This week on Wednesday, the Moon will be Full after midnight, looking south along the Milky Way river of stars. This June Moon is often called the “Honey Moon,” and given that it will be Full in front of the thickest region of the Milky Way, it’s easy to imagine that this week is all about the land of milk and honey.
References to the land of milk and honey come from various traditions, including the story of Moses from the third chapter of Exodus. Moses hears God speak to him in the miracle of the burning bush, and he’s told his people will be led out of exile and oppression into the land of milk and honey ~ where they will experience abundance and goodness.
The Moon moves across the river of Milky Way stars each month, but only in this season does the constellation Cygnus, the swan, return to the sky, flying along the Milky Way in the northeast. The swan is also deeply connected to stories of long exile and migration, especially through the famous Irish myth about the Children of Lir, four beautiful children of the king whose jealous stepmother turns them into swans that must wander the Earth for 900 years, knowing neither the this nor that.
WB Yeats published the Children of Lir poem by Katharine Tynan in the early 1900s. I bring it up because this week is also the 160th anniversary of Yeats’ birth. He was born June 13th, 1865, in county Sligo, Ireland. One of Yeats’ most famous poems concerns another story of the swan, from Greek mythology, about Leda and the Swan, which he considered to be a mighty annunciation, akin to the archangel Gabriel’s annunciation of the Christ Child to Mary. Yeats considered the that the event of the swan’s visitation to Leda was the birth of Greek culture, just as Gabriel’s visitation to Mary instigated the birth of Christianity.
In 1925 Yeats wrote a book called A Vision, in which he pondered various philosophical, historical, astrological, and poetic topics like the Great Year, and the characteristics aligned to the phases of the Moon. He wrote:
Twenty-and-eight the phases of the moon,
The full and the moon's dark and all the crescents,
Twenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty
The cradles that a man must needs be rocked in:
For there's no human life at the full or the dark.
From the first crescent to the half, the dream
But summons to adventure and the man
Is always happy like a bird or a beast;
But while the moon is rounding towards the full
He follows whatever whim's most difficult
Among whims not impossible, and though scarred
As with the cat-o'-nine-tails of the mind,
His body moulded from within his body
Grows comelier.
When Yeats was born in 1865, the Moon was also waning, as it will be this year on the anniversary of his birth, which might account for his writing that before the full moon, the human being seeks itself; after the Full Moon, one seeks the world.
For the Milky Way Honey Moon on Wednesday, and Yeats’ birthday on Friday the 13th, find your way to the many stories of the swans among the stars ~ to bring an abundance of truth and beauty and goodness out of exile and into the now.
