Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Blood Moon

October moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The moon is new! We have just moved into the lunar cycle known as the Blood Moon in 16th Century England. Another popular name for this lunar cycle was the Hunter's Moon -- used by many indigenous peoples in the Americas and adopted into the American Farmers Almanac. In both names the reference is pretty clear: winter is coming and it is time to secure meat for the cold months ahead. Meat for the winter meant that either game had to be hunted, or farm animals had to be slaughtered.

In either case, blood was shed to ensure survival until Spring.

In the name 'The Blood Moon' or 'The Hunter's Moon' can be heard the echoes of an old mythical connection between the moon, blood, and hunting. In ancient Greece, the goddess most closely associated with the moon was Artemis. She was the goddess of the hunt and the goddess who ruled over women's monthly cycles -- their menses, their blood.

Artemis was also a protector of young animals and wildlife. Some modern interpreters of myth like to focus on this aspect of her identity in an effort to disassociate her from violence or killing of any kind. I have seen her portrayed as a kind of warm and fuzzy animal lover who wouldn't hurt a fly. But this is nonsense. Artemis (later identified by the Romans as Diana) was both a protectress and a huntress, a lunar goddess of the wild woods who was attended by beautiful nymphs and was never without her bow and arrow.

It is hard for contemporary Americans, with our binary and oppositional way of thinking, to understand a way of thinking that is mythical and rooted in nature and the cosmos. When one experiences nature and natural forces on a daily basis and at first hand, one can not think in terms of opposition, in terms of two sides, one against the other. The universe simply doesn't work this way. It is not linear or binary. It is cyclical and interconnected and infinitely complex and fascinating.

The moon is perhaps human beings' most direct example of this truth of the universe. Every night it changes -- slowly and gradually and a bit mystifyingly. Yesterday or today, people around the world began to be able to see the tiny sliver of the moon's crescent appearing in the sky. Day by day, it will wax until it is full. Then day by day, it will wane until it is dark and invisible, until it appears dead for approximately three days. And then it will be reborn again, and again begin to wax and grow.

Ancients who observed this rhythm saw it repeated again and again in life. As the moon waxed and waned, died and was reborn, so did each day. The sun rose and brought light, moved overhead into its full glory, then set and gave way to darkness, only to be reborn again the next morning. The tides do the same thing: flowing until they are at their highest point, and then ebbing until they are at their lowest, and then beginning to flow again. The seasons repeat the pattern, with short cold days becoming longer and warmer until the long hot days of summer, and then gradually getting shorter and cooler until the cold, dark 'death' of midwinter. But from midwinter death each year, Spring's new life emerges.

In human life the cycles are repeated yet again. A woman bleeds and then stops bleeding, moves towards ovulation and then ovulates, and then her body moves towards bleeding again. It waxes and wanes with the moon. Similarly a child (or any biological being) is born and grows up (Spring, waxing, morning), then becomes an adult (Summer, full moon, noon), then grows old (Autumn, waning, evening), and eventually dies (Winter, dark moon, night). Even though that particular death is final, in the cosmic view of things it is part of the larger cycle in which life is born again from that death. It is as much a beginning as an ending. Grief gives way to hope, death gives way to life, the cycle repeats itself.

Sometimes just such a cycle can happen in our thinking as well. When I think about blood and hunting, I can not help but think about meat (this was the reason for the hunting and the bloodshed!), and when I think about meat I can't help but think about my own relationship to meat-eating in my life. As a child, I loved meat. From the time I was two until I was five, I lived in Madison, Wisconsin and some of my fondest memories from that time involve meat. I remember that when a tornado threat was in effect we had to go into the basement to wait for the tornado to pass. My parents had an electric skillet, and I remember distinctly them frying bacon for us to eat as we waited out the storm. I also remember loving liverwurst and eating it in the park by the lake. After that we moved to Virginia, and for years my favorite meal -- the one I would request on my birthday -- was steak and rice-a-roni. Another favorite dinner was meat fondue, where we would each cook our meat in the little boiling cauldron and dip it into our favorite sauces.

But at the age of fourteen, just when I started high school, I decided that eating meat was a bad thing and I should stop it. Although I didn't quite realize it then, part of what I was reacting to was the mechanistic way our food system treats animals in this country. Rather than seeing them as living, feeling parts of a sacred and interconnected universe, we see them as machines of production that can be controlled for profit. This approach has disastrous consequences for the animals, the planet, our society, and our individual health.

As much as I loved to eat meat, I could no longer in good conscience participate in a system of abuse, exploitation, and destruction.

I was a vegetarian for ten years and at times tried unsuccessfully to be a vegan, knowing full well that the mechanistic, exploitative approach to animals applied to milk and egg production as much as to meat. But in that ten years of what I thought of as purity and righteousness, a strange thing happened -- my health declined. Despite everything I was told about a vegetarian diet being healthier than a meat-eating one; despite being a 'good vegetarian' who cooked homemade meals and ate grains and legumes together to form 'complete protein,' I found myself increasingly unwell. From the age of 20 to 25, my poor health was my primary preoccupation.

The first dramatic problem that I had was an extreme case of eczema. I developed a rash that started on my leg but eventually spread to cover almost my entire body: my arms, legs, face and parts of my torso. The first time it happened I was 'cured' with a high dose of hydrocortisone by a dermatologist. But six months later the rash was back with a vengeance. At that point I realized I had a choice: I could spend the rest of my life hooked on hydrocortisone or I could get to the root of the problem and heal from the inside out.

I went to an acupuncturist that I found in the paper (I didn't know anyone who'd ever been to an acupuncturist so didn't have any references) who listed dermatological problems as one of her specialties. She treated me with needles and moxibution, which is a kind of incense made from mugwort. Interestingly, the scientific name for mugwort is artemisia -- named for Artemis, goddess of the moon -- and I like to think that as Artemis intervened on that first day, as I entered into the mystery and magic of the lunar energy, I began a process of healing that would not only eventually make me physically healthy, but would help bring me back into a holistic, sacred, and reverent relationship to nature. But this was only the beginning of that journey.

In addition to the needles and the mugwort, the doctor put me on a regimen of herbs that I had to boil in a small clay cauldron every day, twice a day. She put the mixture of what looked like barks, berries, seeds and mysterious powders into little brown paper bags -- a different bag for each dose on each day. Back at home the blackish brew smelled like the floor of a faraway forest as I cooked it in my little apartment kitchen. It tasted disgusting, and there's no way I would have been able to drink it if I hadn't been so desperate to get well. So every day I cooked and I drank, and every week I went in for needles and burning mugwort, and watched my skin and waited.

My eczema got worse. Even downing the putrid brew and doing everything right, my illness was waxing, not waning. I showed the doctor the spreading rash in despair. She told me not to worry, to keep up with my regimen and that it would get better. And miraculously, it did.

The rash hit its highest point, its full moon, its noon, its summer, its high tide, and then, miraculously, began to clear up, to wane, to set, to ebb away and to return to wherever it had come from.

At one point during this process, I made an alarming discovery. One day I arrived to pick up my herbs and caught the acupuncturist unprepared. Usually she had my brown paper bags all made up and stapled together, and I just had to grab them, write her a check, and go. But on this day she began to hastily prepare my bags in front of me. I saw her take a handful of what looked like big insect carcasses and throw them in the bag. 'Wait a minute,' I cried, 'I've never had THOSE before!' 'Yes, you have,' she said. 'Usually I crush them into a powder for you, but today I don't have time...' So that's how I discovered that vegetarian me had been drinking for months, unawares, a broth made from some unknown creature from faraway shores. It was too late to go back, and the doctor was adamant that this particular medicine was crucial for my healing. I carried on with the brewing and drinking with a dawning understanding that what was happening to me was much much bigger than my will, or my opinions about things, or my politics, or my identity as a vegetarian.

I healed well from my eczema, but a couple of years later was faced with another health crisis -- a large bleeding cyst on one of my ovaries. I reluctantly agreed to surgery to have it removed, but refused to be put on the pill as a method for preventing another one and regulating my cycle. Again I turned to acupuncturists to provide me with an alternative. It was then that an acupuncturist began encouraging me to begin to eat meat again, for the sake of my health.

This was a very hard thing for me to do. I had made a decision years ago that flesh and blood were not going to be part of my diet, and I was sticking to that decision. But my health was at stake, and I wanted desperately to be well. I began to realize that there was a way in which my vegetarianism was a way of punishing myself, of preventing myself from being nourished, and I suddenly had a deep and powerful desire to be nourished. And it seemed that that kind of deep nourishment could only come from the flesh and blood, the death, of another animal.

And so, for the first time in ten years, I ate a steak. And I had never tasted anything so wonderful. I gave great thanks to the cow that had died that I may live, and felt myself move back into harmony with the universal cycles of life and death. I came back around to where I had begun. I even spent 6 months on a no-carbohydrate diet, eating lots of meat, eggs, yogurt and vegetables but no grains or beans at all, and my body was so grateful. But my experience as a vegetarian meant that my attitude towards meat would never be the same as it was when I was a child, when meat was just what I wanted for dinner. Now it mattered to me deeply how the animals were treated, how they lived, how they died. I wanted to find a way to be, like Artemis, one who both protects and saves them, even as I am one who kills and eats them. This is nothing new. All indigenous peoples -- all peoples who are 'of a place' -- have had this relationship to animals. They cherish and value them, they hunt them, they give great thanks for the sacrifice of their death, they cook them and eat them and take nourishment from them. There is no contradiction -- it is in keeping with nature and cycles of life, death and rebirth.

In the beautiful book The Moon: Myth and Image, author Jules Cashford describes the ancient and universal relationship between the moon and the cycle of death and life. In one powerful passage, Cashford points out that sacred stories often explain why the moon wanes and waxes with the image of the moon being devoured or dismembered:

I think she just about sums it up. Once we realize that all of Creation is alive and sacred and interconnected -- be it animal, vegetable, mineral, or otherwise; and once we truly understand that we, as human beings, are part of that sacred, living, interconnectedness; and once we accept that all life feeds on other life, we can begin to do the truly important work. This is the work that all societies connected to nature have sought to do. It is not about how to avoid the cycle of life and death, or how to step outside of it or to somehow be exempted from it or escape from it, but rather how to engage with it honorably, meaningfully, and deeply. It means finding ways to raise our animals without shutting them up in factories without earth under their feet or skies over their heads. It means killing and eating them in a way that acknowledges the sacrifice that was made, the blood that was shed, the choice that was taken, so that we may live. Otherwise we violate both "bios" and "zoe", and lose our honor, our faith, and even own souls in the process.

I have faith that the dark hour we are in with regards to farming and our food system is but a phase in a cycle. Perhaps we needed to lose our bearings in our relationship to nature in order to fully realize the cost and the implications. Just as human individuals undergo evolutions of consciousness and understanding, periods of sickness and of healing, so too do human societies. It is my hope and my prayer that as the wheel turns, we will realize how much has been lost in the move to an industrial food system. There is so much that can be regained by recovering ancient wisdom, even as we incorporate appropriate modern technologies. It is not a matter of either/or, because the universe does not work in opposition -- one thing against another, a winner and a loser. It is a matter of when and how one thing gives way to another, what dies that something else may live, what is waxing and what is waning, what is ebbing and what is flowing, what is in darkness and what is in light.

I do see signs of hope and progress. I just returned from two weeks in Washington DC and Virginia, and was lucky enough to be able to go visit the farm run by visionary rancher Joel Salatin. He is radically committed to the well-being and welfare of animals, even as he raises them for food. His cattle graze freely on grass, his pigs have ample space in the beautiful outdoors where they can both forage and eat freely from a supply of grain, his laying hens are on fresh land every day as they and their moveable, open coop are rotated behind the cattle. The farm is green and vibrant, with grass fertilized by compost and manure in healthy proportions. Salatin's 150 acres of range-land are surrounded by many hundreds of acres of woods filled with wildlife. He has spent decades reforesting areas of his property that were damaged by a couple centuries of intensive farming. Chickens and turkeys are protected from the predators who live in these woods by easy-to-move, lightweight electrical fences and simple shelters. The meat chickens are slaughtered humanely on the farm itself in an outdoor abattoir. Salatin both protects animals and sheds their blood.

While in DC, I also had the opportunity to visit the new National Museum of the American Indian. The beautiful, rounded edifice of sandstone is a beautiful addition to a city full of beautiful buildings, and is its most earthy, grounded structure. It is surrounded by gardens of native and indigenous plants, is oriented towards the four cardinal directions, and has a dome that is open to the sky. Inside the building, the primary exhibits all emphasize the ways in which American Indians honor nature, and seek to live in harmony with universal rhythms and truths. To me, it was not only a celebration of indigenous cultures, but also a celebration of the sacredness of Earth, of Earth's creatures and the timeless and unfathomable forces of nature. (It is well worth a visit to their website to 'explore the museum' -- www.nmai.si.edu.) What a wonderful thing to have in the heart of our nation's capital. A small step perhaps, but a significant one.

Returning home on the day of the New Moon, I couldn't help but think about how blessed we all are to be part of the mystery of life, its darkness and its light. We live in a world where we can be touched by Artemis, a world where healing is possible, where there is an intelligence at work that is much, much, much greater than our own.

May you experience the magic of rebirth and new life during this Blood Moon.