The Moon and Her Shadow: Shadow Work and the Sublunary World
The Moon has an incomparable magic. There’s something hypnotizing about its glow — it’s haunting, ethereal, ghostly… Yet that light, its most striking feature, is not its own. Astrologers understood this and took it into consideration in interpreting the body’s significance. Looking back into the field before the rise of the New Age, when nativities were a thing calculated only for kings and nations, the Moon was complicated. It was considered the lowest of the Celestial Hierarchy, one of the nine traditional planets with the most fickle, fleeting nature, and yet it was consulted in all matters. Far from the deeply personal emotional center we consider it today, the Moon was an indicator of the collective, an ever-changing force of reception. For any task or endeavor to be successful, one needed the favour of the Moon. The Picatrix, one of the most comprehensive medieval grimoires, explains:
You should pay attention to the Moon in all workings, as the foremost of the planets, because she has the most manifest effects and judges all things in this world, and to her belong the powers of generation and corruption, and she is mediatrix of their effects; for she received the influences and impressions of all the stars and planets, and pours them down onto the inferior things of the world.
