A homily for the Full Moon on September 7, 2025. Written, as always, without authority.
Dearly Beloved,
Blessed Full Moon, dear ones. I greet you in the name of Aphrodite and the name of the gods on this, the Full Moon in Virgo. This Full Moon includes an eclipse, so be careful to account for that in any magick that you do tonight.
I’ve been busy, busy, busy, since the New Moon with all the new work that the Great Work has been dishing up for me. I’ve been writing a lot and doing a lot of magick. It’s been really good, honestly. I’m always at my best when I’m on-mission. I’ve been like this since I was a kid. My grandfather (who helped raise me) made me this way. It’s made me a good soldier for the gods all these years as I’ve worked my way through my initiatory path, and it promises to be a valuable way of being as I proceed to do the work of theiatry (you can check out the first ritual here). Give me a worthy goal and send me on my way and I will keep my head down and keep walking for as long as it takes to get to my destination, no matter how long it takes, and if I run into a wall I will throw myself against that wall until I get over it, around it, or, if all else fails, through it. I love nothing more than a well-defined mission.
But real life, especially the real life of a working mage, isn’t exactly known for its well-defined missions. I always want to be truthful and lead with my vulnerability with you all, so I must acknowledge that this basic fact of life has been rough for me to accept. I’ve been a mage most of my life, and frankly, I’ve often been terrorized by the liminal and mysterious. Readers of my poetry know that I am always referring to the “temporary tensions” and the “in-betweens”, usually with varying levels of unease and sometimes outright fear or angst. I studied logic for five years and TAed logic classes for two because I liked having clear and distinct answers to well-defined questions. But I learned something while I was in school that drove me a little bit mad for a while. There is a black hole at the center of the logical universe, a problem of provability and consistency that (provably) just can’t be solved. Any system of logic, no matter how well-constructed, that is complex enough to say anything worthwhile will always have true and false statements within it that can’t be proven to be true or false from within the system. It will also be unable to prove its own consistency. Logic will always be forced to reach outside itself for justification.
This means that trying to find ultimate and fundamental truths about the universe using logic alone is a fool’s errand. There will always be more to be said, more premises to be added, more questions to be asked, another paradigm or theory to be considered. It will always turn into long, drawn-out talk that will ultimately be forced to shrug and acknowledge that it just doesn’t know.
Ain’t that just the sort of thing that might drive a budding logician a little loopy?
Confronted with the monster at the heart of reason, I kind of just lost it for awhile. I flailed about in the extremes of both the Right Hand Path (Orthodox Christianity) and Left Hand Path (Setianism), looking for insights through mysticism. Over a period of years I slowly traded in Bertrand Russell and W.V.O. Quine—two of my great philosophical heroes up until that point—for Søren Kierkegaard and Hermann Hesse. I lost my patience with long, drawn-out talk that tries to define reality into being rather than experience it. That sort of talk deals in rules that never seem to apply when I actually need them to help me and tries to make distinctions that get spikier and more treacherous the more I examine them.
Eventually I reached a crisis, as one must. I needed to embrace the mysterious in a way that made me very, very uncomfortable. I needed to face my fear of the liminal, my terror of the in-betweens. I needed to try to meet reality on its own terms, in all its beautiful and perplexing messiness.
And that, as the poem says, has made all the difference.
So this Full Moon I am called to speak of a stance, an attitude towards the world and the people in it, that allows for surprises. I am moved to talk of an earnest and loving approach to the mysterious. I am called to write of the approach to this aching world that I call the Way Of The Friendly Stranger.
I am moved to speak on openness.
The world is scary. That’s just a fact. It’s filled with people that all want different things and are all trying to accomplish goals that we usually know nothing about. That’s a hard fact to deal with. Almost all of us struggle with it. Some of us go into a sort of denial, where we assume that everyone wants the same things we do, and then we react with various levels of dismay, fear, and anger when the other people in the world keep surprising us. Some of us live in constant anxiety about other people and their goals and intentions, and that anxiety can paralyze us (I spent many years in this camp). Some of us throw up our hands and just go wild, ignoring other people while we pursue our own desires and goals as if those other people didn’t exist.
All of those choices, by themselves, can end up causing harm. And if we take those paths, any of them, to their natural conclusions, we often fail to truly grow and thrive. We may also prevent others from growing and thriving. I think that we owe it to both ourselves and each other to work towards general growth and thriving. After all, we are living beings, and it is the goal of all life to grow and thrive.
For me, what it means to say that I am a pagan is to say that I believe in what I call a naturalized theology. I believe that the best and surest way to know the will of the gods and what the gods are like is to look at the natural world in which we live as both part and participant. I look at the systems of interaction between the elements, between Fire, Water, Spirit, Air, and Earth, to understand how to interact with the different parts of myself and the world around me. I look at how living things are born, grow, live, reproduce, nurture and protect their families and communities, and die to understand how I am to live, grow, approach the world and others, and eventually move on to the Underworld. I look at the interconnectedness of the natural world, how every bit connects to every other bit, for wisdom about the ultimate nature of things. And I look to the spirit world—also a part of nature—and the various ecosystems of spirit life that exist within that world for a constant reminder that, no matter what, I am never truly alone. I am always witnessed and known, even in my most heartbreaking—and ridiculous—moments.
Within this naturalized theology, this model of divinity that embraces the world rather than condemning it or attempting to transcend it, there is a great deal that is, when all is said and done, unknown. Even unknowable. Some of it is the province of the divine, of course…the internal ways and doings of the gods that we can only wonder about. But some of it is deeply personal. I simply can’t know what it is like to be you, and you can’t know what it is like to be me. By our very nature as people, we are situated in our own points of view. We can’t truly get out of ourselves in some way that lets us see some sort of “big picture” or gain a true and complete insight into another person. We can get glimpses into each other through love and we can gain moments of insight into the world through mysticism and magick, but in the end we have to deal with the fact that there are hidden places around us. We always have to see into things from the outside, and that sight is always limited.
We also always live in the knowledge that the sight of others is similarly limited, and that can be a sad and lonely fact. We are always hidden in our secret selves, no matter how close we get to someone, no matter how much we work to let people in, no matter how much we may desire to be seen and understood. We are mysteries, even to those closest to us, even to the spirits that surround us. We are never alone, but we are always hidden.
We are also mysterious to ourselves. We sometimes have needs and desires (and fears and anxieties) that we don’t perceive or don’t understand. We touch these strange and obscured parts of ourselves in brief moments, during dreams, visions, and the surprises of desire and repulsion, but they are always seen only in part. Like a beehive, most of the activity of we call the “self” is beneath the surface.
So we are surrounded with mystery and filled with the mysterious. All around us and within us, we are confronted with the unknown and the unknowable. We are caught up in a strange world and we are strangers even to ourselves.
See? I told you that the world is scary.
Now, there are lots of ways we can respond to all of this mystery. We can become deeply suspicious that anything and everything that we don’t immediately understand is a threat. We can go to the other extreme and embrace everything and everyone, refusing to see any enemies anywhere. We can fold up into ourselves and hide from others. We can run to others and hide from ourselves. But I think that all of these responses end up causing more harm than help and that they don’t allow for the basic phenomena at the heart of our reality to reveal themselves to us as they actually are.
By trying to force reality to be one thing or another, to fit into a category or align with an idea, we flatten reality, and by doing that we lose important information about reality. Despite how strange the world may reveal itself to be and how uncomfortable that strangeness may make us, I think it’s better to embrace a basic position of openness. We need to be open to mystery. Open to being surprised. Open to finding a new path, a new friend, or even a new enemy. I think that we need to approach each and every part of the world, every person and phenomena we meet, as a Friendly Stranger.
We come into a mysterious world as a mystery to ourselves, a stranger in a strange land. We must explore both of these mysteries, the one within and the one without, from a position of friendly openness, a position that says “I am a Stranger here and I would like to get to know you”.
This does not mean we let others harm or exploit anyone. Part of this friendly openness is also a readiness to see a clear threat when the world reveals itself as such. We must be ready to protect who and what is important. But it does mean that we let the world be itself. We allow the world—and the people within it—to reveal themselves to us on their own terms, in all their messiness and strangeness.
We are a mystery. The world is a mystery. Let us embrace both of these mysteries together.
So let us turn to this strange world full of strange people with interest and awareness. Let us embrace the the uncanny, the mysterious, and the liminal. Let us explore the temporary tensions and the in-betweens.
Let us embrace openness.
Blessed Full Moon, dear ones. Brace yourself during the eclipse. Things might get weird. If you would like to read an excellent breakdown of the astrological situation, you could do no better than to check out this piece from The Cunning Farmer, one of the best astrologers I know (and I know a lot of astrologers).
In love,
Soror Alice
Art: Odilon Redon, “Mystery”, (~1910)
Excellent piece Alice! And thanks for the recommendation at the end😉
Always!
You are really plucking my soul strings lately.
Awesome! I’m glad to hear it!
I so very much appreciate your musings Alice. This one was freeing in a sense giving permission not to know and at the same time to live fully. I’m not sure that was your intent, but that’s what I came away with. I shared it with a couple of others. Blessings of the full moon to you and Alex.
Thank you so much, San. I know I’m doing well when you compliment my work. And thank you for the shares…every little bit helps!
Blessed Full Moon!