09 Jul The House of the Moon ~ July 10th-16th, 2017
By this time in July, the season of Cancer has fully ripened into the full depth of its nurturing warmth. There is special softness in every sigh and a sweetness even in your sadness. Now that the Full Moon in Capricorn has passed, many of your desires will begin to manifest into being, poised for your imminent enjoyment like heavy low hanging fruits.
Cancer season is a vaporous time of amber sentiments and rosepetal reminiscences. Swept up in the vapors of scent and music, memory becomes fully embodied as a living realm. Cancer, ruled by the Moon, is associated with the archetype of the Divine Mother, whom you have known through the cool hands and soft words of maternal souls everywhere.
But mythologically speaking, the Divine Mother that Cancer correlates to is the blurred beauty of Mnemosyne Mater Musarem. (Memory, Mother of the Muses)
Mnemosyne’s name derives from Mene, Moon, and mosune, ‘wooden house’, so literally translated her name means ‘the House of the Moon.’
As mother of the nine Muses, Mnemosyne reminds you that all arts are born from her in the house of the Moon, where maternal divinity raises and nourishes human consciousness into maturity.
Memory is thus, the loving gardener of the mind. The House of the Moon is where the primal acts of creation roll up from the deep and are cultivated into art-forms with great love and devotion.
In Ancient Greece, Orphic priests were said to drink from the “pool of Memory” in order to experience perfect wisdom. Thus, Cancer season is time to enter these waters and luxuriate in drinking from the pools of memory.
Memory is a realm where linear time is revealed to be an illusion. In the circular rhythms of the Moon, both the past and the future can equally be “remembered”. Thus, in these pools you become much more than your individual story. You become a microcosm that perfectly reflects the macrocosm of the whole human story.
“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.”
The pools of Memory were well known to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who developed a transcendental philosophy of History: one of the sacred arts of the muses.
In devotion to the art of history, Emerson said:
History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man.
In Emerson’s view, the linear march of time was far from what the art of history was really all about. Instead, he asks that human history be envisioned as a record of individuals discovering principles of the universal mind, whereby an immersion into another person’s story is experienced as if remembering one’s own experience.
In his essay, History, Emerson describes this unity of experience by saying,
“What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he may understand.”
Emerson was a great poet, but he was a legendary essayist and lecturer in his time. The Harvard scholar, Harold Bloom, states that “As an essayist, Emerson professedly follows Montaigne, and Montaigne’s precursors: Plato, Plutarch, Seneca. Montaigne and Shakespeare were, for Emerson, the two writers always with him.”
This lineage of thought that Emerson was remembering in his work summarizes the whole point that he was making in his philosophy of History. From the pools of memory he summons the wisdom that:
“There is one mind common to all individual men. Of the works of this mind history is the record. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history.”
Remember that long ago, (in Meno and Phaedo) Plato argued that learning is recollection. Thus to learn is not to acquire new information from the outside, but is instead to drink from the pools of memory. Elsewhere, it may be recalled that Socrates referred to himself as a midwife of knowledge, considering his method of questioning to be a way of coaxing a remembrance of something innate and inborn.
This week, under the light of Cancer, safely embraced in the house of the moon, remember what stories of humanity that you have always loved. What tales of courage and beauty and lust have always moved you? You may share in the joy and sorrow of people and places distant from you in time and place through the collective memory of universal mind.
“He should see that he can live all history in his own person.”
Emerson believed that history should be understood as biography and that by reading the biographies of individuals throughout history, you were in fact reading your own biography, immersing yourself in the universal mind…in the pools of memory.
“…every history should be written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols.”
Through the stories of others, you can remember your own nature, not through the absolute value of facts, but in the symbolism and the soul of living memories.
‘Tis the season to remember who you are through the eyes of Mnemosyne Mater Musarem. (Memory, Mother of the Muses)
Monday/Tuesday: The Age of Gold
On Monday, the Sun in Cancer will be exactly opposed to Pluto in Capricorn. This confrontation with Pluto may manifest in some sort of crisis, but it is still a much calmer energy than what was experienced recently at the Full Moon in Capricorn.
If the heavens were a symphony, then the weekend offered the crescendo and climax, but the beginning of this week is still immersed in a coda: an extension of musical cadence that processes a musical idea all the way through to its structural conclusions, creating a sense of balance between resonance and remembrance.
With the Moon now waning in the sign of Aquarius, expect to have an illuminating sense of detachment from your petty personal problems feeling far more inspired by the human condition as a whole.
Wednesday/Thursday: The Apples of Knowledge
In the middle of the week, the Moon wanes into the waters of Pisces opening up a harmonious trine to the Sun in Cancer. The pools of memory are all the more accessible at this time for the Moon in Pisces will begin to cast your imagination adrift upon the vast oceans of mythopoeia.
On Thursday, the Moon will conjoin Neptune in Pisces, opening a wide portal to the universal mind. This is a day well spent immersed in music or poetry or history. Let yourself merge with the minds from the past who have left their indelible mark upon your heart by building the places that you love, writing the passages that inspire you and fighting the battles that you would be honored to fight.
Friday/Saturday/Sunday: The Blessing of the Morning Stars
On Friday, a happy and fortuitous aspect occurs between Mercury in Leo and Jupiter in Libra. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then a pen empowered by a harmonious aspect between Mercury and Jupiter is very mighty indeed!
Your thoughts and your words will be imbued with optimism about the future. This is a wonderful day to write manifestos for there is a magical power to speak a golden future into being on this day. In consideration of memory’s ability to speak, the weekend would be well spent correlating your vision of the future with an historical story of triumph from the past!
The waning Moon transits through Aries over the weekend, sparking suddenly on Sunday when it conjoins Uranus. This represents a window of opportunity to drop your fear of the future like a bag of bricks: suddenly you become unburdened! In the act of creation that follows liberation from fear, merge with the universal mind, drawing a relationship between an inspiring historical figure and yourself with great relish.
Mercury’s placement in Leo already has a flair for transforming the story of your life into a legend, so why not begin weaving that legend into a whole tapestry of artful allusions while you’re at it?
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