THE MOON'S MYSTERY AND FATE
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.
Path, June, 1894