Thirteen Moons - Repost

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

I'm reposting this more-than-2-year-old item. Interestingly, I find my views haven't changed on this topic.

Thirteen Moons

Despite my new-found head-in-the-sand resolution not to read a newspaper or watch the evening news or listen to a newscast (two-year-old-toddler brutally raped and murdered;Uncle Bob Mugabe beats opposition leader to within an inch of his life;more women and children blown to pieces by some atavistic wargod-struck man) Jason’s music still managed to creep me out (ah, Jason, that’s some good shit you play there-you even managed to get me looking over my shoulder nervously).

So I turned on 702 Talk Radio to keep me company through the night. It grants me the illusion of living in a rational, explicable world-when I know damned well I’m not.

I wake up this morning around 4am to a discussion of why the number 13 is regarded with superstition almost across the world.The callers were giving all the old chestnuts of explanation: the Last Supper had 13 diners, the Knights Templar were arrested on Friday 13th.I believe one caller managed to identify the number with the Great Goddess, but I was taking a shower at the time, so I missed it.

Now, the Last Supper deal obviously won’t wash, as it is plainly a copy of earlier mythologies- Norse for example.I find the Templar explanation ridiculous, personally. This besotted group of religious fanatics were hardly the stuff of paradigm shifts-conspiracy theories notwithstanding- and neither of these parochial myths takes into account the widespread nature of the 13 ‘superstitions’-global as well as temporal.

The obvious fact here is this one: there are 13 cycles of the moon in one solar cycle, as close a dammit.The moon is regarded, more often than not, as a representative of the feminine principle-mutable, cyclic,daemonic,coming into her own in the absence of the sun, ruling water and emotions.

Thus 13 is very basically a Number of the Goddess, and as such has been either venerated or demonised for a very long time indeed.In Western Society we have laboured long enough under the War Gods to have almost forgotten this elemental correspondence, so buried under heaps of patriarchal structure has She been.

But it’s coming back to us, like the wisp of a nearly-forgotten dream.Rise up splendidly, My Lady, and remind us of who we were once , and can be again.