The Lunar Rhythm

[icymist]

The Lunar Rhythm: The Power of Symbolism

Spirits: All early calendars were lunar, and have now been replaced by a solar calendar. This is highly symbolic. The fact is that the human race in its infancy was matriarchal – the female principle always precedes the male.

When the human race invented agriculture and began to stabilize waking consciousness, it also passed its baton to the males. Heretofore the males hadn’t done much of the work of keeping society glued together. What little “thinking” was being done was being done by the women. The culture – in the sense of religion, science, technology, crafts, literature, etc. – was in the hands of the women, who handed it all over to the men at the time agriculture was invented.


The calendar was originally invented by the women who made it lunar because it was precisely the ebb and flow of lunar rhythms that they were trying to track. You only need a solar calendar when you’re doing agriculture because the work you do revolves around the seasons. And although hunting and gathering were also seasonal (depending on what game and plants were available in what season), this wasn’t so much a part of primitive peoples’ existence. They were vaguely aware of the yearly cycle, but didn’t think in those terms much because they had no need to plan much of anything.

So why have a calendar at all, you might ask, much less a lunar one? The reason for this is because in those days, when women still ran the show, the human race was tuned in to certain vibrations, or laws of nature, which ebbed and flowed with the lunar cycle, just as agriculture revolves around the yearly cycle. That is, there are certain wavelengths of knowledge, or techniques for accomplishing things such as healing, music-making, hunting, fishing, gathering, weaving, love-making, etc. which oscillate on a lunar rhythm. Humankind has almost completely lost all of this knowledge; it survives in schemes of planting, etc. by the moon. All of these schemes are valid even if they apparently contradict, such as Europeans planting on a waxing moon near full, and Mayans planting just past new moon. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that the moon’s phase be taken into account consistently, to hook onto the body of memory that exists “out there”.

Indeed, to live one’s life according to the moon, using the rules in any astrological rule book (good times to set eggs, make jellies, cut hair, prune trees, etc. etc.) would put one in touch with some of the profoundest rhythms underlying human existence. This is why the Hasidic Jews find so much joy in what seems to most people a sterile, repetitive existence. They are tuning into that feminine rhythm of joy in repetition, in dancing to the beat of the cosmos. The reason why the Hasids find the sabbath so joyous isn’t because they get a respite from their labors, but because they tune in to the lunar rhythm of the universe. The Hasids use a lunar calendar, as do the Moslems, and that is why they are so vigorous (which their effete, solar-calendar critics see as “fanatical”).

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