Life on the Moon

Who lives on Luna? 

Permanent residents in my realm are few, though some of us live here for millennia by human counting.

We receive dreamers and soul travelers in vast numbers.

We are a transit lounge for spirits on their way to incarnation on Earth, and for ex-physicals who come up from the sublunar planes. Some of those admitted to this realm after death on Earth  find solace for ages in our pleasure palaces and studios, before they are ready for another death and another birth. Some pursue their studies in our schools, where many things are created and discovered before they manifest on Earth. Some become interpreters and teachers for physicals.

I have heard that spirits transit this realm on the way to physical birth. Are there conditions for taking on a human body? Is a contract made before a soul goes down? 

You don’t get born into a human body without formalities. Everyone who is born on Earth has entered into a contract. A typical contract specifies the allotment of time-energy available to you in the life form you are entering. Time-energy is a package, not two different things. In the Assyrian language, we have a precise term, shimtu. The exact length of the life you are given may vary according to how carefully, or recklessly, you expend this time-energy. Living in balance, averaging a gentle cruising speed, you may manage a hundred years; treat your body like a hot rod and you can go to the junkyard early.

The life contract does not give ironclad protection again the events insurance companies call “acts of God”, or against criminal interference.

You may end your life prematurely. This is a serious contractual violation that has unhappy consequences, though not the eternal damnation invented by some churchmen. Suicide is never part of a life contract. However, facing conditions that may tempt you to destroy yourself is quite often an important clause.

The allotment of time-energy is one of the two key elements in the contract. The other is the definition of the life assignment you have agreed to undertake.

Contrary to appearances, everyone born into a human body has agreed to their situation, though not everyone has the same degree of choice and the choices that are made are often ill-considered.

One of the greatest acts of memory is to recall the terms of your life contract and who you were and where you were when you entered into it.

How long do spirits remain in the realm of Luna after physical death? 

Let’s be clear that this is a gated community. You don’t get in without paying your dues. There are many who are rejected at the gate, and some we have to throw out. They fall back into the astral slums below us that the Greeks called Hades.

Some discarnates spend the equivalent of many, many lifetimes here. They enjoy the social environment, they study and teach in our schools, they practice reality creation. Some become mentors and oracles for people on Earth. Some serve as messengers, zephyrs who carry dreams to sleepers.

If you earn the right to go higher, and choose to do that, you are given a new outfit and you are required to leave your current vehicle behind.  When you take off your astral body, you don’t want to leave it lying around for anyone else to pick up. Depending on the quality, that could be like leaving a fur coat in the street. Someone is going to pick it up. Even if your threads are worn, they might be attractive to a passing spirit that wants to put on a new guise, or impersonate you, as a prank or for deliberate deception.    

We have locker rooms where you can check your astral body as you would check your street clothes on the way to the gym.

Few of the graduates who leave astral bodies in these lockers will wish to retrieve them. Now equipped with celestial bodies – which don’t fit over or under an astral suit – they know the joy of liberation from lesser forms and the appetites and cravings that go with them.

However, there are other uses for left-behind astral bodies. In the Messenger Service, some couriers are licensed to use these outfits in their encounters with people down below. So the deceased lover or father who visits a survivor could be that person, dropping by in the astral body – or an actor who has dressed up in that guise.

The actors or guisers should not be confused with the deceivers and thieves who hijack astral bodies for malign purposes. Their operations have sown much confusion and darkness.

Drawing of a Daimon of Luna by Robert Moss

- Excerpt from "Conversation with a Daimon of Luna" in Mysterious Realities by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

In the Garden Behind the Moon

 

I've been rereading The Garden Behind the Moon, by Howard Pyle, originally published in 1895. This may be quite my favorite story for younger readers.

    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 of the Iron Man where the Wonder Box has long been locked up. He catches the black horse by the forelock (like Kairos - opportunity - time). It can no longer fly with a human on its back, but it can run fast. David manages to enter the Iron Castle, and steals the Wonder Box, and rediscovers the girl - escapes from the Iron Castle, and kills the Iron Man with a stone from the sea shore.

    David and his beloved return to the “brown world” on the moon path, 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. 

    So we may catch the hint that the story is about soul loss, when people around you may not notice you are missing, only that you are duller and quieter. And that there are places where lost souls go, from which they may be brought home by those who can muster the courage and imagination to get through some version of the Moon-Angel.

In the Garden behind the Moon

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 of the Iron Man where the Wonder Box has long been locked up. He catches the black horse by the forelock (like Kairos - opportunity - time). It can no longer fly with a human on its back, but it can run fast. David manages to enter the Iron Castle, and steals the Wonder Box, and rediscovers the girl - escapes from the Iron Castle, and kills the Iron Man with a stone from the sea shore.

    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

Plutarch in the Light of the Moon

For Plutarch (c 50-120 AD), the realm of the Moon assumes huge importance as the residence or way station for some (though by no means all) spirits of the departed, and the base for a variety of daimons (many of them formerly humans) who take a close interest in Earth affairs.

Plutarch knew what he was talking about. He was not only a marvelous historian and philosopher, but a Mystery initiate, who spent his last thirty years as a priest at Delphi, communing with the gods and traveling between the worlds. He traveled in Egypt and wrote a treatise on Isis and Osiris that has a continuing influence on our understanding of ancient Egyptian religion.

He knew the importance of dreams. He wrote in his essay "Amatorius" that “Since [the soul’s] arrival in the world, it is by means of dreams that it joyfully greets and gazes upon that which is most beautiful and most divine.”

In hies essay "On the Divine Vengeance" Plutarch describes a journey to a locale in the sphere of Luna where three daimons sitting together in the shape of a triangle are mixing dreams in a cosmic krater (or mixing-bowl). Different streams flow into it, one “whiter than sea foam” another “the violet of the rainbow”. The lighter and whiter the dream that is mixed up, the more true it will be. “This is the source from which dreams derive.”

The source of this account is an ancient NDE. A dissolute man of Soli who is told by an oracle that he will do much better when he dies. Soon after he falls from a height and is believed to be dead until he revives at his burial place three days later
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Plutarch explains how after death spirits that are able to rise beyond the lower astral plane may enjoy a pleasurable afterlife in the realm of the Moon. They may live on there for a great length of Earth time, or graduate to existence on a higher plane, leaving their astral bodies behind. Or they may become Moon-based daimons, closely engaged with human affairs, playing far-from-infallible guides to people in the physical world.

In a most remarkable tract titled" Concerning the Face that Appears in the Orb of the Moon" Plutarch gives a comprehensive account of the role of the Moon in relation to the soul history of humans. The Moon is here described as the portal through which spirits travel on their way to birth on Earth, and to which they ascend, if they pass certain tests, after physical death. Some of these spirits of the departed may be promoted to the status of daimons, with permission to interact with the living.

"Not forever do the spirits tarry upon the moon; they descend to take charge of oracles; they attend and participate in the highest of mystic rituals; they act as warders against misdeeds and chastisers of them, and they flash forth as saviors manifest in war and on the sea." [1]

These spirits of the Moon, far from omniscient or infallible, are on probation.If they act unfairly, giving in to wrath or envy, they are cast out and again confined in human bodies on earth.

Plutarch shakes up our mythic geography when he tells us that Earth is the realm of Demeter, the Moon of Persephone, and everything between Earth and Moon is the realm of Hades. Entry by the departed into the realm of Luna requires the ability to travel beyond the temptations, fears and distractions of the lower astral (Hades) and go through a clean-up, effected by “scrubbers” (maybe resembling scarab beetles).

In summary, this ancient shaman-philosopher confirms that It is in the realm of Luna that spirits take on and take off the astral body before birth and after death. And that the Moon, as an astral realm, is the base for a large population of daimons (many formerly human) who have a close engagement with human affairs.

[1] Plutarch, De facie quae in orbe lunae apparet [“Concerning the Face which appears in the Orb of the Moon”] in Moralia XII trans Harold Cherniss and William Helmbold

Image: Detail of the Moon from Donato Creti, "Astronomical Observations" (1711) in the Vatican Museum

Journal bricolage: We are far from perfection in the sphere of Luna

Looking over a forest of antlers under a downy sky

I make the sign of the Enterer
I come from an Order of the Western Way
A Hasid offers to lend me his sidelocks
I bring home a bear cub on my shoulder
I dive through jaguar’s jaws to play doctor
Time has no secrets from the blue-white mirror
I am making a spiral labyrinth with a silk slip
A scorpion astrologer stabs a paper napkin with hexes
I am docking at Broceliande in outer space
There is a treasure chest at the door of my house
Jung gives me the Book of Heaven, his posthumous master work
A pregnant red fox is clinging to me
Demons are roosting in the cliffs but can be distracted by raw meat
She says she had a hard time staying asleep after she died in 1630
I defend the deer with a long-handled wooden mallet
We are far from perfection in the sphere of Luna

Just for fun, I played a game with my journals over the past half hour. I plucked one report, at random, from journals I had kept over one year. I took one line from that report, with no editing, and made it a line in an emerging poem. I repeated this, year by year, until my mind and my belly told me I had enough. Above you can read the result. The lines appear in chronological order from my journals from 1988 to 2005. Seventeen years, seventeen lines. I did not count as I was plucking, but seventeen is perfect because in tarot it is the Star, for me the card of dreaming with the greater Self. I did not change the order of the lines except for putting Luna (from 2000) at the end.
     This is a poetic version of what I have called journal bricolage. I've given up trying to translate this marvelous French word, sometimes rendered as "tinkering". It's about putting together bits and pieces on a whim, rather than approaching a project as a solid, stolid work of engineering. It's about following oneiric logic rather than plans and structures.

     Claude Lévi-Strauss,who made the word at home in French, found that this approach is central to the making of myths and the workings of "the savage mind". In his celebrated book La pensée sauvage he observed that the bricoleur employs "devious means". His game is "always to make do with whatever is at hand, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions."

     Found objects, junk shops, storage basements, words overheard from strangers...these are materials for bricolage. So are your journals.
     As I look over my instant poem, I am fired up to play games of memory and investigation. Has Jung in the afterlife really written the Book of Heaven with a purple cover that he showed me in a corner bookshop? Do I need to examine what was going on in my life when that pregnant red fox started clinging to me? Why do I find myself in dream after dream, defending the vulnerable with the weapon of Sucellos, the Good Striker, a Celtic boundary guardian? What more does the daimon of Luna want to share with me and through me?

Sketch of Sucellos in RM journal, July 1996

The Cave of the Dreaming God

I am drawn, again and again, to a mythic version of how physical events are generated in a subtler reality that we could call the Dreamtime, or the matrix, or nonlocal mind. The account comes from Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian, biographer, philosopher, priest of Apollo and initiate of the Mysteries. He was a principal source for Shakespeare's plays and for many generations he was the main source of accessible information on the Egyptian religion of Isis and Osiris. He died at Delphi in 120. He continued after his death to inspire later members of his Mystery tradition through trans-temporal encounters; the philosopher Proclus described his conversations with Plutarch across - or rather, outside - the centuries.
     With Plutarch, we are going to take a look at what can be seen, with inner sight, in the face of the Moon. The source is Plutarch's extraordinary essay titled (in the bilingual Loeb edition) De facie quae in orbe lunae apparet, “Concerning the Face which appears in the Orb of the Moon”.
     Plutarch very cutely presents his narrative as a third-hand traveler’s tale, giving the reader the go-ahead to shrug it off as just another tall tale. In fact, beneath the veils, his narrative of a strange sea voyage is probably a very exact relation of what Plutarch himself, and the fellow-members of his Mystery school had learned through their personal travels across the astral sea. The voyage he describes, to the strange island of a sleeping god, is no more an ordinary sea journey than the voyage of Odysseus or those of Bran and other heroes in the Celtic immrama. 

     Plutarch claims that his source is third-hand, a “foreigner” (ksenos) who told a tale to a Carthaginian of a voyage to a western island, five days sail beyond Britain, where the deposed god Kronos lies captive and dreaming in a cave. Kronos sleeps confined in a deep cave of rock that shines like gold. His sleep was cast on him by Zeus, who toppled him from his place as the high god and now keeps him bound. He is fed by birds that fly in over the summit of the rock, dropping ambrosia. His island is suffused with delicious, sleep-inducing fragrance that streams from the rock as from a fountain
    The sleeping god is served by spirits [daimones] who were his comrades when he was king. They derive prophecies from his dreams. “The prophecies that are greatest they come down and report as dreams of Kronos”
    The dreams of Kronos become thoughts in the mind of Zeus. From the mind of Zeus, what was conceived in the dreams of the sleeping god becomes events in the worlds of gods and humans. Those intrigued by what quantum physics suggests about the nature of reality - for example, that the act of observation plucks an event into manifestation from a soup of possibilities - may here find a mythic model for understanding. The ancient philosopher, weaving myth, has given us a vivid account of a matrix, a formative reality which inspires thoughts that eventually generate physical events.
   Plutarch's supposed source, the “foreigner” traveled across a “congealed sea”.at the time when the star of Kronos (the Night Watchman) entered the sign of the Bull.

    Quite as interesting as the account of the dreaming god is the stranger's statement that “among the visible gods we should especially honor the Moon." The Moon is "sovereign over life and death" and borders on the realms of Hades.He proceeds to give an account of the transits of the soul, in the precinct of Luna.

Photo of Ryugu Sea Cave by Batholith via Wikipedia Commons.

The nearness of the Moon

Just now I received a beautiful dream report from one of our teachers of Active Dreaming. She dreamed that the moon was coming close to the earth and we all could fly easily to it. There was a disabled boy in a wheelchair, and for him the Moon got so close to the earth it touched the land and the boy could roll right out to the surface of the Moon from a special hilltop. The dreamer received the wonderful feeling that anyone who is suffering can find a place of respite and magic in the realm of the Moon. After reading this account, I returned to a leisurely morning spent going over old journals. This is always a rich and absorbing exercise. I turned the page in a 2003 journal and found the drawing I have posted above. The accompanying brief dream report reads as follows:

The Nearness of the Moon
I become vividly aware that Luna is very close. It is easy to take people there for fun and adventure, and for instruction in schools that operate on this plane.

I think now of Jung's wildly - and wisely - shamanic understanding of a woman patient who said she went to live on the Moon after suffering incest and abuse as a teen.To the amazement and derision of his colleagues, Jung insisted that she really was living on the Moon. When the young Marie Louise von Franz heard Jung say this in a lecture, she confronted him. He couldn’t be serious, surely. He was. Marie-Louise suggested to Jung that what he meant to say that the patient's situation was “as if” she lived on the Moon. Jung replied, “No, not ‘as if’. She did live on the Moon.” Von Franz thought at the time that he must be crazy. [1] Later she came to understand that Jung recognized that we when we suffer intolerable conditions in this world, part of us may part company with us in order to survive - and why not in the astral realm of Luna, which ancient and indigenous peoples recognize to be thickly settled by spirits who take a close interest in human affairs?

1. Von Franz tells the story of The Woman Who Lived on the Moon in Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales (Toronto: Inner City Books, 2002) 6. She talks about the same episode in the documentary film The Wisdom of the Dream.

Drawing by RM. July 21, 2003.

The Fourteen

R.M., "The Moon at the Foot of My Bed"

The Fourteen

Some days, I don’t remember how I got here, or what I’m supposed to be doing. But today, on the eve of the lunar eclipse, it seems to me that my prior residence was the Moon. There was a mix-up at the time of my conception, for which I tried to press charges against the Zygote Fairy. But she convinced the court that it was my own doing, because I was excessively curious about sex.

I sit now with a ball in my hands. From it strands extend in all directions across time and space. Fourteen silver threads are attached to my body, a little above the navel. One runs to the ball, the others link me to counterparts in other places and times: to the man with skin the color of powdered ash who crouches over a mirror of water in a conical hut in Africa; to the young woman of the future who is priestess and scientist in an Order of dreamers; to the elegant flaneur who strolls with a beautiful woman on his arm through the Paris of Victor Hugo; to the feathered shaman living wild on Deer Mountain. Our work and our passions tug on the web that joins us. When I remember the pattern, I can work the strands like bell-ropes, to signal to another self. Or I may follow a thread into the mind of that other self, in his own world.

We, the Fourteen, came here in the same throw, aspects of a single purpose, operating outside time. My assignment, when I remember it, is to link consciously with my counterparts and serve the plan that unites us.

This was the product of a 10-minute timed writing exercise I led in a workshop at Mosswood Hollow, where I am leading a five-day adventure in Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming in April.