Lessons from The Moon

It has been nearly a month since I entered into a sort of initiatory process within the Hermetic system I have been studying, a process that, fittingly, began under the dominion of the Moon.

My initial communion with her was, in its own right, intimate and very emotional. And yet, it is not the encounter itself that has proven most interesting, but rather the slow unfurling of the mystery that followed in its wake. 

The Moon is known to reveal that which is unseen and unacknowledged. One believes oneself prepared for her tides, for the well-documented gravity she exerts upon the emotional body, but preparedness is, I have come to learn, an illusion of the daylight mind.

She has torn open the hidden chambers of my inner world, cages I had long forgotten. Within them lay truths I never thought I would have to confront.

Among these has been the persistent resurfacing of childhood wounds. My abandonment trauma, in particular, has risen with uncanny force, no longer content to emerge sporadically before retreating into its subterranean dormancy. It now lingers, articulate. I see more clearly than ever how this wound has shaped the very fate of my relationships: the subtle self-sabotage enacted in the name of control, the anticipatory anxiety that corrodes intimacy before it has the chance to deepen, the reflexive bracing for rejection, as though it were not a possibility, but an inevitability inscribed upon me in childhood. Inscribed upon me by my own mother, like a coal branded on my forehead; stay away from her, she is unlovable. 

There is a peculiar cruelty in this awareness: to recognize the pattern in its entirety, and yet remain, to some degree, within its grasp. I do not believe this wound will ever fully leave me. It has become a kind of psychic scar tissue, sensitive, reactive, enduring. And yet, if there is any redemption to be found, it lies in consciousness itself. Self-awareness, though not curative, is at least a form of agency. And still, the Moon is not solely an agent of excavation. She is also a revealer of that which has never before been named.

In the past two years, I have come to understand my asexuality as a defining axis of my human experience. One that both clarifies and complicates my relationship to others. I believed, perhaps prematurely, that I had reached a full understanding of it. But the Moon, ever subversive, has unsettled even this.

A new realization emerged: because I do not relate to others through the convention of physical desire, the foundation of my connection is fundamentally different. I am oriented, almost exclusively, toward the emotional and the spiritual. And within that realization, another: I have never been able to form that kind of connection with men.

This recognition lands with a kind of existential chill. Because men are, without exception, the only partners I have ever allowed myself to pursue. Not out of intrinsic alignment, but out of inherited script: an early indoctrination that delineated the boundaries of what was permissible. I begin to question, with growing seriousness, whether this pattern reflects my nature, or merely my conditioning. Whether entire dimensions of relational possibility have remained unexplored, not because they were unavailable to me, but because I never granted myself the permission to look.

There is something haunting about this thought. How many connections, in their early form, carried within them the potential for something deeper, only to be extinguished prematurely because they did not conform to the expected shape of "man"? How many futures were quietly foreclosed in the name of adherence to a narrative that was never truly mine?

And so I find myself contemplating an unfamiliar horizon. If my past experiences with men have been marked by a reduction of my being to my physical body, and by a disinterest, or even an incapacity, to engage with the depth of my inner world, then what might it mean to enter into a partnership ungoverned by those dynamics? What would it be like to be met, not as a body to be consumed, but as a consciousness to be cherished?

Could such a connection even begin to mend that ancient wound, the one that has so often rendered love synonymous with loss? Is there any hope for my heart of stone that has been petrified by the cruelty I have chronically experienced?

 These are the questions that now occupy my mind as I continue this lunar work. And I cannot help but wonder: if this is what has been revealed under the Moon’s influence alone, what further truths might emerge as I move through communion with the other celestial intelligences?

What remains hidden, waiting, patiently, for its appointed hour of revelation.