An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Moon Worship

“If I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walking in brightness;

“And my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand:

“This also were an iniquity to be punished by the judge: for I should have denied the God that is above.”

These words from the Book of Job, believed to be the oldest book in the Bible, testify to the antiquity of moon worship. Moreover, they bear witness to the enticement of the moon and to the writer’s fear of arousing the jealous wrath of Yahweh by carrying out the old rite of saluting her.

As the most conspicuous luminary of the night, and the nearest heavenly body to our earth, the moon has hung like a shining magic mirror, reflecting man’s dreams. From the Stone Age to the age of space travel, she has bewitched and allured mankind.

The moon has always been primarily regarded as feminine, although there are many moon gods as well as moon goddesses. Psychology has confirmed this; the moon in man’s dream-life is a symbol of feminine influence, and especially of the mother. The moon gods, of whom our old storybook ’Man in the Moon’ is a last vestige, represented the positive powers of the moon, when she is waxing or increasing in light.

The moon’s relation to human fertility, in that she revolves around the Earth in about twenty-eight days, the time of a woman’s menstrual cycle, was noted by our distant ancestors; and this was another reason for regarding the moon as feminine. However, she also rules the fluid secretions of the body, in astrological parlance; and these include the seminal fluid, white and pearl-like. So semen and menstrual blood, the signs and essentials of human fertility, are alike ruled by the moon.

She also rules the tides, which are highest at new moon and full moon. To old-time fishing communities this was very important. But even more important is the age-old belief in the influence of the moon upon the tides of psychic energy and those of human affairs.

Today, there is a difference of opinion about this. Some authorities aver that the old belief in the phases of the moon influencing human behaviour is all nonsense. Others declare with equal assurance that this supposed influence is a fact, and they say that anyone brought into contact with human nature in all its strange vagaries, can vouch for this. Policemen all over the world, they say, recognise full moon as the time when unusual things are likely to happen; not merely the ordinary sorts of crime, but bizarre acts, especially those with a sexual bias. Many slayers of women have, by the press at any rate, been dubbed “moon-murderers.”

The light of the full moon, and especially the midsummer moon, has for so long been believed to have an unsettling effect upon the mind, that it has given us the word ’lunatic’ for the mentally disturbed. Again, some people agree with this belief, saying that crises of mental illness coincide with the full moon; while others scoff at it as an old wives’ tale. However, the writer can testify to having known a successful businessman, otherwise quite normal, whose speech was affected at the time of the full moon. His way of stumbling over words at this time of the month was so well known to his family that they used to call it “the moons.”

Old almanacks, on which country people put great dependence, used to give whole lists of things to do and not to do, with regard to planting crops, cutting timber, and so on, according to the different phases of the moon. In general, the rule was to use the increase of the moon for those matters which you wished to increase, and the waning of the moon for clearing away things you wanted to get rid of.

The waning of the moon, too, was a time of sinister magic, as the waxing of the moon was of beneficent magic. This is why ’wanion’ is an old word for a curse, because it was put on in the waning of the moon.

All these things are part of the antique lore of moon worship and moon magic. As the old rhyme has it:

Pray to the Moon when she is round.

Luck with you will then abound.

What you seek for shall be found,

On the sea or solid ground.

One of the traditional Bardic Triads, said to be handed down from the Druids, tells us: “Three embellishing names of the Moon: The Sun of the Night, the Light of the Beautiful, and the Lamp of the Fairies.”

The rays of the moon are indeed “The Light of the Beautiful”; whether they are stealing through the branches of some woodland scene, or silvering the roofs of a city, or making a pathway of light across the waves of the sea. Things tend to look quite different by moonlight; and it has called to lovers through the ages, since before the Pyramids were built. The moon goddess was the love goddess, and also the lady of enchantment and mystery, in all the lands and cities that flourished when the world was young. Beautiful women of Ancient Egypt hailed her as Queen Isis, The moon rays were the arrows of white Artemis, shot through the murmuring trees in the forests of Greece. The wild and joyous festivals of Ishtar were held in her honour. She was Diana of the oak groves of Nemi; and Lucius Apuleius in his magical vision beheld her rising at midnight from the enchanted ocean.

To the occult philosophers of the Middle Ages, the moon was alchemical silver, as the sun was alchemical gold. Those who would work magic of any kind, observed the moon; and particularly witches, skilled in the works of both the waxing and the waning moon. From the thirteen lunar months of the year, their revered and dreaded number of thirteen was taken.

Today, for the first time in history, man has fulfilled one of his oldest dreams. He has journeyed to the moon and set foot upon the lunar surface. Some people—I think rather devoid of imagination—have cried out that this has robbed the moon of her ancient splendour; that her glamour and magic are dissipated. Nothing, in my opinion, could be further from the truth. The flight to the moon, the quest of the White Goddess, has been one of man’s greatest adventures, and one of the most magical.

It had no common reason to it; any more than did the ascent of Everest or Columbus’s crazy voyage across the Atlantic, with his sailors in constant fear lest they fall over the edge of the world—the voyage that discovered a New World by mistake. Of course, the money could more reasonably have been spent on social services or famine relief; but man is sometimes led by feelings much deeper than those of the reasoning mind. The urge of an ancestral magic lured his ship to that truly unearthly realm; that shining mirror that hangs in space; that crescent-argent upon the shield of night.

The first samples of moon-rock to be examined proved to be coated and fused with a glass-like substance, presumed to be volcanic in origin. So the moon’s surface is indeed mirror-like and reflecting, even as the old occultists claimed its function to be, namely, that of gathering and reflecting the rays of the sun and the stars and planets on to the earth, but infused with the peculiar magnetism of the moon’s own influence.

No intelligent pagan was ever silly enough to think that the moon he saw in the sky was a goddess. On the contrary, the planets and the luminaries were named after the gods, and not vice versa. It was the great powers of Nature, personified as gods and goddesses, whose influences manifested through the heavenly bodies. This, at any rate, was and is the initiates’ conception of astrology.

The same power that ruled the sun, ruled fire. The power that ruled the moon, ruled water. The sun was basically masculine; the moon basically feminine. All of manifested Nature was force incarnating in form; and so that men might come closer to these forces, which are not blind, but of intelligence beyond that of humanity, they built images for the ’powers that be’ to ensoul, and bestowed upon them the names of gods and goddesses. “For by Names and Images are all Powers awakened and re-awakened,” as one great rubric of the Western tradition of the Mysteries tells us.

A great part of genuine witchcraft is moon magic, derived from the age-old lore of moon worship. In spite of the large number of books that have been written about witchcraft in modern times, in response to renewed public interest in the subject, very little has been said about this aspect of it.

One of the very few people who have ever written with an inside knowledge of witchcraft is Charles Godfrey Leland; and he tells us a good deal about moon magic in his books. Another writer who evidences unusual knowledge on this subject is the late Dion Fortune. While not dealing specifically with witchcraft, two of her occult novels, The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic (both re-issued in recent years by the Aquarian Press), contain much curious lunar lore.

From being a widely popular religion which spread all over the Roman Empire, the cults of such moon goddesses as Isis and Diana eventually sank into forced obscurity, with the take-over by Christianity. Contrary to general belief, the pagan religious Mysteries did not die out. They were forcibly suppressed; but in a clandestine and underground form they continued to live, because of their emotional appeal, especially to women. One form they eventually took was that of the Old Religion, the cult of witchcraft.