Under the Grip of a Full Moon
“It is the very error of the moon. She comes more near the earth than she was wont. And makes men mad.”
—William Shakespeare, Othello
What happens to us on a full moon? Does it affect our mental state, open us up to psychic forces, keep us awake at night? Might it cause us to be more lucid, make us more likely to experience intense feelings, more likely to experience forms of ‘madness’, psychosis or spiritual illumination. It is widely believed, even among fairly straight-laced people that the moon has an effect on our moods and that a full moon can bring about more extreme emotional states. Police departments have been known to employ extra staff on full moon nights, anticipating an increase in the amount of intensity of violent crime; hospital staff in emergency units and psychiatric wards tend to be on higher alert for admissions during a full moon. Until the clause in the law was repealed (relatively recently), there was even a provision for leniency for crimes committed on a full moon, as the person was likely to have been ‘under the moon’, and therefore not in the right mind; such was the belief in the power of the full moon to affect a person’s behaviour!
It was on a full moon back in 1990 that I had a powerful spiritual encounter myself, which changed the course of my life. It was actually my first encounter with astrology, and it became the catalyst for a number of intense visionary dreams, and out-of-body experiences, that completely shattered my previously very conventional view of reality. These visions increased in intensity over the following months, and it was the most powerful of these, which occurred on another full moon, five months later, in January 1991, which ended up getting me sectioned under the mental health act.
Jez is the author of the book: “The Wisdom of Mental Illness”, and is a well known shamanic practitioner and trainer. Both he and myself experienced dramatic spiritual awakenings in our early lives that were were interpreted as psychotic breaks: in my case through the psychiatric system, in Jez’s through him convincing himself that he was mad. In both cases, it was the encounter with an extra-ordinary reality that opened up personal healing journeys and inspired our respective vocational paths. For Jez, it was the shamanic path that opened up. For me, it was that powerful encounter with astrology which served both as the catalyst for my ‘madness’, and as my journey to sanity. Counter to the conventional wisdom of my family members and psychiatric practitioners, I ended up looking toward the wisdom in the content of my supposed ‘mental illness’ as the key to my own self-realisation and healing.
“The fundamental mistake was supposing that the healing process was the disease, rather than the process whereby the disease was healed. The disease, if any, was the state previous to the “psychosis”. The so-called “psychosis” was an attempt toward spontaneous healing, it was a movement towards health, not a movement towards disease.”
—Dick Price, founder of the Esalen Institute)
Psychiatric professionals are rarely, if ever, interested in the content of a person’s psychotic break, except insofar as it might pertain to one or other pathological category, typically depression, bi-polar disorder or schizophrenia. Yet, within that content may lie insight or wisdom that can disclose a key to what is trying to break through from the spiritual world. From a secular perspective, there can be no insight in psychosis, as insight equates to the human capacity for self-reflection. Yet within a paradigm that admits the possibility of a spiritual world in which our psyche or soul is participant, then direct contact with this world can render us temporarily under the grip of beings or archetypal powers that supercede our normal human reasoning. This is why someone undergoing such an experience within an indigenous, shamanic culture might even be revered as a carrier of spiritual information. Being possessed by a spirit entity is often a deeply disturbing experience. An experienced shaman can recognise the nature of the posession, and help the person transition through it, whilst also harvesting the spiritual information that could benefit both the individual and the whole community. We will explore examples of this type of shamanic spirit possession in the webinar series, how it might manifest in a person’s life, and how it might be handled appropriately by someone with the eyes to see.
An astrologer might consider a person undergoing a psycho-spiritual crisis to be under the grip of a particular planetary power. In vedic astrology, the planets are known as the graha. This literally translates as the ‘grabbers’, the ones who seize hold of your soul, and in their more extreme expression, can take you over. As part of the webinar series, we will look at the archetypal qualities of the planets, and how these might manifest in and through a person undergoing a psycho-spiritual crisis.
