Welcome to this video which is part of a series devoted to working with the stars for bodily and mental healing, and for spiritual growth.
Today, I’m going to teach you all about how I work with the Moon and so you can just click the link to hear the 20-minute video.
Or if you prefer, you can read it in the following article.
I think there’s no better way to start us off than this song of the Moon by Dion Fortune. To me, it encapsulates, beautifully, the characteristics of this glorious silvery orb.
I am that soundless, boundless, bitter sea. All tides are mine, and answer unto me. Tides of the airs, tides of the inner earth; The secret, silent tides of death and birth. Tides of men’s souls, and dreams, and destiny. Isis veiled, and Ea, Binah, Ge.
Dion Fortune, who wrote that verse for one of her books, The Sea Priestess, was an early 20th century magician. She used to live near where I do today – in a cottage on the slopes of Glastonbury Tor, from where she was the first teacher in Britain to openly hold training schools in the ancient Mysteries. I believe she inspires a lot of my own magical work from wherever she is now, beyond the Veil.
I should quickly mention though, that when we refer to magic, neither she nor I are talking about sleight-of-hand, end-of-the-pier conjuring tricks. It’s not about pulling rabbits out of hats.
It’s about real magic – the sort that came from the mages of ancient Alexandria who, around 4,000 years ago, practised a form of natural magic …otherwise known as alchemy. The word ‘magic’ comes from these mages, as they were known, because ‘magh’ is a Proto Indo-European root word meaning “to have power”.
So where did the power of these mages come from?
By studying closely the processes of Mother Nature, they worked out ways of speeding up or, if they wanted to, slowing down… Her operations.That is how they gained power over their lives, and it is also how we can gain self-empowerment today.
But key to the work of the mages were the seven stars. They knew that without the cooperation of the spirits of the seven stars or planets, otherwise known as gods and goddesses, their alchemical technology would go nowhere. They needed the support of these forces, and they also needed their spiritual guidance which they received through meditation.
In the last video, When You Wish Upon A Star, I unravelled the philosophical basis of the wisdom of those mages in this respect. I also described the stories, or myths as we now call these tales – that they drew in the stars. There are hundreds of them, from just about every culture around the world at that time – most of which had at their core the astrological and alchemical journey of the hero.
These myths were at the heart of the Mystery Teachings which you can learn much more about in my book, Stories in the Stars, and they were taught in the philosophy schools in Alexandria – and in fact all around the Mediterranean at that time.
Over the coming weeks, I will be going into much more detail about how each of those seven stars or planets can help us to heal, so you can benefit from that knowledge too… and here I am beginning with the Moon.
The esoteric nature of the Moon
The first thing to understand is that the month belongs to the Moon. That is what the word ‘month’ means.
The fact that our months today are mostly of 30 to 31 days in length is due to lots of unnecessary fiddle-faddling with our calendars over time, by those who had no knowledge of the esoteric power of the Moon. So it’s only really in February that we experience the length of a true month.
Magicians divide that 28-day cycle of the true month into three parts, maiden, mother and crone.
When they ask the Moon for help in generating growth, in any direction, they pray to a waxing moon …that is anytime from the maiden New Moon to the mother Full Moon which marks the climax of the first fortnight.
However, when they’re asking for a reduction in growth – i.e. for something to lessen or disappear – they work with a waning Moon over that second fortnight of the true month that ends with the Dark Moon of the Crone.
Now that makes sense to me if only from my own experience in growing food.
We plant seeds for upward-growing leafy greens on that first, waxing Moon fortnight of the month, and then seeds for downward-growing, root vegetables, like carrots and potatoes, on the second fortnight of the waning moon.
I can promise you, from experience, that this produces a bumper harvest of both!
But whether or not the Moon is waxing or waning, I find that Her advice centre – let’s call it that – is always open at dawn on Her day, which is Monday.
What to ask the Moon
So let’s imagine you’ve set your alarm clock to wake you at dawn, and now you’re sitting up in bed, rubbing the sleep out of your eyes. The next thing you might to know is how should I approach the Moon for healing? What do I ask her for?
We know what to ask her for by knowing Her and her qualities, and so now I’m going help you get to know Her.
We need to take a holistic approach because the characteristics of each of the seven stars dictate all their strengths and weaknesses, just as much as their position in our birth charts dictates ours. So we have to know what those characteristics are before deciding who to call on and for what.
I mean, if you want to buy a loaf of bread, you’re unlikely to find it at the butcher’s. Similarly, if you want apples, you’ll go to the greengrocer … and not the undertaker, who would be Saturn in this case!
So we need first to understand the character of the Moon and then all the rest will naturally unfold from that.
In a nutshell, what the Sun is to fire, the Moon is to water.
Those fiery, crystalised dragon lines that criss-cross the whole Earth, often …wrongly… called leylines, are also invariably accompanied by rivers, brooks and streams… seemingly weaving a merry dance all around them.
That is how the Marriage of the Sun and the Moon manifests here on the Earth. It is our information superhighway that goes interstellar, in both directions. You could think of those energy lines as telegraph wires that connect us with cosmic forces. Dowsers tell us that they grow and contract according to the phases of the Moon. When the Moon is full, some are as wide as rivers in full flood, like the one sung about by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
"Moon River... Wider than a mile... I'm crossing you in style some day Oh, dream maker, You heart breaker Wherever you're going, I'm going your way."
I don’t think she was singing about just any old river. Whether she realised it or not, she was singing about the goddess who controls all the waters of the Earth, and its tidal flows. Considering that two-thirds of this planet is water, then she rules over a huge domain.
And thus, it stands to reason that the Moon also rules over the ebb and flow of all the fluids of our bodies.
That’s the blood, the blood serum … and not to mention all the other fluids that service the lymph and the intracellular communication, nutrition and waste disposal.
Liquids amount to more than half our body weight… So it might be a good idea to beghin any kind of healing with asking: is my health issue to do with liquid flow or its quality? That would be my first question to ask her. And then if the answer is in the affirmative, I would ask her to correct it.
But there is so much more to how the Moon can help us with our health than just that… and it’s to do with the intrinsic qualities of water… which I’ll come on to next.
The library of the Moon
You probably already know that the Moon is also the custodian of memories, and I believe this is why so many of us get inspiration when we are in water … say, in the bath.
The late Dr Masuro Emoto discovered and taught us much about this quality of communication that water possesses. I often get the answer to a question just by washing my hands under the tap. You will probably have your own ways of receiving messages from water.
But to my way of seeing, water is like the Library of Alexandria. Why do I say that? Because everything everyone on Earth ever knew is stored in it, holographically.
But we don’t actually need to access the whole of the information at once. That would be beyond overwhelming! The Moon goddess unlocks just what we need at any one time, and what we’re capable of understanding, from those memory banks.
And this brings me on to the word ‘remember’. Re-member …as in putting back together that which has been dismembered.
If you put back together a body member – say an arm – that had been broken or dismembered, you would say that you are re-membering it. So in that sense, re-membering is another word for healing.
Now I’m not saying that if you ask the Moon to fix your broken leg, you will be able to instantly stand up and throw away your crutches.
The Moon’s healing follows the rhythms and flows of the tides, and so it’s unlikely to be instant!
On top of that, we are unavoidably subject to trials and challenges on this Earth. It is the overarching message of the Hero’s Journey. We all have our dragons to face down, and there is no magic wand to make that go away! Sometimes, I wish there was!
But as I said before, alchemists knew ways of speeding up these processes. When the only way out is through, it’s great if you can find a fast-track that works with the rivers of natural intelligence in the body … which, by the way, is a process modern medicine seems to know nothing about.
Doctors would prescribe an asprin for damping down a fever, inside of a herb that would pour fuel on the fire, and get that vital detox completed, and over and done with in the fastest and most health-inducing way.
So in petitioning the Moon to re-member us, we are giving ourselves the best chance of getting better more quickly and in a way that will be in line with the direction of how the bodily processes flow naturally.
Sometimes, that healing of remembering is as simple as reminding the body of what it is supposed to do. This is good news for those who suffer from auto-immune dysfunctions … like for instance, celiac disease, diabetes, Graves’ disease, IBS, multiple sclerosis or arthritis…
We know how painful it can be, and so frustrating, when the servant that is supposed to look after us starts attacking us for no good reason.
So remembering can be the act of just giving the body a reminder … but that reminder can only come at the feeling level, not in words. The subconscious mind doesn’t do language, only feelings. So it needs to be reminded of what it felt like to be well, for it to kick-start back up a whole load of processes which it had made redundant.
This is about information as a thing, rather than just a recipe or prescription written down. It is the new inFORMation – inner FORMation – literally reFORMing that which had become deFORMed …and leading to reFORMation and transFORMation.
In essence, that’s what alchemy is all about. Breaking stuff down so that you can reform it into something else.
This remembering process with the Moon reminds me a bit of defragging a computer. Defragging is so-named because it re-members the fragmentation of data that has aged over time, and fallen apart. Left to themselves, those fragments are like free-floating, free radicals that can cause the computer to run slow.So in that way, we sometimes need to defrag our bodies.There are several ways to do it … fasting for more than three days is one.
But I find a simpler way is to ask the Moon at sunrise on a Monday to remind my body of how it felt when it was in a better state of health, and I sometimes ask the Moon to re-member my DNA. This is because the DNA is actually the memory bank that holds the architectural blueprint of the body, which informs all the rest of the biological processes.
Don’t worry over the wording too much, or caveating your wishes like a lawyer. She is immensely wise, and has massive intelligence. She knows exactly how to achieve what you need. She just needed you to ask.
The Moon and the Philosopher’s Stone
Liquids, by their very nature, flow, and sometimes they can end up flowing into some quite rank, putrid-smelling pools. That’s not always a bad thing. Putrefaction is the alchemical stage that’s the precursor to the formation of the Philosopher’s Stone… and this is the stone that turns all it touches into gold.
According to alchemist Dennis W Hauck in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Alchemy.
“Putrefaction was also referred to by alchemists as the Purgation of the Stone, because it was considered to be the final death to any contaminants or remnants of ego in the matter, and it was a necessary prelude to the resurrection or rebirth of matter on a more perfect or spiritual level.”
However, I don’t think there’s any harm in asking the Moon goddess to check on the progress of our ponging pools of putrefaction, because she will know if and when some further help or catalyst is needed.
A magical spell under the Moon
Now finally, here’s a simple Moon magical formula or spell. You will need to do it on a daybreak when the Moon is still visible in the sky just as the Sun is coming up.
So, first of all, make a tea with your choice of any of the herbs that the Moon governs. There’s plenty to pick from, including aloe, arrowhead, daisy, dog-tooth violet, eucalyptus, hyssop, moonwort, moneywort, mouse ear, nutmeg, opium poppy, orris root, pearlwort, periwinkle, wild poppy, rattle grass, dog rose, saxifrage, speedwell, sweet flag, turmeric and water violet.
Then take a mug of the tea outside and hold it so that the Moon reflects on the surface of the liquid. Again, don’t be too pedantic about it, if you’re not sure whether you have achieved the right reflection or not. It’s the intention that matters.
Have your conversation with the Moon goddess about whatever you think She can help you with. Then afterwards slowly sprinkle the liquid on to your garden beds.
I hope you’ve found this teaching on Moon Magic helpful. It’s by no means everything you need to know about working magically with the Moon, and I wouldn’t want to be too prescriptive anyway. It is just to get you launched from the right place, so can you start to ask the right questions … and let Her teach you the rest.
Annie Dieu-Le-Veut 