Mythopoetics/ Air ings

For The Love of a Woman
by stephanie pope published 04/01/09

Pt 4 April Moon
The Sign of the Rabbit

When the moon blooms like a flower in the night/petals of Heaven-born silver light/its seeds ride
the wind/to the souls of men/ so silently;/there is a fanfare/in the changing wind - Mark Heard

Come April one ought take one’s lunar suggestions from poets like Mark Heard who notes there is a fanfare in the wind changing everything. The fanfare is the vernal equinox. It is the occurrence of the equinox each year and the first full moon after it that will set when Easter will be celebrated. This year the first full moon ushering in
the return of spring occurs April 9th and Easter is the following Sunday, April 12th.

Masque of Four Seasons
Spring, Walter Crane
A Goddess Symbol
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When I first heard the names we use to honor the great spring heralder I felt like mom had just filled the Easter basket. April
moon is ‘pink’ and ‘grass’ and ‘egg’ and it is all blossoming right
there in the moon like a night-blooming flower; April moon is something like a shofar seeding within its depth the wind moving over the face of the deep and calling the sound of itself into existence everywhere—as if nowhere, too, there is everywhere something to celebrate.

The flower Walter Crane paints suggests the trumpet-shaped virgin’s seed as if the image of the event to come is tapping within her body a perception of its nature and shape. Her magic is the magic of light. The maiden soul already knows its way through the mind of winter and back into the upper world. She can sprout it like grass and shake it through flowering couplets off her sleeve.

Opening The Likon Mystikon

This logical ability in soul-making to turn psyche’s deep poetic phrase is the finest possible movement in all imagination thinks Larens van der Post. (237)  He is talking about the Kalahari Bushmen who can feel the coming presence already tapping away in himself how movements will take shape. It is a future tapping in the mind of a great memory not his own. It is irrevocable and it is as if he gives birth to what fathers him. He does this when he makes his music and dances in the tap with his foot. He is listening with a deep ear to the song he is practicing in his tap and he is remembering; that is an old, old way, the way of poet-singers. Soul-making repeats what muses whisper into a singer’s heart. The Bushmen can feel his rejected aboriginal shades echo an even older primal love in life returning through the fundamental renewal tapping in his chest. .- Pinax of Persephone

There is a kind of honoring of the dying depth side given voice and value just now so that in the re-turned life the shades of this love sarcifice are the Bushmen’s gift, making young and immediate what is first and oldest in spirit van der Post suggests. What is first and oldest is creatura’s eros; but it is never old!  It is the making spirit in the work older than the work itself; it is the spirit which desires and fathers itself making spirit out of life. The Bushmen taps upon his drum and he dances

“to perceive and to serve a life-giving image that is even older playing through his music….I saw the reason why poetry, music and the arts are a matter of survival and life and death…the arts are both the guardian and the maker in a chain…charged with the latest aboriginal movements in the latest edition of man.”(235-37)

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Descent Into Motherhood

The dark eros of an invisible fathering spreads the kingdom of the father in an uprush of indestructible Dionysian beauty. This may be why when spring returns in the trumpet in the flourish, April Moon seems a fanfare indeed! The father is a mother. The mother is fathering Spring.

A fanfare is a short piece of music played loudly and usually on a trumpet and usually to announce the arrival of some important person or a great event. A fanfare is a showy outward display expressed in a flourish of trumpets. “Spring arrives already pregnant with life,” announces the flourishing trumpets. Already embodied in Earth’s fertility sown together in life and death as the one form, Spring is a maiden moon clothing motherhood in unearthy shades.

The moon’s story is, from the beginning, a descent into motherhood; The maiden is already a ghost. In her rising is already the unfathomable mysterion of her childhood
abduction. She was never born a child, herself; herself a pregnancy made in which her own ghostly reflection is neither anodos nor cathedos in movement for that is the role of her mother. Yet, one expects from her, in the well, a flowering in her depths already exists and precedes the earthly anodos and cathedos Demeter expresses as Spring in her daughter's lunar 'springing'. The myth tells it that Persephone has given birth to a divine child, an indestructible light. The season is furthermore a parthenogenic form, already two and already more; already seeded and tapping within its body a perception in depths of nature and shapes.

Plato calls her the wise Pherapapha because she already touches, and moves knowing her way through the mind of winter. Kerenyi risks imagining she is a mistress of the labyrinth and knows its solution. This should suggest her Easter ‘basket’ is a likon mystikon. She opens the way in opening ‘it’. Funny, the Easter grave-story is a kind of opening into seeing like this. Likewise may Walter Crane have painted Spring’s basket shining in pink and tender fullness because even where fertility withdrew into the mind of winter and married itself to death, Spring never once loses the fructifying power in her capacity for returning. Likewise is the re turning power in the poet's metaphor tapping with psychological life in mythopoeic movements from within the maiden story.

Once she is happily a maid gathering flowers with her friends and then she is gone. We most recognize her name in the Ionic Greek of epic literature as Persephonē. Her closest friends, Athene, her feminine wisdom and Artemis, her own lunation, form the pattern in life which insists every really new creation return to its origin in an ancient source. There is a strangely triadic femininity expressed throughout the mother daughter dyad operating.

Her mother’s grief is frightening and terrible and as awesome as is her joy when Spring returns. April’s moon is marked in a trifold life-giving movement woven between innocence, grief and joy and pressed to the deep ear in an already sober eye. The trumpets come to mind again as of someone important and a great event sounded just now, a god in the moon even but, in spirit and not in form; something old and already forever that it is…already she is not new! Something already like Artemis is a hunter in the heart or like the Bushmen of the Kalarhari, something is already behaving the
heart of the hunter in the symbols which are its living
soul.

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That brings me to the story of the sacrifice in the flesh of the moon pressed into the deep ear of an already sober eye. It is the divine associations of the mythical rabbit in world mythologies as having a mystery link to the female menstrual cycle and the moon which governs it.

A Trinity Symbol

Sometimes it is suggested the man in the moon is really a hare carrying a cosmic egg; that the egg of the world is tattooed into the face of the moon where Indra placed the hare for having resolved, when browsing the spring grass and feeling it not right enough for alms-giving, decides to offer its entire body in charity. To honor the hare’s virtue Indra taps the sign of the rabbit into the orb of the moon with its extracted essence so that you and I remember to tell this story.  
 
Three Hares, Jackie Morris 

Terri Windling references The Three Hares Project and reveals it

an extraordinary and ancient archetype, stretching across diverse religions and cultures, many centuries and many thousands of miles. It is part of the shared medieval heritage of Europe and Asia (Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and Judaism) yet still inspires creative work among contemporary artists….and if we dig a little deeper into [hare] stories we find that they are also contradictory, paradoxical creatures: symbols of both cleverness and foolishness, of femininity and androgny, of cowardice and courage, of rampant sexuality and virginal purity. In some lands, Hare is the messenger of the Great Goddess, moving by moonlight between the human world and the realm of the gods; in other lands he is a god himself, wily deceiver and sacred world creator rolled into one.

This bunny jumping is the power of the metaphor par excellence. Each rabbit shares an ear of an other to formulate the way it holds a depth ear. I love the Jackie Morris version because the image of the celestial body painted in the heavens is also painted gleaming in the eye of each rabbit. Importantly, meaning is suspended as the archetypal sign of the rabbit operates within the movement between the animal and the moonlit god; the meaning of the sign of the triple-rabbit presence remains obscured. And, I might say the image of the bunny still operates this way, *like animal remains*. The body after the ghost has passed, the metaphor, is re maining, i.e. telling an older story, conveying a darker mythoi in the Hillmanian sense for soul's logical life grounded in ghostly or archetypal shapes and forms. Nonetheless, the sign of the rabbit powerfully suggests the April moon’s trifold life-fructifying motion of innocence, grief and joy remains woven between the quested and the found charis opening a space between movements pressed to the deep ear pair of a third, not given, yet a third invisibly shared. And thusly is the maiden soul shared even now between an earthly
life and the timeless dearth of god forever.

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A Trickster Figure

It is not all goodness and light. There is the problem of the ghost lady. There is that rage, you know? And the story goes on to talk about that. So does Kerényi. The story never negates the duality operating between the questing one and the one found. It opens back a scission in the soul and a vision of the feminine source of life. It is the inseparable nonetheless separated,

“the common source of life for men and women alike just as the ear of grain had opened a vision into ‘the abyss of the seed’…this origin and this duality is the mother and the daughter within themselves…heirs of an endless line not only of mothers, but of fathers as well.” (147)

At one point in our history we’ve made witches of the vision of the feminine source of life just as elsewise Renaissance painters use it to represent sexual purity. And the fantasy is that rabbits express a kind of insatiable mating madness, a lust without love and also a kind of sexual purity; it is a mysterious ability to produce an offspring without a mate at all. Mary was such a white rabbit according to the Christian fathers of the Mother Church. And here, on the Cathedral wall of Chartres is the same Mary power in demon guise. You can see the face of lust in the animal belly. But, now you might think of Demeter deep in grief waiting in the upper room of her chambers. And the little Baubo who comes and dances, consoles her by tapping within her body a perception of its nature and shape. And Demeter laughs when she sees her living soul. Baubo reminds her of her own figure of origin, her daughter, Persephone pregnant with all the forms to come. The Lady of Sorrow's sudden laughter sinks behind the tapping already there in the mind of the Great Memory. She can feel the poetry. It, too, is already there like the laughter; a poetry so deeply contained in the marrow of its own life its sound can draw even the moon down from heaven. And so, likewise, once it did.


Work Cited


Chapman, Chris. Three Hares Project.
http://www.chrischapmanphotography.com/hares/index.html Tuesday, March 24, 2009.

Farmer’s Almanac. April Full Moon. Video, http://www.farmersalmanac.com/video/astronomy/april-full-moon . Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Kerényi, Karl. Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter. Ralph Manheim, trans. New Jersey: Princeton, 1967.


Windling, Terri. Endicott Studios. www.endicottstudios.com The Symbolism of Rabbits and Hares. http://www.endicott-studio.com/rdrm/rrRabbits.html, Tuesday, March 24, 2009, 4:14pm.