The Full Moon and the Occult

 

The Moon and The Occult

 

The full moon, perhaps more than any other natural body or force, has long been associated with the occult. The moon is associated with beckoning madness and monsters from within the depths of man, with witches, werewolves, divination, and secretive cults.

Perhaps this stems from polytheist religions, where many deities associated with the moon were also tied to other, sometimes bloody or secretive aspects. Looking at this list of lunar deities,  seven of the ten selected lunar deities have some association with death. Selene, Diana, Artemis were all associated with the hunt; with taking life. Hecate, Thoth and Alignak are all somehow tied to the dead; Thoth sometimes being charged with weighing their souls, Alignak being responsible for bring the souls of the dead back to the earth to be reborn, and Hecate, associated with the moon through the reappearance of Phobe and her relationship to Artemis, was in charge of the spirit world. Coyolxauhquin becomes the moon-goddess only after death, when her severed head is tossed into the sky. Many of these deities operate in liminal spaces;  Artemis is neither girl nor woman due to her vow of chastity, Cerridwen is depicted as both a maiden and a crown. Ngalindi, the Yolngu Moon-man, moves from life to death in the course of his cycle; growing fat and lazy only to be hacked apart by his wives and die, and then rise from the dead to do it all again. Some lunar deities are associated with secret knowledge and intuition, such as Cerridwen who keeps the cauldron of knowledge from which she gives wisdom, and Thoth who is also associated with Seshat, the scribe of the gods, the ruler of writing and wisdom. Many of these figures are women, potentially due to the moon’s association with the menstrual cycle  but also potentially due to women’s position as a liminal figure; of a gateway between life and death, due to their ability to carry and bear children, and the danger associated with it. The moon is a much more fluid figure than the sun, cycling as it does through different phases throughout the month, sometimes giving back nothing but darkness, sometimes gifting the world below with light. It’s reigns over the night; a period of darkness associated with heightened danger. In fact, according to a study by Burt P. Kotler et al, have shown a tendency to avoid moonlight as “increased illumination appears to aid predators such as

owls and foxes more than it aids their rodent prey” (1469). So while the full moon’s light may bring a further range of sight and knowledge one’s surroundings, that knowledge comes with a price to one’s safety, and is more suited to aid the predator rather than the prey, which could explain why so many of the moon’s deities are hunter’s themselves.

 

This danger and fluidity puts lunar figures at odds with their solar opposites—many of whom are positioned as direct foils of one another such as Artemis and Apollo, who were brother and sister. Many, though not all, solar deities are male figures, who typically are associated with justice and protection, such as Surya, who banished illness, as well as the darkness and nightmares that the moon is often blamed for. According to Britannica,  attributes of sun deities have been adopted by monotheist deities, even Christ himself. Potentially then, since modern culture is rooted mostly in monotheism, and those deities more closely resemble sun deities, moon deities and the moon itself have been further regulated to and associated with margins of society; to witchcraft, to cults, and to secret, arcane and archaic knowledge, and mystery.

 

 

 These attitudes are clearly present in the following passage, in which a murder is pinned on a full moon cult in Liverpool circa 1962:

 

Police hunted Friday for members of a pagan cult in the belief a woman found stabbed to death two weeks ago may have been the victim of a ritual "full moon murder." The cult, which has a wide following here, worships the Polynesian God of fertility, naked Tiki. When the moon is full, Tiki is said to demand a blood sacrifice (V11.10; V12.1). Maureen Dutton, 27, was found stabbed to death with 14 knife wounds Dec. 22, a night when the moon was almost full. Chief Det. Supt. James Morris appealed to members of the cult "to come forward to help in the investigation"-the equivalent, in British police parlance, of a statement they are wanted for questioning. Thursday night, police combed coffee bars and clubs for Tiki cultists, many of whom are university students. Tiki disciples keep wooden images of the grotesquely shaped god, usually about eight inches high, in their homes. Some abase themselves before the idol and burn incense. Other ornaments used in the rituals include necklaces of polished sea shells. The more fervent worshippers have a cult mark tatooed on their arms. Tiki worshippers have been known to visit the Duttons. Mrs. Dutton's husband is a research chemist and a doctor of philosophy. (Cray, 204-5)

Here a crime has been conflated with the full moon, pinned in fact on a cult inspired by a full moon deity, Tiki, said to demand blood sacrifices, for its followers to tattoo and debase themselves, and adorn themselves with symbols associated with an island culture and the sea—another natural body closely associated with the moon due to the moon’s effect on the tides. There is no recorded god known as Tiki that I have found, and the true conclusion of this crime is unclear. When you google “tiki cultists” the first thing to turn up is a  facebook page associated with the Hawaiian tiki and Hawaiian culture with a heavy emphasis on beach life. The use of the word “Tiki” for the god depicted in this urban legend is likely a misunderstanding or misappropriation of Polynesian culture and belief by British citizens in the early 1960s, further echoed in the seashell adornments and the tattoos and the wooden idols, despite the positioning of local university students being the primary members of the cult. The roots of Satanic Panic approaching, a violent death near the night of the full moon, combined with perhaps more globalized and educated youths in the area, likely enflamed the imagination enough to fill in the rest of the details from cultural touchstones influenced by the moon’s association with death and secret knowledge and paganism. The heart of this supposed cult is made up of university students, and it’s suggested that a doctor of philosophy, an academic, is at least in some way playing some part, deepening that connection between the moon, and those who may have secret knowledge or access to knowledge we ourselves may not have. The only named figure is a woman—the wife of the academic, suggested by the cult’s frequent visits to her home to be one of them. This positions her in a strange, liminal space of active participant in the arcane as well as victim of it; associating her with lunar goddesses whose myths are sometimes laced with sacrifice; Artemis and her vow of celibacy, Coyolxauhquin and her beheading, an Chang'e, the Chinese moon goddess who interfered and toppled her violent husband’s bid for immortality, and as a result had to flee to the moon and live there forever. Despite Tiki being positioned as a male god, and his idols quite phallic, the focus on Mrs. Dutton as both cultist and victim, keeps the legend in line with the typically feminine-association of lunar spirituality, while allowing it to adopt a more brutal, menacing, exotic and sexual flavor.

 

The association between the moon and witchcraft outlasted Satanic Panic, and still is alive and well today. Consider the following video:

Here we have a man out hunting for evidence of the Mississippi Witch. He finds it important to note that it is between the Fall Equinox and the Full Moon—signaling to the audience the likelihood of increased witchy activity due to the time. The Equinox is likely relevant because it is a transitional, liminal time, and one in which the year is transitioning from a period of growth to a period of dying. It’s interesting to note that in this video, and in the above account of the murder, the moon doesn’t even have to be fully-full to be associated with, or cause, mischief and violence. That being almost—or changing over—to the state of fullness is enough. The cameraman, however, obviously finds the moon an important component of the mischief caused, lingering on a shot of it after finding a particularly impressive stack of stones next to a body of water. Here, as well, there’s another association with the moon and water seen in the previous legend as represented by seashells.

This association with water is pretty prevalent in depictions of the moon and the supernatural. In the tarot, the Moon card typically depicts the full moon above a landscape split in two by a river. On each side of the river is a tower, and on each side sits a canine figure; one depicted as wild, and one as tame, which Biddy Tarot, a popular divination site, claims to represent “the tamed and the wild aspects of our minds.” At the bottom of the card there are waves, which Biddy Tarot says represents “the watery subconscious of our minds.” The moon, as represented here, is associated with duality and liminality—shores where water and land meet and are neither, truly, where minds are both tame and wild, and all it takes for one to become the other is a quick leap over a thin line. Perhaps this comes from the moon’s own liminality, its own crossing of lines, from dark to light to dark. Biddy Tarot associates the Moon card’s meaning with the words: “Illusion, fear, anxiety, subconscious, intuition” as well as “[r]elease of fear, repressed emotion, inner confusion” depending on its position.

But not all attitudes about the moon and its supernatural influence are negative. There has been a current move among neo-pagans, especially women, that looks to the moon as a symbol of power; a connection with the Goddess and femininity,  as the darkness and light of the moon both necessary and powerful in their own right. Many women see the moon as a well from which they can draw magic from, that it will assist different kinds of magic depending on the phase, helping with cleansing, with summoning and manifestation, and with banishing. Women, embracing the liminality of the moon and its feminine, mysterious, and arcane aura, have begun to form their own spiritual beliefs based off of the moon and lunar deities often in defiance and to play off of the societal fears of the supernatural associations with the moon and witches, often out of frustration with the patriarchal society, such as those who practice “Dianic Wicca,” typically all-female covens who seldom invite men into their group and focus their worship on Diana, a popular moon goddess. It’s not surprising that women who may be tired of patriarchal society would find relief in moon-goddess centered worship. Not only were many of the moon-goddesses virgins, such as Artemis and Diana, but many of them abdicated men’s company by choice, even if they weren’t virginal. Not only did Chang'e run to the moon for fear of her husband’s retribution, but Sina, a Polynesian goddess, got tired of how her husband and family treated her, so she packed her bags and ran off to the moon, deciding she liked it there much better. The modern increase and turn of young women towards moon-centered magic is likely an expression of frustrations with old patriarchal systems with an increase in their ability to confront it, perhaps related to the increase in women speaking out against sexual assault and harassment seen in the MeToo movement.