PROBABLY no heavenly body has received as much attention
from men in all ages as our moon. Many causes contributed to this. The Moon
is near us; she is a remarkable and large object in the sky; she enlightens
the night; she appears to have much to do with man and his affairs. Omens,
spells, wishes, oracles, divination, traditions cluster around her during
all time. It would be difficult to find a scripture that does not exalt
the moon. The Christian Bible says that God ordained that the sun should
rule the day and the moon the night. The Roman Church depicts Mary the Mother
of God holding the child while she stands upon the crescent moon. The twelfth
chapter of Revelations opens thus:
And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the
sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.
Other religions are the same as this modern Hebraic one in giving the
moon a very great prominence.
Even science cannot escape the fascination. The brilliancy and nearness
of the moon and her many recurring changes all aid in fixing the attention
of science. Modern and ancient science alike unite in watching the night's
great light as she performs her journey round us. Nations regulate themselves
and their acts, religious and commercial, by the moon. Feast days of the
church are fixed more by the lunar than the solar calendar, for all the
movable feasts depend on the moon. Calendars rule commercial affairs in
credits, obligations, and settlements.
From earliest times the calendar, ruled in fact by the moon's motion, has
been of immense interest to man. Periodically rulers of the earth try to
reform the calendar of days and months when it as periodically gets out
of order. The present arrangement of months with twenty-eight, twenty-nine,
thirty, and thirty-one days was invented to make a calendar which would
last some centuries before another one will be needed, just because the
moon's motion will not give twelve regular months, but twelve regular ones
and one small one of about six days. And when the present style of reckoning
was introduced, many communities of men in Europe rebelled because they
thought they had been deprived of some actual days of life.
Caesar ordered a reformation of the calendar by attempting to use the sun,
but in time it fell into great confusion. Pope Gregory XIIl directed ten
days to be suppressed, and then found that the Julian calendar had an error
which would amount to three days in four hundred years - quite a serious
matter. The Gregorian year now prevails, except in Russia. But still the
greater number of men and the greater number of festivals depend On the
moon and her motion. While if we examine the records relating to superstition,
we will find that whatever may have been the place once held by the sun,
it has been usurped by the moon, leaving one nation distinctly worshipers
of the Lord of Day.
Modern Theosophy, coming on the field as the uniter of all religions by
explaining the symbols and traditions of each, is not exempt from the mystery
of the moon. H. P. Blavatsky is our sole originator of a theory regarding
the satellite which one could not have invented with the most wonderful
imagination. She says her teachers told her, and leaves us to work out the
details; but her theory will bear investigation if taken as part of the
whole evolutionary scheme reported by her. If we had thought to escape from
lunar dreams and puzzles we were in error, for while she plainly asserts
that the former body of the entity now called Man's Earth is the very moon
in our sky, the existence of a mystery is as plainly declared. The first
mystery which she claimed to reveal - and, indeed, she first of every one
states it - is that in a remote period, when there was no earth, the moon
existed as an inhabited globe, died, and at once threw out into space all
her energies, leaving nothing but the physical vehicle. Those energies revolved
and condensed the matter in space near by and produced our earth; the moon,
its parent, proceeding towards disintegration, but compelled to revolve
around her child, this earth. This gives us a use and history for the moon.
But then the same messenger says that the "superstition" prevailing
so long and widely as to the moon's bad influence, as in insanity, in necromancy,
and the like, is due to the fact that the moon, being a corpse intimately
associated with earth, throws upon the latter, so very near to her, a stream
of noxious emanations which, when availed of by wicked and knowing persons,
may be used for man's injury. Then the same writer goes on to assert that
six mysterious doctrines or facts remain yet untold, and all relating to
the moon.
It would be idle to speculate on these mysteries, for it has ever been found
that unless the Great Initiates speak, the general run of men can but modify,
enlarge, or intertwine by their fancy those facts and doctrines of which
they have heard. But as to the fate of the moon, H.P.B., speaking for those
Initiates, says plainly what is to become of our satellite.
In the first volume of Secret Doctrine, in a foot note on page
155 of the first edition, she writes:
Both [Mercury and Venus] are far older than the Earth, and, before the
latter reaches her seventh Round her mother moon will have dissolved into
thin air, as the "Moons" of the other planets have, or have not,
as the case may be, since there are planets which have several moons
- a mystery again which no Oedipus of astronomy has solved.
This is extremely plain as to our moon, yet raises another mystery as
to the general subject of moons. If correspondence is a law of nature, as
I firmly believe, then it would be in accordance with it for the moon, considered
as earth's former body, to dissolve all away in course of time. And as evolution
proceeds with uniformity, the upward progress of our races and earth should
be marked by the gradual fading and final disappearance of the moon, as
H.P.B. says. It is likely that before our sixth round is ended, it being
the round relating to Buddhi as the vehicle of spirit, the
body of the moon, which was the vehicle for prana and astral body,
will have disappeared. Very probably one of the unrevealed mysteries has
to do with the uses and purposes of and for the whole mass of matter now
constituting the moon's bulk. But whatever those mysteries are, the fate
of our satellite is very clearly asserted, for the benefit of those who
have confidence in H.P.B.'s teachers, and who are willing to take the key
of correspondence for the unlocking of the lock of Nature.
WILLIAM BREHON
Path, June, 1894
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