The Moon and Necrovion

I was asked to speak at your convocation because of my investigations into the nature of Darkness and the life I have lived there.

The subject you have chosen is a difficult one, and the news I bring may be offensive to worshippers of Diana.

Perhaps you know from reading the Archives that I do not believe in a physical reality independant from the thoughts of the people inhabiting this place. Perhaps in other realms there is some objective thing in itself, some ding an sich.

In this one, the best we may manage is intersubjectivity. Agreement of subjective experience.

Not only is there no moon, there is no sun and no sky. Can you see them in any scene? You infer their presence from the levels of light, but cannot observe them directly. Recent changes will allow some of this... but observe:

Here we come to a major point in the metaphysics of this place. We exist between the astral and the material. Above us are clouds of imagination. What you believe is formed in those clouds. If you will it strongly enough, it is manifested here.

Thus if you will a literal moon, you will have one - see Bootes adventure as an example. It is a demonstration of the will of the people having a concrete effect on the world in which we live.

Now Necrovion is a dark place, dimly lit. We infer that the moon shines down on its deserts without ever seeing such a thing. The belief makes it real.

From here, we may move into the symbolic meaning of such things as moons and Necrovions.

Necrovion is a prison camp, and ancient one. A place created to punish the criminally insane - not to cure or teach or house them, but to flay them with the torturous products of their own dim minds.

Such a place is an explicit elucidation of unconscious process. Now as we begin to examine the relationship between this elucidation and the Jungian concept of the Moon and the night, we begin to see some interesting correlates.

For Jung, the dark and the unknown are symbols for the unconscious. A vast body of water, too, represents subconscious forces at work - powerful, unknowable, a dangerous journey. The night is where your subconscious has expression - in dreams.

The Moon is the light that illuminates only darkness. There is not enough light to see clearly, only to see what you can't see. Diana is also the Anima. In a male-dominated psychotherapy, she became very important indeed. The Greeks believed the soul of a person was opposite their own gender. So a woman's soul was Animus, the male spirit that thinks in straight lines, grasps the heart of a problem, is logical, speaks directly.

And the soul of the man is Anima, who thinks in circles, feels, trusts her instincts, is illogical, speaks indirectly.

Each, Animus and Anima, would be repressed by the person - we would act the opposite. For Jung this was the source of psychopathology. The cure was to embrace the inner transgendered soul. Embrace the way of being that you have suppressed.

This was, of course, not a literal transgender, only a symbolic way of understanding that there are polar ways of acting and that the healthiest ground is away from the poles.

Look at Tarquinus - his avatar. A man and woman walking side by side, arm in arm. This is the ideal of mental health - the Animus and the Anima in lockstep, knowing one another intimately.

Still, Diana becomes a central figure in my personal mythology. My own journey has been about embracing the Dark to empower the light. To see what is beneath in order to fully understand what is above.

Necrovion is such a place, where the subconscious is thrown into the dim light of the Moon. Its purpose is not cure but torture - but sometimes torture is a cure. I speak of suffering with meaning. To suffer with meaning becomes a goal.

To live a happy life with no meaning - devoid of purpose or clarity - would be seen as the greatest torture for the spirit. To live a life of suffering in which the pain had a purpose, however, would be the ultimate gift.

There is what is beneath the Moon in Necrovion.

What is beneath the Moon here, in other places? Loreroot, for example: a forest by day, its purpose obvious. It serves to frustrate the weak and empower the strong or wise.

At night, however, we see what we cannot see. It becomes a metaphor: for rampant growth; for the sexuality and animalism within us; for the forces that drive us to grow and live and strive.

Opposite Necrovion? Yes, but also the same. Loreroot is the Life that makes Necrovion's Death possible and needful. And Necrovion is the Death that makes Loreroot's life meaningful.

Under the Moon, these things are true.