Comes the Full Moon

The Man in the Moon is a Lady by Val Lempiala

A Song of Enchantment

A song of Enchantment I sang me there,

In a green-green wood, by waters fair,

Just as the words came up to me

I sang it under the wild wood tree. 

Widdershins turned I, singing it low,

Watching the wild birds come and go;

No cloud in the deep dark blue to be seen

Under the thick-thatched branches green. 

Twilight came: silence came:

The planet of Evening's silver flame;

By darkening paths I wandered through

Thickets trembling with drops of dew. 

But the music is lost and the words are gone

Of the song I sang as I sat alone,

Ages and ages have fallen on me -

On the wood and the pool and the elder tree.

Walter de la Mare

In my area, the full moon occurs on Wednesday, January 19th at 4:22 PM. I will be honoring this time and making my usual magick. In the meantime, there is a libation to be brewed and an offering to be baked, a round, plump barley cake, fragrant and  filled with herbs and spices, seeds and a silver coin.

I have been browsing through Charles Leland's Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling recently. There are many interesting tidbits, so I thought I'd share a few.

According to Leland, when a gypsy woman is with child, she will not, if she can help it, leave her tent by full moonshine. A child born at the time of full moon will make a happy marriage.

He goes on to say that "moon-worship is very ancient; it is alluded to as a forbidden thing in the Book of Job. From early times witches and other women worked their spells when stark-naked by the light of the full moon, which is evidently derived from the ancient worship of that planet and the shameless orgies connected with it." These men!!! Their fantasies and general misogynistic tendencies made them fear women and their magick. He further states, "In ancient symbolism the horns of the moon were regarded as synonymous with the horns of the ox - hence their connection with agriculture, productiveness and fertility, or the general principle, and from this comes the beneficent influence not only of the horns, but of horse-shoes, boars' tusks, crabs' claws, and pieces of coral resembling them." He includes the following, which many of us are familiar with.

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.

Notice that the moon is called "she" in this little poem as opposed to "he" or the familiar  "man in the moon." The moon has always mystified and even terrified people. Even now, when man has been to the moon, She still fascinates us, She is not just a large rock orbiting Momma Earth. Her effects can be felt by all, the pull of the water in our bodies as well as the seas, our emotions.  I was born during the dark moon - does it mean anything? Did it mark me as one of Hekate's own? Who knows? And those born during full moons, does that make them more inclined to follow a mystical path too? The dark of the moon, the full moon - liminal times? I ponder the powers of the moon and Her influences.

Blessings nine!