Kindle Notes & Highlights
The purpose of the dark phase of any cycle is that of transition between the death of the old and the birth of the new.
The dark phase of the lunar cycle holds all that cannot be seen with the waking eye or understood by the rational mind.
Society’s attitudes toward people of color, woman’s sexuality, the occult, the unconscious, the psychic arts, the aged, and death itself are all manifestations of these fearful dark moon projections.
The serpent, which sheds its skin and renews itself, like the waxing and waning of the moon, was seen to embody the mysteries of death and renewal.
In a society ruled by solar white consciousness, we have been taught to fear, reject, devalue, and disempower all that is linked with the concepts of the dark—people of color, women, sexuality, menstruation, nature, the occult, the pagan, night, the unconscious and irrational, and death itself.
the transition from matriarchal to patriarchal culture that occurred five millennia ago.
The period around 3000 BCE is a critical time in the life cycle of the Moon Goddess and the peoples who worshiped her. It was a time when the goddess cultures that had flourished around the world for over 30,000 years began to decline.
This period also marked the rise in the patriarchal tribes, who revered the solar gods,
The cosmology that developed during the reign of the Goddess arose from the kinds of thought processes that originate primarily out of the right brain. The right brain is feminine in polarity, circular in motion, intuitive in nature, and audial in emphasis. The right brain is relational and unifying; it focuses on a wholistic view of how things are similar and interconnected. When the right brain is predominant, then humans, animals, plants, and the physical world upon which they all live, the skies, the land and seas, the underworld, and the spiritual world of deities are all seen as
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The right brain also sees time as cyclical. Humanity then worshiped a feminine lunar deity who circled and ever-renewed herself.
The left brain is masculine in polarity, linear in movement, logical in nature, and visual in perception. It has been most prevalent in the analytical, technological, and scientific intellectualism of modern times.
the right brain focuses on how things are alike, the left brain emphasizes how they are different. It develops our capacity for analysis and discrimination, and in the process it perceives a distinction between subject and object. This kind of dualistic view sees a separation between self and others, between us and them, and this perception inevitably leads to a war of opposites that yields an oppressor and victim.
This kind of thinking leads to a conclusion where individuals feel alienated in a lonely universe that is random, chaotic, and without underlying intelligence.
In addition to fear of the other, the fear of death was a product of left-brain perception that denies cyclical time and instead sees time as linear. In linear time the end is no longer connected to the beginning. The end is the end, and death is the final conclusion of life. Life and death are not seen as the two alternating phases of cyclical existence, but instead are viewed as warring opposites. In a cosmology where death is linear and final, not cyclical and renewing, death is the ultimate terror.
