Moon Magic
“A new moon teaches gradualness and deliberation and how one gives birth to oneself slowly. Patience with small details makes perfect a large work, like the universe.”
Contents
* Fairytales as scripture
* Left-hand path of Faery
* Moon as a sacred guide
* Ordinary Feminine magic
* Power of Grief & Dirt
It is time to enter the Moon Mysteries
Welcome to the feminine mysteries and the folkways of myth and magic, where we follow the wild dance of the moon through the darkness and back into the light. This is a lunar left hand path. It is a path of enchantment and storytelling, of faery lines that transport us into our wyrd inner worlds. The moon has always been the archetype of the soul.
The left side is the feminine dimension, of the yin, of the invisible. Walking "widdershins" (counter-clockwise) is a traditional way to enter the Faerie Realm. This Otherworld is a place of genesis, a place of origin, of story.
Stories are circular, not linear. Stories lead us in circles, so we can become whole. We are storytellers and tale-weavers by our very nature. Stories are creative wombs; they birth and rerbirth us. Stories incant worlds awake.
The original storyteller was the moon who wove tales with her bright and dark threads. Moon magic lives at the heart of the feminine mysteries and imbues us with a feminine mirror magic. The moon is the measure of time. And stories, with their narratives and timelines, are woven from time.
What moon were you born under? What moon housed your first bleed? What moon did you break your heart or consummate your love? You can thread all the moons of your life together into a luminescent tale of magic.
Stories have been sacred since time out of mind. Words are windows into worlds. Incanting stories is the original spellcasting. Words are lunar, they emerge from the dark realm into light. There are no beginnings or endings; only portals, gateways: Dark Moon, New Moon, Full Moon. When we practice feminine magic, we “see the whole of the Moon” – we understand the otherworld of shadow lives inside our brightest moments.
Fairytales are old scripture, lore carried over time, words whose worlds have been forgotten.
Fairytales flinch under the fire of the sun, and prefer to take sanctuary under the soothing glow of the moon. Lunar magic takes us out of the city and the straight lines of modern life. Witches fly us into the Dark Moon for wisdom; the Grail Maiden helps us shine like the Full Moon. The wild witch archetype Initiates us, and the shining maiden archetype integrates us.
When we head into the dark forest, innocent as a fool, we may stumble on the wise witch, and be taken into her faraway cottage with its big fiery cauldron of power. The Witch is not there to be “nice” to us; nor is she “safe”, she may teach us a lesson or she may have us for supper. Either way, we will come out her lair wiser for it, even if our ego is a little rough-and-tumbled. The moon and her fairy realm can be a place of madness and initition, it is a place we fear to tread, but know we must go to grow.
The Grail Maiden meets us in the sunlit groves to soothe our soul, grant blessings, and helps us integrate what we discovered in the heart of the dark, wild woods. She brings us communion to the Mother of Life, who smiles upon our escapades, making us whole again in the circle of life.
Feminine moon magic is not heroic in the traditional sense; it is domestic and full of humbleness. It happens during 'chores' - spinning, cooking, stitching. And it works with the land, the plants, the elements, the stars.
What I love about feminine magic is that it is rooted in reality. It integrates that you have dirty dishes in the sink, that you need to rest on your moontime, that your body is sensitive and gets sick, that you need money to pay your bills, and food to feed your kids, and that if you don’t dance you’ll go mad, and that laughter and good food is a soul tonic, and that your moods shift like a merry-go-round, and that you get angry sometimes, and sob yourself to sleep. And that pleasure heals you.
It is not pompous or preachy or promising something far away. Feminine magic is not like some spiritual systems that tell you not to need:
Relationships, rest, money, sex, comfort, support, community, play, pleasure, love, praise, power, grief, mischief, connection, entertainment, dissolution, chaos, magic, comedy, tragedy, dreams, passion, hope.
What we see in reality is that without these everyday alchemies which feminine magic acknowledges, we are divorced from reality; from the desire for food, money, homes, companionship, connection, body regeneration, dreaming time, and when we don’t receive this feminine magic; we slowly die. We become cut out people with scripted lives.
Our ancestors courted feminine magic; they feasted and danced with revelry in festivals, they shaped female figures from clay and asked them for blessings; for a good harvest, for the right relationship, for fertility, for healing. They weren’t ashamed of their bodily needs and their everyday domestic life, and they believed a feminine presence was available to them, to gift the abundance of life, and to comfort them in their grief.
They looked to the skies and witnessed the moon as a female magician looking out over them, and they called upon her – both her dark eyes and her eye-bright love – and were initiated by her cycles. They planted seeds and babies under her radiant gaze, calling on The Lady to help them take.
Feminine magic is the path of the householder, the lowly maiden or crone, whose magical tools are her cauldron and cooking pots and her broom and sweeping brush. In all the tales, it is she who initiates the masters and gurus, and reminds them of the truth of earth alchemy and embodiment.
Art by Tanya Stewart, exclusively created for my writing in Sage magazine
