THE MOON

Imagine the moon, high and full, suspended in the sky, illuminating the landscape. Observe it and feel how its shape and light seduces you, making you keep your gaze on it. She is always there, mysterious and ancient, patiently revolving around the Earth, even when we don't look up, even when we see her as just part of the everyday landscape. How do we feel about the Moon? How do we represent it in art and popular culture? Why is it so important from a symbolic point of view? Maybe all these questions can be framed in Astrology and maybe we can propose another question: What do we mean when we say Moon?

Moon in astrology speaks of different functions of reality. Firstly, Moon is a protective function, it is the context that protects and takes care of us. Those functions and responses connected with instinct and the past that we need to protect us from the dangers of life. Luna is the protective framework within which life can grow and reproduce. Like a protective egg within which, for as long as it is needed, all that is necessary for the development and nourishment of that body will be given, without the need to even ask for it.

Moon is also a function of reproduction, * like the cells in gestation that reproduce material in this marvellous and mysterious cellular multiplication. The mystery of life as gestation. The mystery of the creation of life, so fragile and yet so powerful. The fragility of a life squealing at birth, the fragility of a small body open to the immensity of life, breathing for the first time. The absolute and ancestral power of bringing a body from nothingness into being; from the dark realm of possibilities and the cold of the infinite spaces of the cosmos, into embodied life on this warm and moist earth. How can we be grateful for this gift of being alive in these bodies? What substance has brought and protected us? Moon. Mother. Old and young. Ancient wet nurse. Mother. Mother. Mother.

Moon is all the complexities of the mechanisms we use to protect ourselves. Even when those mechanisms trap us in their threads and veils, and do not let us see that we act to defend ourselves, out of fear of life. They are the instinctive reactions that lock us into the known. They are reactions that are not even ours, they are grooves, marks, impersonal patterns that travel long ago from the past, centuries, millennia. They are the voices and fears of those who lived before us.