Homily for the Full Moon in Taurus, written 4-23-24.
Dearly Beloved,
Happy Full Moon in Taurus!
In the traditional naming scheme made popular in the “Farmer’s Almanac”, this Full Moon is called the “Pink Moon”, named so after the blooming of the “Moss Pink”, a beautiful flower with deep pink flowers. This Full Moon thus commemorates the rising of beauty in the burgeoning early months of Spring. With this in mind, this Full Moon I am moved to speak of the mystery that we call “beauty”.
Beauty is a difficult concept to wrap our heads around, so difficult that an entire branch of philosophy called aesthetics is dedicated to trying to figure it out. Despite this intellectual difficulty, most people find identifying beauty when they experience it very easy. In fact, beauty can be sensually and emotionally overwhelming for many people, inspiring strong experiences that can be life-changing. It is this mystery that can inspire years of effort and change lives that I wish to consider today.
Beauty is both wonderful and terrible. We see it in the bloom of flowers, yes…but there is also a beauty of the tomb, a beauty of decay, a beauty of desolation. Many people who have explored an abandoned, burnt-out factory, witnessed the glorious desolation of the desert at night, or looked deeply at the grotesques of the Baroque Period can attest that great beauty and meaning can be found in things that are disturbing as well as those that are appealing.
As pagans, we subscribe to a naturalized theology; we look to the natural for our knowledge of the supernatural and to the physical for our knowledge of the metaphysical. This means that in the processes and patterns of nature such as the turning of the seasons and the changes of the Moon, we see the activities and the manifest will of the Divine. So what does the existence of beauty, the fact that we perceive beauty in some things but not others, the fact that beauty comes in a whole spectrum of manifestations ranging from cute and fanciful to terrifying and grotesque, the fact that beauty can cut right through us, down to our core, and reveal things to us we never imagined, what does this range of facts tell us about the Divine?
Within the physical world, there is an ordering principle that the ancient Greeks called the λόγος (logos). This logos gives rise to the laws of nature and our ability to recognize this logos when we see it is what gives rise to our intuitions about reality that connect our reason to our interactions with the world. The fact that the world and our reasoning about the world can coincide is due to this manifestation of the Divine, this organizing and ordering principle within reality, and our ability to recognize it.
The reason I bring up the important concept of the logos is because I believe that beauty is a similar manifestation of the Divine in our world. We experience and recognize beauty as we do because it points to the Divine, in exactly the same way as the logos. We have intuitions about beauty in the same way as we have intuitions about time, quantity, space, and so on, and these intuitions are signposts pointing us towards the will of the Divine manifest in the worlds both around us and within us.
So the next time you wish to engage with the Divine, consider engaging with beauty. Listen to a song. Read a story or a poem. Go out into nature or into the depths of an abandoned factory, into a forest or a foundry, and experience the varieties of beauty that the manifest world offers us. Look into the face of the beloved or into the starry night sky.
And most of all, look to the Moon, the glorious Moon, the beautiful Moon, and experience its blessings and glory.
Happy Full Moon.
In love,
Soror Alice
Art: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, “Moss Roses”, (1890)