Christ, you can almost hear the wailing. "Kenny's gone to the Devil! La Roche has joined the dark side!" But the image, as used, is Alchemical and has less to do with the Christian concept of personified evil and more to do with Man the Magus and the dual nature of the Work: Solve et Coagula. Loosen. Bind. Luna, the moon, has long been the paramount symbol of the rhythm of cyclic time - female time - and eternal renewal. She also represents the dark side of god's creation - the intuitive, irrational, and the subjective. If you place the Sun and the Moon together in a Hieros Gamos you have pictured the Sacred Marriage of Opposites: Man & Woman, King and Queen, Heaven & Earth, Gold and Silver. In Alchemy Luna/Silver and Sol/Gold are the headliners in the drama. It is their "joinings" in the Vas which will fructify the waters and birth the Divine Child of the Work. Still . . . as Pooler Jones says, there's something magnetic about the dark side. Something moist and yielding, feminine & beckoning . . . something medieval & true from analogy if nothing else. Darwin warned us that all life began in the watery abyss where the moon's tidal rhythms rocked us in its arms for a billion years, molding us to its gravity and its myth of dismemberment and resurrection.

More Raptors - the late spring of Northern Michigan under the stream of hunting birds - a damn good time to be working on Luna, the second of our 7 Temple Bells. Slag and I like to geomance the piss out of a good Alpha Rock. The one we found for Luna has a lot of character and cleft. Iwojima made the two finial caps of the verticals out of copper and a stainless aluminum to give it the Silvery Sheen of a Lunar apparition. The Captain carved our 4 plaques which we let in to the verticals - for Luna we again use the two Kenny Sigils, and then the symbol of the moon from Astrology and the Alphalogical "Ag" for Argent/Silver.

Luna was installed in Northport on the lawn of Woody's Tavern. The children of tourists were asking their mothers: what are those funny men doing to that rock? Alchemy is a subjective science which hides right in plain site behind its symbols. So do we. It's a subject for the worldly wise so not that many Americans are there yet. "It's part of a bell-tower for a Cathedral," we told them. "Oh." they said.

Ishtar, Hathor, Isis, Artemis, were all Lunar Goddesses. So is Mary. There are anthropologists who believe that - after Fire - the first bit of gnosis which man tore from the world was the link between the female mysteries of birth and sex and death and the cycles of the Moon. Our linguistic root for terms which mean "to measure" comes from the indo-european root [me] which first meant moon, as do the words menstruate, menses, meter, and meal. Other forms of the morpheme give us our words for mind and mood, as well as words which describe mowing with a sickle or scythe. Long before the sun gave us its model for a calendar, the only thing that man had with which to tell time was the ceaseless recycling of the phases of the moon. In that icon of the endless repitition of birth, fruition, death, darkness, and resurrection, man would first see the condition of all living things - he would see fate and fortuna. In the moon he would apprehend dimly the plots for the stories of Zagreus, Pentheus, Orpheus, Actaeon, Osiris, and Christ - dismemberment, communion, resurrection. Transformation. Transmutation. Transubstantiation. All of these ideas from the Priscia Theologica were first broadcast by the tragicomedic history of the moon. Before continuing - take a moment and see a short 2 minute movie on the Moon and Alchemy. Use the "Back" button to return.

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