Today it will, for a rare time, be placed for us right in front of the one who dictates our days, our collective overactivity, our daily life. It will be full, will coat our moment in a blue which will force our humility in the face of its mystery, the darkness that it calls forth, this other side of things which usually interests us so little. Queen of the night, a powerful symbol of this otherness that exists in each of us, she made the psychoanalyst Jung say that she was “this continually changing light in the night, the nocturnal sphere of human experience”.
Although it was also, depending on the times and places, a masculine god, the Moon is generally associated, for Westerners, with the feminine principle. Among the ancient Greeks, whether Selene, Artemis or Hecate, depending on the phase in which she appears to us, the Moon is a rather dark goddess, although she guides navigators or helps to draw up calendars. She can make herself the goddess of the passage between the living and the dead, just as she can also infiltrate the dreams of men, driving them crazy.
In Jungian psychoanalysis, it carries the shadow, the unconscious aspect, the one which only reveals itself to us in the dark, which we are reluctant to look at in full light and which, therefore, is more likely to reveal itself to us in the adversity of conflicts and trials. What we want to project outside of us, this dark side that resides in the darkness of our psyche, will, sooner or later, claim its due on our existence, according to Jung’s thinking. Paying homage to the Moon is therefore, symbolically, daring to truly contemplate ourselves for who we are, shadow included, by accepting the part of ugliness that is ours, which obviously has a tendency to narcissistically upset us in the process.
By extension, the Moon is also associated with what is referred to as the first great narcissistic injury inflicted on humanity, namely the confirmation of the Copernican theory of the heliocentric system by Galileo. It is in fact by observing the Moon through his famous astronomical telescope that Galileo further strengthens his conviction that he must defend Copernicus’ thesis. By observing it, he also brings it into “reality”, de-idealizes it, revealing in particular that, contrary to mythological imaginations which saw it as smooth and perfect, the Moon is, in fact, full of roughness, a bit like us. , Ultimately.
Associated with the tides, menstrual cycles and childbirth, the Moon still resides, in our contemporary narratives, on the feminine side of the world. Midwives know it well, since, although science has denied the links between full moons and childbirth, it is nevertheless very often under the Moon that they accompany women in giving birth. In fact, 70% of so-called “natural births without intervention” occur at night according to a large British study, which focused on observing the “moments of labor and birth” of 5,093,615 women, over a period extending from 2005 to 2014.
It reveals to us that, when we do not force anything, parturients work at night, under the Moon, regardless of its state, and babies are born in the morning. In a moving way, it’s a bit as if nature often aligns itself so that we can welcome a new being at the same time as we welcome the return of the Sun on us. Biologically, it is through the work of hormones that this body preference is mainly explained.
Poetically, the work of giving birth, the greatest work of all, is often experienced in the dark, where no one is looking, while each woman who becomes a mother (whether for the first or the tenth time) experiences the greatest crossing of all, the one that tears her body apart, while she delivers a new, full-fledged human into the world.
It is myself under what is known as a super Moon (when the distance from the Earth is at its lowest and the Moon is full) that I went through this long journey leading to the birth of my daughter. So the Moon and I weaved what I like to feel was a poetically intimate relationship, as she guided me through my bedroom window, soothing my pain with her whitish glow, reminding me that we We have all been there, all the mothers before me, by this feeling of dying which leads nowhere other than to births. Because, it is well known, it is not just a baby who is born at the end of the work. There are also parents, a family, sometimes big brothers and big sisters, who all experience a great moment of surprise and wonder, something that happens too little in the course of an entire existence.
The symbolic force of an eclipse like the one we will experience today perhaps lies precisely in this return to the marvelous, towards a human posture before the sky, half-fascinated, half-frightened, perhaps conscious of its place that resides elsewhere than in this vast race for conquest. It will not be a question, for a few minutes, of trying to contemplate the world above, but of avoiding looking too directly at the stars, of submitting a bit to laws which still escape us, which perhaps reactivate in us something of a posture of “non-knowing”, just curious, which is becoming so rare these days.
So I will obviously be in the front row, because in addition to totally eclipsing what dominates the rest of the time, it will also offer us, dear Moon, a rare moment of “togetherness”, which we also radically need.