Reading and the Lunar
The Lunar is the most complex of the three energies. The Sun and the Star tend to stand as two extreme poles, with the Lunar being the mobile and transformative processes which take us between them. It is ruler of the ways - but the ways are many indeed. And so it is easy to conceptualise the Solar and Stellar in clear images: the Solar as the problems and pleasures of some kind of cosy, claustrophobic pastoral fantasia, and the Stellar as the climactic getting-devoured-by-the-infinite of weird fiction. But over time, in my notes, 'Lunar' has come to mean so many things it may as well mean nothing at all.
But perhaps that is right. A thing that is flexible; that is changing; that is in motion; a thing that reflects light but does not create it, yet transforms it in the act of reflection. It is in tension between the clear and the unknown, now a little Sun in the darkness of the night sky, now part of the gaps between the Stars. It is not Moonish to be a single thing.
Below: all Lunar!
The Moon relates to Magic
The Lunar governs witches and wizards and magic of all kinds. It is not the cosy spiritual certainties of the Sun, so often identified with the figure of the Emperor-Father and the State. The Lunar puts us on the outside of the day, outside of the law and the respectable, as well as in the middle place between the mortal and the infinite.
When in these pages I use the term "Magic" - though many things can be magical or otherworldly - I usually refer to something popculturally witchlike or wizardesque. Toads and tomes, wand and broom, sigils and study. This is to name and separate this style out from other things one might term magic (for example, religious witchcraft or natural phenomena)
Reading is the daily practice which is most to-do with feeling like a fellow in a tower surrounded by books, and encountering stories and techniques of magic.
The Moon is insular
Where the Solar is outward-facing and connected, the Lunar is inward and private. One might imagine this through the metaphor of a big community all working together, versus a hermit dwelling quietly alone; or a village filled with worldly things and cares, versus an isolated abbey devoted to contemplation and study.
Reading is solitary, and takes you to inner worlds.
The Moon Journeys
Walking takes us places on the landscape, but Reading sets us travelling in quite another sense. Stepping out of your front doorstep, the paths we travel must be transmuted through imagination. We are practicing the skill of seeing.
Reading is most often concerned with descriptions of journeys, like secret maps - telling how others have found the way so we can follow it.
The Moon governs artists and thinkers
That is, people always somehow outside of their time and place, those most able to fracture the now and bring in the new. The moon is a challenge to the Sun's authority - both as renewer and the fear of change and chaos. The Lunar is the world of ideas and images, moving away from the physical into the cerebral and dreamlike.
Control and the Artificial
The Moon stands in tension with the other Domains to create pairs.
In tension with the Stellar, the Lunar can denote control and mastery, the human confidence in having power over all things. Reading is best done inside, away from the wet. The term armchair Pagan
means a person more comfortable reading about magic than doing it, someone who lives through the cosy control of their books but unable to risk and fear the real.
In tension with the Solar, the Lunar can signify things which are no longer natural - though the Solar is man, it's man as interconnected with natural systems, in which one is a mammal capable of co-existing with the cycling year and your nonhuman neighbours within a balanced system. The Lunar can be the Sun's systems thrown into disarray, and so among these images is the artificial, the things man can invent which taking him very far from simply existing within the simple gifts of earth -
and that can be both bad and good. Reading requires man-made tools - books, eReaders, speakers - and often, an interest in the qualities of the things themselves - the pleasing crackle of vinyl, the loveliness of a library-shelf, and the sense of spiritual rightness that can arise from having your things nicely organised and on display.
It's nice to have a book nook.
The Moon is not always Professorial
There are many moons; the Loremaster archetype embodied by Reading is but one.
The moon can bring dreaming, chaos, transformation into other shapes, and as we travel with it, closer proximity to the madness of the Stellar, in which the moon's motions share a part.
Reading is the daily practice most similar to the Lunar, but it is not the fullness of it.
On Disconnection
Once you have established a Reading List, got some materials in, it is time for the third and final chapter. We will be clearing some space in our lives for Reading.