Dancing with Luna: Hillman and the Moon as Luminary

Often times, astrologers speak of the Moon’s light as a reflection of the Sun’s light. This never sat well with me on the level of psyche. So I was thrilled when I stumbled across the following passage from James Hillman:

“[The moon’s] images do not reflect a borrowed light… [Alchemical] silver does not come after gold, [the moon does not come after sun]. [Her] images have their own innate gleam and ring. They are not reflections of the world, but are the light by which we see the world. The psyche comes to each moment of the world from the moon… at birth each day, right now…giving the soul’s differentiated worth to each particular thing that the sunlight shows as the same…. This is the light of silver, [of moon].” (Hillman, Alch. Psych. 152).

While the light of the sun shows each object as the same, creating a kind of distinction of form in the interplay of light and shadow that allows category, the silvery light of our inner moon “gives the soul’s differentiated worth to each particular thing.” The uniqueness of your soul, interacting with the uniqueness of the soul of whatever you perceive produces an original experience.

The moon’s images “have their own innate gleam and ring.” They allow us to experience a world ensouled, animated. Anima. Soul. Animated. Ensouled. Connected to the light of our inner moon, we experience life ensouled, cosmos ensouled, re-enchanted (enchanted, encanto, singing).

To Hillman’s view, we all have a wealth of guardians alive within and around us; forces, energies, and patterns that are so ancient and so deep that we can rely on them. Astrologically speaking, these ancient forces are represented in the planets and signs of the birth chart, and the Moon is our bridge to every one of them, to every archetypal character within.

(Note: When Hilllman spoke of that part of the psyche that we call lunar consciousness, he used the imagery of moon, silver, Luna, and anima almost interchangeably. When you see “the moon” in brackets, it is in lieu of one of those synonyms.)

We might see the moon as a soul-person within, “the person of our moods, self-reflections, reveries, sensuous longing…” She is the “spinner of fantasy, the personification of all unknown psychic capacities that lie waiting, drawing us seductively, uncannily inward to the dark of the uncut forest and the deeps below the waves.” (Hillman Re-Visioning Psychology, 42) The moon’s magnetism draws us toward depth.

To Hillman’s view, She presents a precise image of the current emotions of our soul. She changes events into experiences that mean “me.” She makes possible the inner ground of faith in yourself as a person, the conviction that what happens matters to the soul and that one’s existence is personal and important. (Hillman RVP 43)

She makes possible experiencing through images. She embodies the reflective, mirroring activity of consciousness. She connects our usual consciousness with imagination by provoking desire, clouding us with fantasies, or deepening our reflection. She is both bridge to the imaginal and the other side. She is psyche personified….She is soul. (Hillman RVP 43).

When we are cut off from her, we experience what psychologists call “depersonalization.” A loss of soul, where the presence standing behind our ordinary consciousness is suddenly absent. In depersonalization, all the functions of ego-consciousness operate as before (like associating, remembering, perceiving, feeling, and thinking), but our conviction in ourselves as a person, and the sense of things being real seems to have left us. Without the moon within, everything, including our sense of self, becomes automatic, unreal, emptied out. The sense of “me-ness” vanishes. (Hilllman RVP, 44).

The very existence of “depersonalization” shows that we have something more to us than our daily waking consciousness, and that factor, in astrological symbolism, is the Moon.  (Re-V Psych, 44-46).

Her role, in both cosmos and psyche, outer and inner, is to personify; to make real, to animate, to ensoul. She does this both with our sense of “me-ness,” what we call “I,” as well as with the characters of our interiority, that amazing cast of characters that nightly appear to us in our dreams. “She is both their soul and ours.” (Hillman RVP 49)

She “amplifies with beauty, nature, and the archaic past, the pandemonium of fantasy and the imaginal…In her absence we shrivel—no beauty, no nature, no fantasy. The flavor’s gone, the scent, the salt.

Her presence is crucial. Through her presence, importance mounts, and our “sense of person becomes more vivid.” Why? Because with her presence we sense, deeply, that “[we] carry with [us] at all times the protection of our daimones.” We might view daimones as the images of our ancestors that are alive within us, be they cultural, spiritual, creative, or biological. Those images who “guard our fate, guide it, probably are it.” (Hillman 50).

Jung once said, “memory is the stuff of destiny.” Meaning, what (and who) we innately remember is tied to destiny as the unfolding of our lives. To me, this kind of memory is the stuff of the moon within.

Hillman suggests that the moon-as-soul is the prime maker introducing us to our inner images. “On her depends my faith in the reality of the external world and my faith in myself as a person. Reality of world and self depends upon the faith of this soul” (meaning the moon) “in me.”

He then makes an astonishing proposition: “No longer is it a question of whether I believe in soul, but whether soul believes in me, grants me faith in it, in psychic reality.” To Hillman’s thinking, the inner moon is synonymous with psychic reality itself, the sense of the realness of our psyche’s experience and of our very existence.

The moon represents that in us which connects us to our wealth of guardians, those images of figures deep within us who are always with us.

The birth chart shows us at least a few of those, as if the planets represent a glimpse of the organs of the psyche; those energies, straight from nature herself, which all of us have deep within, and on which we can both call and draw in hours of need, and to whom we can relate creatively when they call on us for care, awareness, and compassion.

No moon? No sense of real-ness, of me-ness, of inner life, of image, of dream, of art, of story. She is a a luminary; a source of a particular kind of consciousness within that gives to every image that rises within and every object without its silver, “its own innate gleam and ring,” moon as the “light by which we see the world.”