One of the more difficult aspects I have found of studying the Mansions of the Moon and their attendant spirits, as a whole, is that 28 is a pretty large number. I have heard anecdotally that some folks regularly venerate many more spirits than that on a regular basis, even daily. But, for me and the way I have worked over the years, I found it tough to really get in and explore any one individual spirit when the Moon changes Mansions just about every day.
When I was getting into the Grimorium Verum, I spent two years establishing a relationship with Scirlin through daily offerings, prayers, and meditations, before slowly adding a Chief in preparation for the Rite of the First Character and then a few other spirits over the years. That method gave me time to develop a call and response practice that led to a very satisfying set of relationships. I value being able to contemplate and turn over communication in my mind for an extended amount of time, keeping myself open to the synchronicities that inevitably arise.
With the Mansion spirits there was never any question that the Mansion in which Moon resided at any one moment indicated which spirit was active. In fact, I found it quite cumbersome to venerate the spirit of the Mansion of the moment while thinking about the artwork for a different Mansion and at the same time writing the Lunar Mansion Reports for the next couple of weeks. And whether or not one believes my study has been directed by the spirits themselves, I never felt it was appropriate to pick one Mansion spirit to form a relationship with before working with any other. Not only did I feel like it was an all-of-them-or-nothing proposition, in which each of the Mansion spirits had equal power and importance as the others, I felt little to no influence from Mansion spirits when the Moon was not in their particular Mansion. The exception to this was a sometimes indistinct border from one Mansion to the next that didn’t always match the exact moment of change that I had calculated in which I perceived a spirit’s influence becoming apparent a little earlier or a little later than I expected.
The difficulty this presents is that I would have roughly 20 to 26 hours with a Mansion spirit before they stepped off stage and the next one stepped up. Enough time to make prayers, meditate, and communicate through pendulum or tarot, but not so much time to deeply contemplate much of what I received before my attention was pulled to the next one. It feels very fast paced, almost staccato, but that would be consistent with the nature of the Moon.
Also consistent with the nature of the Moon is a feeling that the Mansions are unfathomably vast, deep, and fluid. Over the thousands of years of their use they have been adopted into multiple cultures and adapted for various purposes. I used to describe this as the Mansions being “hollow” and that they were ready to be filled with new cultural understanding but I have abandoned that descriptor because I don’t like that it implies the Mansions are devoid of content. They certainly are not. If anything, there is too much. Layers and layers of mystery hidden in plain sight, much like the unconscious and dreaming parts of the mind which the planetary sphere of the Moon symbolizes.
What this has meant is that I study the 28 one day at a time month by month, year by year. The change from Mansion to Mansion happens fast but progress on learning any one is rather slow, limited to 13 times a year. Fast and slow, both at the same time.
And please don’t read that as any kind of complaint. The complexities of the Mansions of the Moon are delightfully challenging. And so, here I keep going, step by step, letting the Mansions present themselves to me and learning their lessons.
The thing is, since they move and change so fast, the Mansions can easily fade from one's awareness as one goes about the everyday actions of living life. But the Mansions are not separate from the little details of each moment. All of manifest reality is an expression and a celebration of the Mansions of the Moon. The Mansions of the Moon are the undergirding, the architecture, of the astrological weather and all things that happen on earth.
No comments:
Post a Comment