Me n the Moon
Exploring my relationship with the mysterious queen of the night sky
The secret of this post is that it was my final for a Religion 200 class at Smith, a gateway course for that part of my bachelor’s degree. Honestly one of the best classes I ever took (despite the pain of junior year after a pandemic gap and being in a long-distance relationship), with one of my fav profs <3 I did go through and commit a number of line edits to the first part, but the thing IS (and you can ask Andy!!) that this final paper was meant to be a work-in-progress, so my editing and posting it online is just going above and beyond to complete the assignment, not self-plagarism. The prompt was to use the theorists we’d been learning about through the semester to analyze a phenomenon in our lives we struggled to fully explain.
ANYWAYZ I’m releasing this ~exclusive~ look into my academic file because the actual moon is approaching fullness in Libra, ruled by Venus, which makes it the perfect time to contemplate your relationship with the divine feminine through words. I also felt compelled to give my first blog post “The Prodigal Sun” a companion, because that piece focuses I think entirely on the divine masculine. Balance is key, as they say, so here you go.
Approaches to the Study of Religion
Prof. Andy Rotman
Dec. 31st, 2022
Explication
Awed by her splendor
stars near the lovely
moon cover their own
bright faces
when she
is roundest and lights
earth with her silver
-Sappho
It was the end of my high school years, around seventeen maybe, before I really noticed the moon. I’d spent my childhood in awe at the stars–growing up in the mountainous desert the whole wide sky was open to me and they kept my focus for the whole of preadolescence. I’m sure I exclaimed at the moon now and again when she was brightest but I didn’t relate to her, or know this wild, ineffable connection I speak from now. The first memory I have of starting to realize there was a connection was this random impulse to change my Instagram bio to “gay for the moon”–it was a moral quandry enough that I asked the most out lesbian friend I had if I was okay to claim that, given my still-questioning status. She assured me it was fine, with a twinkle of knowing in her eye.
It was not only the beginning of accepting my own queerness, but also the beginning of projecting that identity out to the world. In aligning myself with the moon, I was choosing a symbol of femininity and mystery that felt like a comfortable expression of who I was. She’s also associated with the shadows of night–where the occult flourishes, a deviated identification that craves secret, forbidden knowledge. Lunar rituals and eclectically spiritual rites were not uncommon in my childhood, and as I got older (especially when I first moved out of the house for college), ritualizing the passage of time became an important way for me to connect to my spirituality.
Around then I was just crawling from the throes of puberty hormones, and like many womb-havers my experience was (and continues to be) less than pleasant. At fifteen, my therapist suspected I fulfilled sufficient criteria for PMDD, or premenstrual dysphoric disorder, characterized by extremely aggravated symptoms of PMS: irritability, mood swings, cramps, anxiety, insomnia, depression, lack of impulse control, full body pain, fatigue. She suggested birth control, a common treatment, which I ultimately decided against for concern of family history (and I had really, truly, no need for it for other reasons at that point). I mitigated my monthly agony over the years with varying levels of success via both holistic and western methods. During the Pandemic, when life slowed decidedly down, I noticed I was syncing perfectly with her darkest phase. When the Earth’s shadow readies to pass over her glowing face, so too does my body prepare to enter into shadow.
I’m not sure how it took me so long to put these things together. I’d been using a period tracking app for years–once I made the connection, I went back through it and confirmed it has been happening for long enough to make it a pattern–but I have no need for the app now. I simply find out when the new moon is happening and know the approximate. Around this same time in the Pandemic, I learned (initially from social media and later my own scraped together internet research, though there’s not much out there), that like a moon cycle has four principle parts, so too does a menstrual one–people with periods experience a month long hormone fluctuation pattern, whereas those without are governed by the sun’s twenty-four-hour loop. It was revolutionary because I realized I could ritualize my life around the specific stage I’m experiencing in that moment, centered around my body’s needs as opposed to what society is expecting of me (constant production?). I will say it’s easier said than done (and hardest at college) but it really strengthened my sense that our connection goes deep.
The too-muchness of my relationship with the moon comes in this way she affects my body. It’s been known forever that a menstrual cycle resembles the moon’s, but science has hardly begun to explore the link. There must be something like a tide in my womb, affected by the movement of celestial bodies in space. The moon: a body reflecting sunlight rather than emanating it. Growing and retreating over the space of a month. Something about the blueprint of the universe imitated in the microcosm of my body. And that’s not to mention the illinx-ical effect it gives me to simply consume her reflected light. The giddy wonder of seeing that glow never diminishes. It makes me squeal and jump up and down, exclaim without words because the excitement is too great. I could stare at her for hours without tiring (which I’m constantly tempted to do with the sun, but that would destroy my eyes–perhaps there’s something in that, a craving for something intangible and potentially dangerous and by way of this feels purer, more divine, than anything in the world). I read once (on the internet) that in ancient times when humans lived in smaller groups, those with periods developed a symbiosis among themselves so some were on a full moon cycle and some on a new moon one; that way, they could take care of each other and it wouldn’t knock out half the group’s contributors. You experience the same thing today when you spend lots of time around other womb-havers. Over the Pandemic, for example, I spent a lot of time with my now ex partner, who had a full moon cycle. When she later moved in with friends (who also happened to have periods), her cycle shifted to a new moon one. I liked to joke I was the alpha, since mine stayed steady. It reminds me of the ancient lineage I’m a part of back to those groups, and this other knowing that our bodies have carried out through time, literally marking its passage with their physical existence.
Another aspect I have not yet discussed is the weight of the moon’s symbolism. I mean this in a few ways. One, simply as a fetish image, or a commodity to be traded around–I own many moon-inspired items: jewelry and clothes, my room is plastered with posters, books, wall hangings, mirrors, containers, the list goes on. Also, as an icon, something that I send prayers to, both directly and to representations. But, whereas most icons don’t reciprocate a relationship with those who worship them, mine does (my cycle syncing up with it, for one). Indeed, on the occult(ish) side, the symbolism goes even deeper, and starts to blend together with the physical effect I was discussing earlier. In this I am referring to astrology, the ancient system of divination that uses observation of the stars’ and planets’ movements to keep track of Earth and her creatures’ natural cycles. To me, it makes all the sense in the world that celestial bodies influence the course of my life. I feel energy fluctuating throughout the month with the moon, and the sun/seasons (seasonal depression is a good example). I feel not just physically attached to the moon, but also bound by this ancient art to see a connection between myself and bodies in the sky.
Something convincing me these are more than mere coincidences is that I have lived many moments astrology “ predicted,” more like weather than a formula. One Saturday in college there was a new moon lunar eclipse–all you really need to know is that eclipses tend to be very high energy (haven’t you ever heard an elementary school teacher talk about how wild kids go on full moons and eclipses?)–during which my roommate’s cat had a health issue we were terribly preoccupied with all day. Then, right on time, my period hit, bringing with it all the utter agony of cramps. I was also recovering from a covid booster so I was already feeling under the weather. All in all, an unexpectedly crazy day.
Who I am is very much rooted in these foundations, and being able to conceptualize my body as a tool of nature’s timekeeping, of her shifting moods, has helped me understand myself. I am most connected to my body thinking of it this way, unattached to gender but present with my physicality, accepting of the massive role of the divine feminine (that slow cycle filled with mystery, shadow, pain, birth and rebirth) in the making of it, and the human I am today.
Explanations (getting into ~theory~)
The first theorists I want to use to explore my relationship with the moon are Michel Foucault and Max Weber. I feel the need to interweave their theories because they feel inextricable from each other; it feels impossible to get away from the Protestant work ethic or capitalism in any aspect of my life, though I try. Part of my joy for the moon centers around her deviancy from that, connected as she is to the first stirrings of my queerness, and given what I’ve learned about monthly hormones as opposed to daily ones. I also feel like there’s something in capitalism that reveres light, progress, knowledge, and seems to fear mysteries and the unknown. In the Western, American culture I’m familiar with, death is the worst possible conclusion, and rest is never an option. This patriarchy has been built around a model of constant production, constant movement “forward.” In The Spirit of Capitalism, Weber quotes founding father Benjamin Franklin: “‘Remember, that time is money…credit is money…money is of the prolific, generating nature…’” (Weber 2001, 14). The capitalist ideal is all about exponential growth, as Weber says,“[it is] the duty of an individual to increase his wealth…with the strictest avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of it” (16-17). It is something entirely outside of the realm of the body or its needs, focusing instead on perceived external power relations based on capital.
Foucault takes this understanding further in Discipline and Punishment: “The political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use…the body becomes a useful force only if it is a productive body and a subjected body” (Foucault 1977, 26). If you are not constantly productive in a societally approved way (what we are subjected to understand as productive and useful), you are essentially useless. People with disabilities come up against this issue constantly. I don’t want to draw too broad generalizations or lump disabled people into a monolith, but periods can become a temporary yet chronic handicap that severely affects daily life in this way. A period is often viewed as taboo and shameful, associated as it is with blood and death, and can even bear characteristics of an illness– it should be a time to retreat and rejuvenate as the moon suggests. A time, literally, for reflection (the moon momentarily dormant in hers), but there is no reflection in capitalism. “Rather, a different group proved central: men raised in the school of hard knocks, simultaneously calculating and daring but above all dispassionate, steady, shrewd, fully devoted to their cause, and in possession of strict, middle-class views and “principles” (Weber, 30). These pioneers modeled the capitalist enterprise as an unfeeling, growth-at-all-costs mindset, injected with “this new spirit of capitalism” (30), the only way to live with themselves while pursuing lives “so incomprehensible and puzzling, so vulgar and repulsive” (32) to the pre-capitalist (and to me). In contrast to that, the moon reminds me that there are radical possibilities for utopias that would allow for a closer partnership with nature, and with my body’s natural cycle of growth, pause, and reflection. “The delinquent is an institutional product” (Foucault 1977, 301) said Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Similarly, I am a deviant not by actions I have taken but by my existence as a form that is less profitable. My deviancy from capitalism is therefore practically programmed into me by the very nature of my body.
The reality of my physical existence on the planet is really the core of my understanding of my relationship with the moon. Just as I am bound up in the different moods and motivations, as Geertz might put it, of societal deviance due to the shape and function of my body, I am also engaged with a joyful side. Ultimately, for me the moon is a “happy object,” as Sara Ahmed understands it. It was difficult to pick out this framework among the other theorists we studied: there are so many aspects of ritual (Seligman), meaning (Geertz), fetish/totem/idol comparisons (Mitchell), sacredness versus commodity (Kopytoff), alterity (Csordas), and more that could be explored, but I think with Ahmed’s argument I can touch on all the most important parts. It's not just that I love the delinquent thrill ideologically tying me to the moon, but I find genuine comfort in our meetings as a constant in my life. It exists as a timekeeper, a physical representation of the movements of the universe hurtling our bodies forward through space and time, and also just a glorious shining thing in the sky that is magical for me to look at. Yes, magical– some combination of joy, possibility, and mystery that feels like it could nearly take me right out of my body. Ahmed claims: “Evaluations are expressed in how bodies turn toward things. To give value to things is to shape what is near us” (Ahmed 2010, 31). Not only do I physically turn toward to the moon at any possible chance, but also in my idol-istic treatment of the moon’s image, adopting it anywhere and everywhere in the aesthetic of my “near-sphere”: posters, art, poetry, clothing, jewelry, etc. Things that both bring me daily joy from looking and letting others know I associate myself with it. Some of my interests and bodies of knowledge, like astrology, were turned to because of and shaped by my love for the moon and my interest in understanding the alterity of our connection more deeply.
It’s a bit ironic that one of Ahmed’s arguments about the word “happiness” focuses on the nature of chance associated with its root, given the moon’s association with having a constant cycle. Consequently the moon is a predictable force rather than an agent of chance. Moreover, it is associated heavily with ritual, which plays an important role in my life, acting as a cornerstone of contentment, of structure. Ahmed concedes a similar point, quoting Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: “‘Happiness, in fact is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person’” (31). I wonder also if the magical possibility I associate with connecting to the physical light of the moon, given my reverence, is at its root an expectation, “as if to follow [its] point would be…aiming…toward a happiness that is presumed to follow” (34). Especially when considering the context of my knowledge of the moon–for example associations with deviation (and possible radical utopia), or its power measured by ancient arts like astrology–one may extrapolate my adoption of her as a symbol is an attempt at controlling the rhythms and cycles of my life, and expecting further contentment and happiness from that.
There is no possibility of fully capturing, explaining, or rationalizing my feelings on the subject. The glamor that fills my eyes when the moon is mentioned, particularly in spiritual contexts, is shimmering, otherworldly, and just out of reach. When I look at the moon itself, utter delight pins me to the spot and I have to smile, laugh, point, marvel. I might stand or just sit for hours even, bathing in the glow. She just makes me giddy.
Bibliography
Foucault, Michel. 1977 (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by
Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.
Sappho. (n.d.). Awed by her splendor . AllPoetry.com. Retrieved December 10, 2021, from
https://allpoetry.com/Awed-by-her-splendor
Weber, Max. 2002 (1905). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 3rd edition.
Introduction and translation by Stephen Kalberg. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing
Company.
Ahmed, Sara. 2010. In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J.
Seigworth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.