"The moon was created for the counting of days." - Hebrew midrash
Another month, another moon.
But that’s the point – that’s why cultures around the world have used the lunar cycle as a calendar, why the Hebrews coined the phrase I use as the standing head for this series. The moon takes us through the year, counts us through the phases and transitions of the seasons. We plant and reap and hunt and love and live and die, while the moon marks time. Each one has its own meaning. Each one teaches its own lessons.
And now the year takes us into July, the last month of Summer (as some Pagans, including my own coven, count it). This month, especially down here in Florida, is a time of storms, and the name of our July moon reflects that.
Welcome to the Thunder Moon.
Read on . . .
"Knock on the sky and listen to the sound." - Zen Saying
There aren’t a lot of things you can witness in nature – and fewer you can witness
safely – that hold the same kind of awful power as a thunderstorm. I remember, growing up in northern Louisiana, the
huge thunderstorms that would roll through from the Midwest. Monstrous storms - endless, heavy and black like a roof upon the world, moving past like great beasts migrating to the sea.
I would sit on our porch for hours and just experience them, listen to the crack and rumble, watch the flashes and streaks paint the sky, feel the tingle of each lightning strike and the cold sting of the rain that flew in sideways under the porch roof.
These were magical events. These were encounters with the sacred. That’s how it was for me, a 20th Century kid with cable TV and a Nintendo. Imagine how our distant ancestors must have felt, huddling from the sound and fury in caves and huts, without the least understanding of what was passing overhead.
No surprise, then, that just about every pantheon across the world has a god associated with thunder and storms. Thunder gods are usually major gods – if not the major god – in any given culture: Ukko among the ancient Finns; the Greek Zeus and his Roman doppelganger, Jupiter; the Norse god Thor; the Egyptian Set (a heroic god in the Upper Kingdom before he was demonized as the nemesis of Horus); the Yoruba diety Shango; the Aztec Tlaloc, and his Mayan counterpart Chaac; the Celtic Taranis; the Hindu god Indra; and the Great Spirit’s own messenger, the Thunderbird (as known by the Nuu-chah-nulth, of the Pacific Northwest) . . . and of course, the Semitic god Jehovah. Wherever lightening struck the earth, it was judgement. Wherever thunder rattled the sky, it was the noise of the gods.
But it doesn’t take divine intervention to make a thunderstorm. It takes only humidity and temperature. Water droplets ride rising columns of warm air, colliding with each other until they knock loose stray electrons. Positively-charged droplets rise to the top of the cloud, stray electrons gather at the base. The polarized cloud becomes a generator – building up a charge and eventually arcing as lightening until that polarity is neutralized.
That technical explanation doesn't have the poetry of a great supernatural bird flapping its wings, or an angry god striking his hammer. But that doesn't take away from the spiritual meaning of a thunderstorm . . . actually, it establishes it.
A thunderstorm is about balance.
"You can't have too much of everything, you must have a balance, that's very important." - Abdullah Ahmad Badawi
A storm - any storm - is just a mechanism for correcting an imbalance. What we see as chaos is Nature's greatest expression of order - the re-establishing of boundaries, the restoration of the great Neutrality. In the microcosm, a thunderstorm corrects the imbalance of its own cloud's electric charge. But in the broader view, the storms of July correct for the imbalances of Summer itself.
Remember when you were a kid? We all wished Summer could last forever back then - long, bright days, a green and blooming world. But too much of anything catches up with you. An endless Summer would become no less a Hell than an eternal Winter.
Nothing is free. There are always side effects, consequences, and they must always be balanced out. The heat from those Summer days, and the moisture that rises from all that life, rack up a tab - one that must ultimately be payed in storms.
For every action, reaction. For every road, a toll.
"Just as there is no loss of basic energy in the universe, so no thought or action is without its effects, present or ultimate, seen or unseen, felt or unfelt." ~Norman Cousins
The world cycles because it must, because everything - good and bad, light and dark, hot and cold, pushes it off-center, and only the turning of the Wheel steers it back into balance again.
The Thunder Moon reminds us why Summer must always pass into Fall, why the year must turn like a wheel. The storms of July are a symbol of the debts that accumulate when the world goes in any one direction - and the feedback of cause-and-effect that always strives to clear the books.
But the July moon is also a time to consider the brewing storms in our own lives. Think about your life, your relationships, your health, your job, your pursuits. Think about what you do - and especially what you may overdo. What imbalances does it create? What effects does it set in motion . . . and what sturm and drang will they bring?
Whether you do a full ritual beneath the Thunder Moon tonight, or just find yourself staring up at it, remember this: a world out of balance - or a life out of balance - inevitably brings a correcting storm. In your meditations, your ritual, your magickal work, focus on finding balance in yourself and your world . . . and the harder act, keeping it.
Blessed Be.