The Garden Behind the Moon, by
Howard Pyle, originally published in 1895, may be quite my favorite story
for younger readers and for older readers who would like to recover the magical child within themselves.
My friendly daimon
of Luna concurs*. He especially approves of the fact that a beautiful but
terrible entity “whom so many people know by a different name and are so afraid
of” is called the Moon-Angel. Around his face, it is bright like sunlight. He
“never brings something but he takes something away from him again” - and we
come to learn that this is most often the soul of someone who has died. The
Moon-Angel of the story is also called the Master Cobbler, which appears to
reflect the preferences of an old cobbler in a fishing village who “knows less
than nothing” and thereby more than those around him. We see the old cobbler
pegging soles to uppers on his last. My daimon points out that there is a
crafty allusion here to Sandalphon, the Sandal-Angel or Shoe-Angel who gives
and takes away soul bodies for transits to and from the Moon.
So to the story:
A boy called David, who is not yet twelve,
and is regarded as dreamy and simple (a “moon-calf”) by his peers, learns from
the old cobbler that a moon-path opens across the sea a day or two after the
moon is at its full. Close to shore, the first steps float in the tide as bars
of light, slippery underfoot. But if you persist, the moon-path becomes a
gravel road, and finally a broad shining field, until you get to the Moon.
After an initial mishap, the boy gets to
the Moon, where a man-in-the-Moon pulls him up a stair. From each window of the
Moon house, he sees into different scenes, into the inside as well as the
outside. He is set to polishing stars with lamb's wool, for nights when the
Moon is waning. He earns a little break; he is allowed down a back stair
into a lovely garden where he plays with other children. He has his time in the
garden for three days every month, and falls in love with a little princess,
but is then told that he cannot return to the garden because he is turning
twelve, and will be too old.
Now he is called to the Quest: to
win his girl, he must find the Know All book in the Wonder Box that has been
hidden since Eve and Adam (note the order) were driven form the garden. To do
this, he must “go behind” the Moon-Angel, something that has almost never been
done. When he confronts the Moon-Angel, we begin to feel his terror as well as
his beauty. In effect the boy has to step THROUGH his form, through unbearable
cold that transforms to unbearable heat. He bursts through a great iron door
into the landscape of the Quest. He is no longer a boy; he has aged ten years.
He finds his local guide - a woman
in a red shift who cleans souls and leaves them out to dry. She tells him what
he will need to do to capture the black winged horse that will take him to the Iron Castle Iron Castle Iron Castle
David and his beloved return to the
“brown world” on the moonpath, but find that the path branches to take each to
their separate homes. So now there is another test, for the princess (she's a
real one) to find her hero and for the Wonder Box she took from him to be opened
with the key that he retained. A happy and triumphant ending, of course. In
which the most interesting feature (as my daimon observes, pointing a finger up
under his left eye) is that nobody knew that David was missing all the time he
spent in the house of the Moon and the lands beyond it. And nobody in Princess
Aurelia's kingdom knew she was gone either; they had merely found her, from
birth, strangely mute and emotion-less. She's fully alive now that her soul has
come home from the Garden Behind the Moon.
*See "Conversation with a Daimon of Luna" in Mysterious Realities: A Dream Traveler's Tales from the Imaginal Realm
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