into the Age of Aries.

The world’s first age of wealth is followed by its first real age of war as aggressive young cultures fight for control of land, minerals, livestock—and women, some of whom no longer birth new babies for the tribe, but produce future slaves for a new archetype, the Lord.

The desecration of the field, the river, and the womb is well underway, but has not yet brought the catastrophic results that will come much later. We all still have enough to eat and drink, at least until armies start burning crops some centuries from now. The Lord really does want to keep us alive, if only so we can build him a higher, prouder monument than has yet been seen.

Now, two Great Ages later, in 2008, we are near the cusp between the Age of Pisces and the Age of Aquarius, and the pendulum has swung to its excruciating extreme. The sacred feminine is disrespected everywhere, subjected to misogynistic religious control, forced prostitution, female genital mutilation, and other outrages that ancient wise women would never have imagined. Stalin showed only a lifetime ago how to design an artificial famine that wiped out twenty million contumacious Kulaks, and men of power have used food and water as weapons ever since, as they do today in Tibet, Gaza, and Darfur.

The young cultures have reached their point of implosion, as the most grievous maldistribution of wealth in our planet’s history is mirrored,

xvi / Introduction

not surprisingly, in a maldistribution of food that is triply hideous and strange because we have more than enough to nourish everyone. Or we would, if the life and health of our people and other species were as important to us as the profits of shareholders and the power of Monsanto, who dares attempt to control the process of life itself by compelling farmers to buy genetically-modified seeds.

We are in the agony of the hiatus now, as the pendulum comes to stasis, and begins its next downward swing. What to do at this precarious moment? We come as best we can to serenity and acceptance. We can hope that God or ETs will save us. We can join thousands of respected officials and academics who are trying to solve the problem with the same level of consciousness that created it.

We can learn how to ride the Aquarian currents and create change in our favor. And we can look again at long-forgotten ways of food and water management, and the mythic field of consciousness that embraced them, and enabled them to work as well as they did for so long. We can live under the Moon.

1 The Circle is Cast: Living in the Moon’s Time

T

his book will tell the story of how our ancestors once lived in tune with their bodies and the life processes of Mother Earth, in the lunar time of matriarchal societies who saw all of life as an ever-renewing circle. They had not begun to think of a new year, much less an end of the world, because in their view, life goes on.

Then we will see how, as our villages and towns grew into cities and civilizations and empires, we began to live more and more in the solar time of patriarchal societies who saw all of life as a grueling competition for land and crops, minerals and slaves, all of it happening in linear finality under the pressures of the deadline, the cutoff point and the view that life is short, and the one who dies with the most toys wins. The effects of this grasping, slashing world view, and the misery it has brought to our bodies, our souls, and our whole planet, are evident all around us now. It is getting clear that we can go one of two ways: to easy ruin if we do nothing, or back to health if we will make the effort to learn and change.

The years ahead will tell us, and we will be the ones to decide, how the story ends. The premise we’ll follow here is that as more of our people are choosing to build community and create sustainable

/ The Circle is Cast: Living in the Moon’s Time

economies, we will live in intimate interdependence with nature and evolve synarchies in which both the sacred feminine and the sacred masculine are respected and empowered. As we’ll see by the end of the play, if we make the more demanding choice of waking up and working together, we’ll be living in lunar time again. Many of us already are. But the round of the dance will expand as our consciousness changes and grows, until it resembles the spiral of a galaxy more than a circle, and we join in realizing that life goes on and up.

Body Time Before we understood even the cycle of the Moon, our first faint conceptions of time were in the two great lights in the sky: the great blazing yellow light whose rising and vanishing comprised what we call a “day,” and the softer white light that kept changing back and forth between a sliver and circle, and sometimes disappeared for two risings and settings of the Golden One. Before we began to understand the cycles in which the great lights move, our first timepieces were our bodies, and our lives were a set of concentric rhythms based in our bodies’ organs and processes. The most rapid rhythm was in the heart, which gave its beat to our poetry and music. Next were the lungs, whose breath rhythm would be the measure of speech.

Next were the mouth and the lower body, which could go through their cycle of eating and evacuating maybe three times while the Sun was up. There was also a sleep cycle that was about half as long as the waking time each day. Longest of all the cycles was the one that only a younger woman had, from the time that her blood would stop flowing at each Moon until her baby would be born.

We have no way of knowing, but we can make a good guess that what motivated us to start understanding and counting the Moon’s cycle was to predict how many Moons would go by before the woman who was with child would give birth. At some point we reckoned that a complete Moon cycle takes about twenty-eight or twenty-nine days of the Sun until her child comes between nine

The Circle is Cast: Living in the Moon’s Time /

and ten Moons from now. The next discovery was even more momentous: that the cycle of the Moon and the bleeding cycle of the young woman took the same number of days, and were clearly related. The Moon was the master maker of rhythm in the flow of blood and birth, and of water too, once coastal peoples observed the connection between the lunar cycle and the tides of the ocean.

The ancient matriarchies worshipped both the Sun and the Moon, recognizing, if not yet understanding, the role that each one plays in the flourishing of crops and the motion of life. But the Moon always took precedence as the supreme deity. Unlike the less reliable Sun, whose course in the sky could move closer to the horizon or higher in the sky when the season turned colder or hotter, the Moon was constant, always moving in the same track. And because she was somehow connected with water, the first farmers prayed to her as the one who could grant water to the fields—or could withhold it from those who failed to honor her.

The Mother Line Matriarchy means “mother power.” The political and economic power of the tribe was firmly in the hands of mothers among the old cultures everywhere, not only because motherhood was essential to continuing the community’s life, but because there was as yet not even an institution of marriage that might affirm a man’s role in the creating of children and bind a woman to him as his mate.

No such custom as marriage, and all of the legal complications that came with it, was possible yet, because no one had yet seen—or had yet acknowledged—the role of the human sex act in the making of new babies. This was the reason that ancient myths of peoples everywhere claimed that a new child now grew in a woman’s womb because she had been exposed to the action of wind, or the river, or an unseen god—anything but a mortal male.

Robert Graves is likely correct in saying that the sexual needs of the tribe’s members were met by “group marriages of all female

/ The Circle is Cast: Living in the Moon’s Time

members of a particular totem society with all members of another.”1 Thus the line of succession in each mother’s household was matrilineal: while it was obvious who the mother of each child was, the identity of his or her father was impossible to guess. It would not be until much later, in the Jewish and Greek societies of the Age of Aries—that a sexual revolution occurred once paternity was accepted as a fact of life. Fathers could now lay claim to property, priesthood, and almost everything else that had once been the domain of mothers, particularly the wise women who met in council to make together the decisions that would guide the community’s life.

Not that the male was a mere spear carrier in the old matriarchal cultures. While circular time is naturally feminine in nature, and is surely tied to the female menstrual cycle and the phases of the Moon, the cycle of life as the ancients perceived it was one of female and male forces in balance. While the feminine is the principle of continuity, the masculine is the principle of renewal who initiates the new cycle, then ages and dies, or is sacrificed (literally “made holy”) and replaced in the spring by a new, youthful, vigorous, beautiful god who plants his seed in the goddess before he dies and is resurrected to come again, impregnate her again, and keep the wheel of life turning.

This is why the legends of ancient peoples are full of figures like the green god Osiris, who is endlessly reborn (on December 25) and dies each year while the river, the living body of Isis, flows ceaselessly on. Osiris’ European counterpart, the Green Man, is reborn each year in the spring, joins with Mother Earth to create new life, then ages into the Holly King of the Yule season and the decrepit Old Man Winter before he passes away and comes again. The Middle-Eastern deities Tammuz and Attis, and their Greek brother Adonis, were all born each year on December 25, all produced children with the goddess of beauty, all died from wounds inflicted by powerful wild animals, all were hung on trees from which their blood dripped down to revivify the Earth, and all were resurrected on or soon after the spring equinox.

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These annual cycles of the birth, procreation, death, and resurrection of potent male lover-gods, and the veneration of goddesses such as Kore/Persephone—who lived above ground and was fruitful each spring and summer as the consort of Dionysus, and spent the other half of the year underground as the queen of Hades— are naturally signs that the cultures who create and celebrate them expect life to go on forever in the same round of male and female joining and parting in the timeless dance of life and death. What all these mythic stories have in common is an intimate connection with the life cycle of the human body, especially the female body, and the all-embracing life cycle of the natural world; a link to the feminine power and ever-renewing light of the Moon; and a belief so firm that is never stated, and does not need to be: that of course life goes on. It always has and it always will. Why should it not? Life is holy, and what is holy endures.

How the Year Moves by the Moon For thousands of years, from the time of the early agricultural settlements that archaeologists have uncovered from as early as 8000 BCE, to the time of the Celtic-Druidic peoples whom the Romans encountered in the centuries before Julius Caesar, the wise women kept time in very much the same way. They knew that one life cycle of the Earth, from leafing out in spring through summer’s abundance to the autumn harvest and the dark cold of winter, was equal to thirteen cycles of the Moon, for thirteen lunar rounds of twentyeight days each would be equal to 364 days, and very close to the Sun cycle of 365¼ days that astronomers would determine later. So it would have been easy for the wise women in charge of time reckoning to add an extra day after every thirteen Moons, or an extra five days after every sixty-five Moons. But they didn’t do this. They didn’t think in terms of inserting what we call a single “intercalary” day—like February 29, which we add every four solar years in a leap year—to keep the Moon cycle in rhythm with the Earth. The early

/ The Circle is Cast: Living in the Moon’s Time

matriarchs added a whole intercalary month. Why did they do this, when adding only a day here and there, it appears to us, would have been so much simpler?

Because the cycle of the Moon was not to be tampered with.

There was an obvious order and rightness in the lunations, the new Moons and full Moons that divided each Moon cycle into phases of fourteen days, and in the whole majestic twenty-eight-day lunar round. This is why the matriarchal timekeepers chose to add an entire twenty-eight-day Moon when it was needed, usually at an interval of twenty-eight to thirty Moons. Since most solar months are thirty or thirty-one days long, and the Moon’s cycle is twenty-eight days, an intercalary Moon would come every thirty months.

For the wise women who acted in council to manage the work and play cycle of the community, deciding when to add an intercalary Moon was a matter of practical need and consensus, and involved a decision about which set of lunations, which new Moon and full Moon pair, the tribe needed to repeat in order to address a problem or opportunity, as well as get the lunar wheel back in rhythm with the Earth. The intercalary Moon gave the tribe a way to reprise a Moon by running it again. If this year’s crops were hugely abundant, for example, then the Harvest Moon and Wine Moon of autumn might have to be run again just to sickle all that wheat and tread all those grapes. If winter came early and was very severe, or ran long, there may have been no choice but to do Ice Moon twice.

There were no hard rules to the choosing of an extra Moon, much less any dogmas, except that no lunations could ever be cut from the cycle, as all of them were necessary, and their sacred order had to be preserved. For a very long time, it somehow all worked, and the matriarchs made sure that the Dance of the Moon stayed on the same beat with the Song of the Earth.

Modern witches and neo-pagans use the Celtic term esbat for each pair of lunations—that is, a new Moon and a full Moon—that repeat in each cycle of the Earth year. All of the esbats are listed,

The Circle is Cast: Living in the Moon’s Time /

along with the great Sun events, Earth season feasts, and the festivals that almost all our religions still time to the Moon, in Chapter 11.

Most of the esbats are obvious in their meaning, from the grass and strawberries, crows and corn, hay and beavers that came in each season, or long nights of winter and the lightning of summer. While the cycle of esbats helped to organize the year into all its tasks, dangers, and delights, its main purpose was clear. No matter how rich the harvest or the hunt, or how tasty the wine, the point of the whole design was to care for the community’s most precious resource by promoting the blessings of fertility and birth.

This is obvious in the esbats of late spring and summer, which were added to the list in more recent times, when the link between sex and procreation was understood, and marriage became customary. The names of some of the esbats may puzzle us at first—but they soon come clear when we remember that the point of everything we do is to respect and care for those who own the womb.

Chaste Moon and Maiden Moon (April), and Mother Moon (May) The lunations of April are optimistically called Chaste Moon and Maiden Moon because in the fiery surge of Aries the Ram, a young man’s fancy hotly turns to what can be charitably called love, though it is often something more urgent—so wise women guard the virgins with especial care amid the heady juiciness of spring. In May, mothers protect and prepare their daughters who will soon be married at Dyad Moon.

Dyad Moon, Honey Moon, and Rose Moon ( June) The Gemini season of late May through most of June has been known as the time of the Twins—the Two, the Dyad—since ancient times, because we have always known that this month is not just about Mars, the male ruler of Aries, or Venus, who rules the Taurus month that follows. It is defined by the two, the couple, and thus is mainly about the hieros gamos, the sacred union of the sexes.2 This is why we have had June brides for thousands of years before we had

/ The Circle is Cast: Living in the Moon’s Time

Juno, or June. We still use the same symbols of the season today. The newlyweds’ first days of marriage are still called a Honey Moon, and it begins after their families and friends have strewn their path with the white flowers of spirit and the red ones of passion under the Rose Moon.

Blessing Moon and Claiming Moon ( July) As June moves past the summer solstice and into July, the maiden— more about her soon—makes the first crucial transition of her life.

She now becomes a lover, growing into the role that up to now has been more fantasy in the mind than fire in the flesh. And like every love goddess who bears children, the young woman who’s been a virgin until now will likely be a mother in the coming year, perhaps at the next Mother Moon in May. But the goddess who is most truly in power now, and will be so increasingly as the years pass and the marriage bears fruit, is the mother goddess. In her many facets as Hera/Juno (Greek/Roman), Fricka (Norse), Durga (Hindu), Isis-Hathor (Egyptian) and countless others, she has always represented the order, fidelity, and reverence of home and family in life at its most rooted and stable. This is why the Blessing Moon that follows the Honey Moon is for consecrating the new home. The rites are timeless. The hearth fire is lit. The first food offerings are made, which include bread and salt, so that those who live under this roof will never know hunger, and their life together will never lose its savor.

Flowers and herbs that bring health, prosperity, and babies are placed on lintels and rafters. All seems as content and complete as a new couple’s life can be—yet only two weeks from now, Claiming Moon is coming. What is there to claim? Who is claiming what?

The tribe’s most precious resource is to be claimed, and the ones who are claiming them are, naturally, the young men. After the newly married couples are happily settled into their homes at Blessing Moon, a man has about two weeks, until Claiming Moon, to ask for the hand of the young woman he hopes to marry at the next Dyad Moon, after a proper courtship lasting almost a year. It’s un-

The Circle is Cast: Living in the Moon’s Time /

derstood that while the suitor must honor his intended’s father by asking his consent and answering his questions about oxen and tools and general willingness to work hard and keep food on his family’s table—it’s obvious who will really make the decision: the mother, of course, just as her mother accepted some twenty years ago the young man who seemed the best mate for her daughter. The more desirable the young woman, the greater the likelihood that she’ll attract more than one ardent young man, which brings us to …

Dispute Moon (August) One essential complication of the play now arrives. We have rivals, and rules for handling rivalry. One is that mother and daughter must not cruelly prolong the suitors’ uncertainty. The mother may announce the good news as early as August, as betrothals are common at Lughnasad, and she must be ready to announce their choice at the last harvest feast that comes just before at the onset of winter, when the community gives thanks for Mother Earth’s blessings. This interval of time will show, if any uncertainty remains in the mother’s prudent mind, which suitors will work the field to bring in the harvest, lead a big hunt, and work smoothly with others.

The other rule is that the lucky selected lover does not gloat, and the rejected ones find their way to accept what is not to be. The timing of this spiritual ordeal could not be better, coming as it does in the dog days of the Leo month, when male pride inhales deep and passions flare. But the losers must, and almost always do, surrender to reality as the women have defined it. There is much to be done in the months to come: the grape and grain harvests, the Hunter’s Moon, the caring for those who sicken and pass away in the cold of Mourning Moon and Dead Moon. Good teamwork is essential, and the village will not abide disputatious men.

This is actually how the whole year went in the ancient matriarchies, for as long as the object of the game was to honor life and increase it. This was how it went from the rise of the ancient matriarchies in the Age of Cancer through the Age of Gemini that followed

10 / The Circle is Cast: Living in the Moon’s Time

it, even into the Age of Taurus, when the pharaoh of Egypt was called “the Bull of his Mother”—at least until late in the Age of Egypt, when the Nile culture, like its competitors, turned patriarchal.3 What do all these ages mean?

Getting our Bearings in Time:The Great Ages We’re about to chart our course through the more ambitious schemes of time reckoning that would come between the lunar, spiritual time of the matriarchal era and the solar, commercial time of our own very wired, mechanized moment, now that the Age of Pisces fades, and the Age of Aquarius begins. In chapter 6, we’ll see more about Plato’s Great Year, and the three most recent ages when all the calendars we use today evolved. The simple summary for now is that the point in the zodiac where the Sun rises each year at the spring equinox moves backward very slowly over an immense cycle of 25,920 years, so in this long cycle of precession, the equinox sunrise point takes 2,160 years to move through each zodiac sign.

Each of these great ages introduces new technologies, social and political structures, philosophical ideas, religious movements, and cultural archetypes that are appropriate to the zodiac symbol, its ruling planet, and element. Our present age, for example, under the water sign of Pisces the Fishes, is ruled by Neptune, lord of the sea.

So we have mastered navigation by sea and hydraulic engineering, we’ve sailed in the mystical ocean of love and explored the depths of the unconscious mind, we read messages from water, and we face a planetary water crisis as the dominant religious paradigm of the age—Christianity, symbolized by the fish—struggles to survive.

The two ages that concern us now, as the Dance of the Moon begins, are so remote from our time that for the first, we have no written evidence, but only Stone Age tools; for the second, we have only early pictorial symbols from which true alphabets have not yet evolved: 1. The early matriarchal Age of Cancer (8790–6630 BCE), the water sign whose ruling planet is, of course, the Moon.

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2. The mature matriarchal Age of Gemini (roughly 6630–4470 BCE), when our laws of family and communal relationships began to evolve, and our forebears first began to communicate in written letters and numbers.

We begin, then, in the Age of Cancer, around 7000 BCE. In this era, matriarchies either developed or consolidated their rule, goddess religions flourished in the rhythm of the Moon, and the first true farming communities understood fertilizer, irrigation, and other techniques well enough to pull off what historians now call an agricultural revolution.

By making their fields much more productive, so that their crops could now support more people, whose growing numbers would compel their communities to acquire more farm land, the farmers of the Cancer Age solved one problem, only to open a whole basket of others. As they now knew how to farm more abundantly, without necessarily knowing how to do it sustainably, large areas in which the soil got no rest and refreshment began to turn from arable land into arid dust. And worse, as populations grew too big for the land they had, and needed more, they had no choice but to merge with neighbors who were willing, or to overcome those who were not. The old cultures, who had lived for so long in harmony with the Earth and reverence for the Moon, had begun to transmute into young cultures looking to conquer and expand in the fire time of the Sun.4

The Water and the Triple Goddess Through most of the Age of Cancer, this urgency and trouble is still very far away. No one has the faintest conception about solstices and equinoxes, geometry and taxes, astrologers and armies. Now, as we live in the water time of the Moon, we are not inclined yet to fix anything with definitions and descriptions. We look each day at everything that runs, swims, and flies as though we are seeing it for the first time. We notice how closely the actions of plants and animals follow the timing of the Moon, long before we know that all of

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them, like all of us, are mostly water. And we learn the other ways that we and the world follow the cycle of the Moon.

One thing we see, to our puzzlement, is that on the nights when the Moon is dark, and in the days between them too, we seem to know things without seeing them. Our hunches turn out right and we know to follow them when the Moon is dark, and when her first new crescent appears, before we have the words yet to state that intuition and psychic perception are very strong at the new Moon. Another thing we notice about the Moon when she is very new is that whatever change in weather comes with her has a way of lasting all the way to the full Moon. Weather patterns last two weeks, starting at the new Moon. We live in lunar time, bringing our efforts to culmination at the full Moon, to completion at the waning Moon, and to renewal at the new Moon.

We learn the Moon’s cycle as a three-stage round of birth and growth, fullness and reproduction, and death and renewal, all of them appropriate to the woman’s life cycle that she traces from maiden to mother to the mysterious one who plays the crucial role of the wise woman at harvest time in August and September, but by the end of October is turning dark and destructive as the crone, who in such powerful forms as Kali/Cailleach, Hecate, and Sekhmet serves the natural order by helping to clear away whatever is due to pass on.

This divine feminine triad or trinity—the wise women had this idea first, before there were trinities of other triple gods—is of course the famous Triple Goddess, revered in ancient cultures everywhere. Her life cycle is acted again and again in each cycle of the Moon. The new crescent is the open, receptive cup of the girl and the nubile maiden. Her full circle is the mother in her ripeness and fruition, and her receding sliver as she fades away is not the cup anymore, the waiting one of the maiden and the flowing one of the mother, but the cap of wisdom that the wise woman wears on her crown as she acts her dark, necessary role in the yearly round of growth, birth, and death. In the age of the early matriarchies,

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women were the priests of birth and death, just as they were the ones who practiced the mysteries of agriculture.5 It was only a matter of time before our ancestors would see that the same rule of three applies to the whole Earth year too. Like the Egyptians, who saw each year as having three seasons of inundation and planting, growth and harvest, and the dry season, the ancient matriarchies everywhere enacted the birth and growth of the maiden at the time of thaw and quickening in mid-winter, the ripening and abundance of the mother in the new leaves and stamina of high spring, and the silence and mastery of the wise woman in mid-autumn.

Though the Sun swings high and low in the sky between hot and cold, he always looks the same. But the Moon is born anew, grows and shines in the fullness of her glory, then grows smaller and darker as she fades to nothing, and is soon reborn. Which of the two, the Sun or the Moon, better seems to resemble the round of our own lives as we grow, bear fruit, and pass away? And which one suggests: if the Moon’s light dies every twenty-eight days and then soon comes again … may my light do the same? Does my spirit return in some place, in some way, like the chalice of the maiden Moon? When my body passes away, will my soul live on, coming again like our Lady Luna?

Why are the ideas and symbols of God the Mother spreading on our planet now? Why are more and more respected keepers of wisdom advising us, as Barbara Hand Clow does, that “the Moon is your best timekeeper”?6 And why are more people living well away from the mechanized misery of the clock religion that solar time has now become, and aligning instead with the customs and values of the old matriarchies? The negative answer is obvious: the mounting disrespect of the feminine over these many thousand years, and the overempowerment of the masculine, has brought us to a crisis of survival so immediate and compelling that it demands the traditional wise women actions of compassion, nurturance, wisdom, self-discipline, attentiveness, and love. It will suggest more persuasively in the years ahead that “if you will realign with the Moon,” as

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Clow puts it, “you can waltz right out of the dilemmas created by the holy clock.”7 The Return of the Goddess was expected, and the need for it seen, even before Madame Blavatsky predicted in Isis Unveiled that “The religion of the ancients is the religion of the future.”8 In time, the next steps are to re-empower the sacred feminine, then rebalance her with the sacred masculine, most feasibly in the small, sustainable communities that more and more people are building now. For celebrating the simpler, cleaner cycle of life, the models we naturally find most attractive are those of the old cultures who first heard the Dance of the Moon, and are hearing it again in today’s Celtic-Druidic, Wiccan, and neo-pagan communities. The many celebrants of Mother Earth, more of them every year, differ on the details, but all share the crucial elements: a reverence for the Earth, and a desire to live again on her terms; a respect for the feminine; and a longing to celebrate the joy of life in a spirit of love. We have begun to remember the rites that were sacred in ancient times, and still are, because they affirm the sanctity of life.

Chapter 1 Notes 1. Robert Graves, The White Goddess, pp. 388–389.

2. See, for example, Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, pp. 108–109.

3. For the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy during Egypt’s long history, see “The Bull of his Mother” at www.hermes3.net/may106 .htm.

4. For more on the old and young cultures, see Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.

5. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, I, p. 92.

6. Barbara Hand Clow, Alchemy of Nine Dimensions, pp. 39–40.

7. Ibid.

8. Helena P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, I, p. 613.