Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - July 21, 1969, Winnipeg, Manitoba Winnipeg free ere5s. Moon supplement monday july 21. 1969 step shatters Symbol of centuries by William Beider the death of ishtar approaches and hardly anyone is prepared to mourn her properly. The final moment will be widely celebrated not As the death of a diet but As a Triumph of Man. Ishtar is the Moon the heaven Queen the sensual goddess of love and sex and All of the unpredictable emotions which shape people s lives. She is the Mother of All the mysterious Force of Fertility and growth in plants and animals and human beings. The babylonians who worshipped her called her Silver shining seed producing and pregnant. Yet she is also the Queen of the darkness in life the unseen Powers who disrupt and destroy and bring death thou Silver diet of secret a poet s hymn began. And soon the secret of the diet will be gone. Before men set foot on the Moon and ishtar departs forever something should be said in her behalf. The theologians would probably insist that ishtar died a Long time ago with the fall of Babylonia and the great temples where the goddess received sacrifices of first born children first fruit and the virginity of Young Worsen. But ishtar was Only the prototype she lived on for centuries in other places under other names astarte in Phoenicia Isis in Egypt Artemis in Greece Diana in Rome to mention a few. And though Moon worship is out of style in the Western world echoes of ishtar Are still audible there if one listens carefully. The most obvious in the tin pan poetry of popular music the songs which attempt to evoke romantic love by mentioning moonbeams. In Southern Italy it is said peasant women still Wear a Charm of the Crescent Moon to protect them in childbirth. They Pray to the Catholic figure of Mother Mary but they Call her Moon of our Church. Controls growth Fertility Plain country people from the old Amish in Lancaster county Pennsylvania to egyptian Fellah in still Plant by the Moon not with a religious sense but because they know the Moon controls growth and Fertility. Crops which yield above the ground generally Are sown when the Moon is waxing others when it is waning. Observing the Moon phases does produce Bountiful harvests for the Plain sects though sceptics insist that the Amish love for hard work and their generous use of animal manure has something to do with it in orthodox temples the hebrew prayer Book keeps alive a Liturgy which dates Back to before the time of Abraham Kiddush Levano the Blessing of the new Moon. Symbolic of the jewish people whose history has assumed various is the worshippers chant As they come out from the synagogue to View the skies. Like the new Moon they reappeared after being the hebrew Faith and later the Christian one challenged ishtar and the other Moon goddesses who in time retreated. Moses exhorted the israelite to turn away from them and Deuteronomy still prescribes the penalty for Moon worship death by stoning. Only scattered glimpses remain on the surface. But that does not diminish the reverberations which Apollo 11 has sent across the millennia. In the continuum of what men have believed about themselves their world and their gods the Moon has been a powerful Symbol and is powerful still some would the Moon Landing changes All of that of course. It destroys the mystery of the Symbol and alters forever the perspectives of Faith and imagination. Once men get beyond the old mysteries they will surely have to create new myths. As the two american astronauts alighted on the haunting face of ishtar sunday evening hardly any of the . Taxpayers who sent them there regard it As blasphemous. A substantial number of sophisticated citizens even consider it pointless a View shared by Amish elders whose primitive Faith holds that god s work for Man is Here on but the journey to the Moon is really not a matter of discovering valuable minerals or finding life on other planets Are any of the other practical consequences men envision from space exploration. It has to do with what men believe about themselves and their universe. Primitive understanding the Moon s Power Over men s ideas begins with the most primitive understanding of the Bright planet which floated irregularly through their world changing its shape and size. It was enough to know that the Moon itself grew and diminished then disappeared from the sky entirely in a Cycle More complicated than the coming of Day and night. Around the world men conceived different explanations. The Power of the Moon is demonstrated by the striking similarities which run through the legends. The Story of the great Hare the Rabbit which men saw in the markings on the Moon turns up in various forms in China Africa and North America. Among the Iroquois he was one form of great Manitou the great spirit. In a bushmen legend Hare is the Moon s messenger. The brer Rabbit stories from the slave holding South match the hero myths from West Africa. The magic survives today in the Lucky Rabbit s foot and in the easter Bunny the connection is not far fetched considering that easter was celebrated As a Pagan Moon festival with the same theme of rebirth and immortality Long before the resurrection of in their separate ways the primitives arrived at a common association the Moon s Power Over Fertility and growth nature s cycles of life and death. In Greenland the natives concluded that the Moon has the Power to impregnate women. The Maori Moon was the permanent husband of All women. Nigerian tribesmen Felt the same Power but believed that the great Moon Mother sends the Moon Bird to Earth to bring babies to the women the Moon Bird a Universal Symbol lives on too in the Nursery stories of the the evidence was obvious. The Moon swells up As a woman with child. Its full circuit from new Moon to new Moon 27.3 Days corresponds approximately to the menstrual Cycle of women. The Moon measures not Only the night and Day but the coming and going of the seasons. The renewal of growing things. Its presence in the sky accompanies the life refreshing Dew. The growing Light of the waxing Moon germinates the seeds and stimulates the Rowine plants. However wrong the conclusions were the observations were not so bad for the pre scientific Ages. Moonlight does stimulate Plant growth so does a Street on Clear nights when the Moon s presence is obvious to All there is heavier Dew because heat rises More easily to the upper the lunar movements do control the tides and the lives of the Marine animals who live along the shores. Moon Power produces the maelstrom off the coast of Norway which Edgar Allan Poe described. At Beau Mont n.c., lunar periods have been observed in a sea Plant which produces a new crop of sexual cells each month by the Mooon. In the context of what earlier men thought they saw these things seemed reasonable enough. Beliefs merge with facts in a natural Way. On the Island of Sylt in the North sea the my hives take their time when the tide is ebbing for they know that births proceed Only when the tide Riser Plutarch who we no primitive observed the Moon having the Light which makes moist and pregnant is pro Motif of the generating of living beings and of the of rectification of and even Charles Darwin whose mind shattered scientific assumptions in the 19th Century hypothesized that life s origin by the Edge of the sea and the tides of the Moon was somehow related to the lunar period in women. The primitive interpretations of lunar began to As sume a deeper meaning however As men elaborated on the qualities that they saw in the Moon. Ishtar and her sister goddesses developed Complex personalities which Shelley Shakespeare Twain Landing ends Moon poets reign by Jack Smith the los Angeles times War talk by men who Haye been in a War is Al ways interesting whereas Moon talk by a poet who has not been on the Moon is Likely to be Dull Twain Mark thou should St be living at this hour after years of Moon talk by poets major and minor the world is soon to hear some Moon talk from a Man who has been there. When the astronauts gather up their rocks or cheese or whatever it is they find up there and bring it Home years of wondering will be answered. Possibly nothing else under the Sun has provoked so much human speculation except the nature of god and the universe and those Are concepts beyond the Ordinary mortal. But the Moon in the words of tin pan Alley the Moon be Longs to everyone. More than 400 years ago an English playwright named John Heywood put Down some proverbs one of which stated unequivocally the Moone is made of Greene nobody knows today whether Heywood was kidding or not though he was known to his con temporaries As merry John. But a Flat statement like that catches on. There Are a lot of Greene cheese people in the world today. Poetic Moon talk has known no Bounds. If every song and poem with Moon or Moonlight or Moon Shine in it were abolished and some certainly should be our literature would be reduced by half. The Moon has Given Rise to As Many metaphors As the sky has stars. Shakespeare called it a Silver Bow new Bent in Juliet Calls it an inconstant Moon that monthly changes in her circled the Bard also called it the mortal and the cold fruitless and an arrant whose Pale fire she snatches from the Shelley called the Moon that Robed Maiden with White fire and Keats never More than a metaphor behind Shelley saw it As a Coy Sweet nun in Holiday William Blake s Best shot was the Moon like a Flower in heaven s High Bower with silent de Light sits and smiles on the the Best Yeats could do was Silver which in t much better when you examine it than Greene either As poetry or science. While the Moon floats like a Roosevelt dime How s that through Lyric literature it also comes Down to Earth to play with children in Nursery rhymes girls and boys come oat to play the Moon is shining As Light As How Long have we been telling the Gullible Little nippers in their cradles yet that the cow jumped Over the a feat of such Patent improbability that even the Little dog laughed. And now there is no reason at All to believe we can t put a cow Over the Moon. No reason to be Lieve we wont either just for the hell of it. Nonsense is As full of Moonlight As the lyrics of Keats and Shelley they dined on mince and slices of quince. Which they ate with a run Cible spoon and hand in hand on the Edge of the Sand they danced by the Light of the but after curfew is something else. One poet Frances Thompson wrote the innocent Moon which nothing does but Thomp son did t know his Silver Apple. It was Byron the Rake who knew what the Moon s real Busi Ness was on Earth aside from Pul Ling the oceans Back and Forth to give us High Low and mean tides. Wrote Byron there is not a Day the longest not the 21st of june sees half the business in a wicked Way on which three single hours of Moonshine whatever else it May be the Moon is not a snob. It shines on slums As Well As palaces. It even shines on Brooklyn if Nathalla Crane can be believed the Moon comes Over Brooklyn on time with the Borough clock tis the same that Taw Palmyra and the Walls of miss Crane also wrote linger on the Flathouse roof the Moonlight is divine but my heart is All a flutter like the washing on the Lii their Moonwalk the poets in variably speak of the Moon As female. She is not Only Beautiful but mysterious elusive Coy a creature of phases now showing Only a tantalizing Sliver of her flesh now rising from her Couch fully revealed naked and glorious to the Earth her Lover. It s risky to find out too much about a woman like that. Once the veil of mystery is peeled Back the enchantress turns out to be the girl next door. So it May be with the Moon. Looking up from his Microscope the scientist May Tell a breathless world Why it s Only hol crystalline granular Plutonic igneous Rock after in any Case when our Astro nauts come Home with their buckets full of Moon Man s relation ship with that mysterious presence in the heavens will have been changed somehow forever. We will have answered one of our abiding questions and we will have eaten the Cherry off the ice Cream. On the other hand we May open the door to the mysterious room Only to find the room full of other closed and mysterious doors. Whatever the Moon is made of it will go on shining on the Taj mahal on miss Crane s Flathouse roof on Byron s wickedness on boys and girls playing and on tin pan Alley. Whatever the astronauts find up there it will always rhyme with june. To compose by to Bay at Over Miami How river9 Shine on by Sid Moody associated press writer hey diddle diddle the cat and the fiddle what on Earth is the Moon a puzzlement. Ever since the third Day of creation when it was turned on As a lesser Light to Rule the the Moon has been a dim Light leading dimly. Poets High priests and piano Pounders on tin pan Alley All have taken stands on the Moon with notable Lack of agreement. Only dogs seem to know what to make1 of the Moon. They Bay at it. While a turkish tale says the Moon is dark because its Mother got tired of it trailing her around and threw a dish rag in its face americans seem to have these Moon thoughts pretty much to themselves a Maiden who drinks White wine and Rose water and looks through a silk Scarf at the Moon will see her husband to be. 0 if a husband leaves his wife while the Moon is waning he will not be seen by her again 0 for Good Luck Bow nine times to the Moon while shaking Silver coins in the pocket. Mark Twain wrote everyone is a Moon and has a dark Side which he never shows to this modesty does t apply to am Erica s son Smiths who have writ ten enough Moon music to reach there and Back including Over How High the by the Light of the Silvery Shine on Harvest that of Devil i wished on the to spoon by High the. Harvest. What a Little Light can Light becomes Carolina Blue Light on the on the Light on the Light on the Light on the Light on the Over the Light in Light Pri son Light Light Shine Over Light on the Orange Light of Tahiti in your on my about and the was and so was there is also one for Moon s Sake called Moon june maybe that s Why it hides its face once a month although the Algon Quin indians believe differently. You see according to their legends the Moon i i encompassed elements that seem alien to modern ideas about god. In most cases the Moon goddess was preceded by a Moon god. Ishtar preempted her father sinn who kept the tree of knowledge and who gave his name to it. Sinai where Moses received the divine ishtar As one modern scholar described her was the goddess of love the controller of those mysterious forces beyond human understanding which attract human beings irresistibly to each other or Asun accountable Force them yet she was also maternal love the Mother of All living things and raw sexual love the patroness of in sum she was the inconstancy of human emotions. C. G. Jung the psychologist argued that the ancient gods were created by Man s unconscious know lege of himself and. As projections of psychological realities they Are still applicable to understanding Why people think and act the Way they do. Like dim memories of ancient the Moon mysteries reappear in modern minds according to the disciples of Jung. Thus a 20th Century woman draws a a future to illustrate for the analyst the crisis in her emotional life a picture of a woman being ravished by the Moon. The drawing expresses an emotional experience perhaps imprinted on the unconscious memory which corresponds roughly to the sacred marriage of the Moon temples when Maidens gained a sort of psycho logical virginity a feeling of completeness by submit Ting themselves to the ravishing goddess. The ancients knew much of the working of these unconscious forces for they recorded them in an entirely unbiased wrote or. M. Esther Harding a student of Jung who explored the Moon symbols. We however Are biased we disregard everything which does not fit in with our preconceived theory of scientific materially observable deeper mysteries remain in the later versions of the ishtar myth something began to happen to her. The sensual goddess attempts to seduce the hero Gilgamesh but he resists Success fully. He scolds the goddess for her promiscuity. The notion that mortal men could Challenge the deities with Success coincides with the first probing toward a More objective understanding of the natural world understanding which inevitably increases men s control Over it. The feminine Moon deities who ruled the realm of emotions and instinctive Widom gave Way to others masculine gods. The emphasis shifted to Man s ability to make Laws to seek knowledge to impose some kind of order on the Wilder forces of nature. The Jude Christian beliefs May have driven the Sabbath from the Sabba to is ishtar her menstrual but the basis for Faith changed. Astrologers while they kept up the Moon books prophesying Days of Good and ill Fortune began Pratti cing astronomy on the Side a More orderly obie calve discipline. And literature created new heroes men who dared to approach the Moon itself. In the second Century Lucian the satirist described the Moon flight of Meni plus who fashioned one Wing from a vulture and the other from an Eagle. Lucian s fantasy stimulated More serious contemplation of the idea by men who came along centuries later. Kepler Galileo to Wolkovsky Goddard and others All made the audacious dream a Little More realistic. Science fiction thriller As science stripped away the mysteries it remained for literature to capture the spirit of the adventure. In his science fiction thriller first men on the Moon h. G. Wells had his narrator Bedford express the age old Puzzle of the quest Why had we come to the Moon the thing presented itself to me As a perplexing problem. What is this spirit in Man that urges forever to depart from happiness and Security to toil to place himself in danger even to risk a reasonable certainty of Bedford could not convey a very satisfactory explanation except to conclude that some Force not himself impels him and go he that same sort of vague restlessness attends the Moon flight of Apollo 11. Men and science will demolish the Symbol of the Moon but somehow everyone knows in Advance that they will not solve the deeper mysteries which ishtar expressed. Our modern 20th Century attitude is that everything could be ordered rightly if Only people would use their wrote or. Harding. The majority of people even believe that the difficulties of our present Day world could be solved simply by the right application of economic Laws or by some other rational system and that people can be made Good by some educational technique. We hold in fact that god is intelligence and that he is incarnate in Man s rational intellect. Needless to say this concept has left out of count the nonhuman creative Power but such Are the sterile Days upon which our concept of the divine has this feeling that something is missing finds expression in the current flourishing of popular astrology and in the surge of interest in Eastern religions which still Honor the mysteries of unseen creative Power. The cultural revolution of the Youthful love in expresses something similar. Disaffected kids embrace the irrational and the erotic searching for a human antidote to the new agonies spawned by the nuclear age. A new perspective ishtar of course won t be revived. But the Landing on the Moon gives human beings a new perspective on themselves. That will Lead to new mysteries and sym Bols ideas which no one can now imagine. The theologians do not seem to take this seriously but poets do. Archibald Macleish offered a hopeful speculation on the possibilities when Apollo 8 circled the Moon and sent Back its first photographs. What had changed he decided was not so much that men could now see the Moon but that at last they could see the Earth that tiny raft in the enormous empty Macleish wrote to see the Earth As it truly is Small and Blue and Beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats is to see ourselves As riders on the Earth together Brothers on that Bright Blue loveliness in the eternal cold Brothers who know now they Are truly ;