The Dark Moon - www.archivepublishing.co.uk
A journey through darkness toward healing and forgiveness
edited by Hazel Marshall
REVIEWS
‘Every woman, every Mother should read it. You will weep as I did, but you will feel, as I did, the incredible love, strength and courage that enabled her to write it. Her grasp of the importance of myth and fairy tale as a medium for healing and understanding is amazing.’
Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki – author of The Shining Paths
'Many poignant thought provoking analogies that resonate with and express the huge pain and loss felt by a mother whose daughter’s innocence has been shattered. Anne Maria captures the complex matrix f feelings and emotions of discovering sexual abuse, so effectively that I could feel complete empathy for her. This book will inspire and comfort parents whose children have been abused, describing clearly how intense early feelings become more tempered and bearable with the passing of time. The Dark Moon gives excellent psychological insight into isolating experience.
Denise Hubble – Counselling Coordinator – ‘Mosac’ Supporting non-abusing parents and carers of sexually abused children
‘I found the writing so powerful and healing – such a truthful, unexpected and emotionally moving piece – that I really could not put it down until I had finished it – and then immediately had to read it again. It seemed to speak to the very core of my being. The strength of the healing in the writing, the reflection that it will bring into so many other’s issues and to their personal healing journeys will, I am sure, afford them huge amounts of succour and the beginnings of inner strength.’
Sarah Frossell – International Coach and Trainer – NLP
‘With Demeter’s courage and a mother’s tenderness, the author takes the quest that can restore love and forgiveness after the discovery of her daughter’s sexual abuse.’
Caitlin Matthews – author of Sophia, Goddess of Wisdom and Singing the Soul Back Home.
READERS COMMENTS
'This is a most brilliant, enlightening book. Especially because of my current challenge – engineered by myself – and has gifted me a deep… deepened… deepening… understanding. I think this will be a best-seller and forever…
Anon
I have been inspired by the Dark Moon, although I have not had this same experiences as Anne Maria Clarke. When I feel lost in darkness or anxiety, her writing will uplift me and help me to know that I am not alone. As with poetry and other inspirational writing, I am full of gratitude to the author for sharing the depth of her emotional experience, and how her understanding of the symbols of fairy tale and myth ultimately helped to lift her up and make sense of it all, bringing her to forgiveness and love. The simplicity and beauty of her prose also brings to me the power of the symbols of fairy tale and myth. I find huge comfort to know that I am connected to an ancient human journey of confronting the dragons and darkness in me to find unconditional love within. I would recommend buying this as a gift to yourself or for a friend, to have to read or dip into and reflect upon at any time.
Jane Riddles
‘Every woman, every Mother should read it. You will weep as I did, but you will feel, as I did, the incredible love, strength and courage that enabled her to write it. Her grasp of the importance of myth and fairy tale as a medium for healing and understanding is amazing.’
Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki – author of The Shining Paths
'Many poignant thought provoking analogies that resonate with and express the huge pain and loss felt by a mother whose daughter’s innocence has been shattered. Anne Maria captures the complex matrix f feelings and emotions of discovering sexual abuse, so effectively that I could feel complete empathy for her. This book will inspire and comfort parents whose children have been abused, describing clearly how intense early feelings become more tempered and bearable with the passing of time. The Dark Moon gives excellent psychological insight into isolating experience.
Denise Hubble – Counselling Coordinator – ‘Mosac’ Supporting non-abusing parents and carers of sexually abused children
‘I found the writing so powerful and healing – such a truthful, unexpected and emotionally moving piece – that I really could not put it down until I had finished it – and then immediately had to read it again. It seemed to speak to the very core of my being. The strength of the healing in the writing, the reflection that it will bring into so many other’s issues and to their personal healing journeys will, I am sure, afford them huge amounts of succour and the beginnings of inner strength.’
Sarah Frossell – International Coach and Trainer – NLP
‘With Demeter’s courage and a mother’s tenderness, the author takes the quest that can restore love and forgiveness after the discovery of her daughter’s sexual abuse.’
Caitlin Matthews – author of Sophia, Goddess of Wisdom and Singing the Soul Back Home.
READERS COMMENTS
'This is a most brilliant, enlightening book. Especially because of my current challenge – engineered by myself – and has gifted me a deep… deepened… deepening… understanding. I think this will be a best-seller and forever…
Anon
I have been inspired by the Dark Moon, although I have not had this same experiences as Anne Maria Clarke. When I feel lost in darkness or anxiety, her writing will uplift me and help me to know that I am not alone. As with poetry and other inspirational writing, I am full of gratitude to the author for sharing the depth of her emotional experience, and how her understanding of the symbols of fairy tale and myth ultimately helped to lift her up and make sense of it all, bringing her to forgiveness and love. The simplicity and beauty of her prose also brings to me the power of the symbols of fairy tale and myth. I find huge comfort to know that I am connected to an ancient human journey of confronting the dragons and darkness in me to find unconditional love within. I would recommend buying this as a gift to yourself or for a friend, to have to read or dip into and reflect upon at any time.
Jane Riddles
The Dark Moon - book launch transcript presented by
Anne Maria Clarke at the MOSAC FORUM in Greenwich, London
'First I want to thank everyone here at MOSAC. I can’t think of a better place from which to launch The Dark Moon.
There is a wonderful scene in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, where Galadriel, the powerful Elvin Queen, gives the hobbit Frodo a phial of pure light to guide and protect him in the perilous realms ahead.
“It will be a light for you in dark places, she says, “where all other lights have gone out.”.
MOSAC is like that. It was for me, years ago when I first called, and it is still for countless others, struggling to hold onto their very lives.
We were like Frodo and his companions at the start of our story, abruptly awakened to a perilous danger that had already crossed our borders without our consent. And we too, all of us who set forth, were like those gentle hobbits of the shire, snatched from our everyday lives by dark forces that seemed to threaten our very existence. In the Lord of the Rings, the darkness emanated from a maleficent ring, forged by the Dark Lord. The whole of middle earth is threatened, not just the shire. Yet for reasons unbeknown to them, it is the Hobbits who are charged with the terrifying task of returning the ring to Mount Doom, where it can finally be destroyed.
In our story, the darkness that threatened our small group of family and friends emanated from a crime that affected all of us - from our daughter at the center - through all of our relationships - as it affects others too - far away and beyond our little world - and what was our story, turned out to be their story too - and what was their story, turned out to be mirrored in myths, legends and fairytale throughout the wide world.
“I wish the ring had never come to me,” says Frodo to Gandalf , “I wish none of this had happened.” “So do all who come to know such things – but that is not important. What is important is what we do with the time left over to us.”
What I want to do today is to give a flavour of The Dark Moon and to introduce some of the symbolism and the stories that shed light upon our predicament along the way. It's not possible in 25mins, to gather more than a few threads -
But suffice to say – to embark is to become an initiate – the route leads through deepest darkness where one is tested to the hilt – to arrive is to precure a new consciousness and to transform what could so easily, be only a tragedy – into a heroic journey, in which those who succeed stand taller, not smaller as a result.
Each person’s process will be unique and yet have universal meaning that is both inclusive of and transcendent of the personal dimension. This is true for us and also the characters of myth, which for the duration, become profound meditations - that shed much light on the path of the hero and heroine ahead.
The Stories
Now, these stories are part of storytelling since people first used language and the themes must in fact be older still. People felt like that even when they had no way of expressing it. And it’s the universal theme of loss and search - we have lost the past, the present is bleak, we are in a wasteland. That is where all longing starts and from where the great internal journey begins. We make literal journeys, physical journeys, but we make internal journeys too and the two are often very closely related. And the great internal journey is the search for PARADISE LOST.
The Moon
The myth of loss, searching and finding is a Lunar Myth, and the search for the lost loved one follows the course of the moon
The moon is a symbol, perhaps more than any other, that is associated with the feminine and with the feminine soul. And the Lunar cycle, this progression of phases becomes the framework for the story of The Dark Moon.
Elizabeth Kubla-Ross
Now, these phases are very similar – to those stages of recovery – first put forward by Elizabeth Kubla- Ross in her work on death and dying, in which she describes a series of progressions through shock, denial, anger, grief, through to eventual coming to terms and letting go. In the Dark Moon, these same progressions are transposed onto a mythological landscape, so that the stages become phases through which we must pass on the long road to recovery.
The linear model is transformed into a circle that offers a trusting hospitality to that which is complex and mysterious, rather like a Mandala or an Inuit medicine wheel.
Now, there are three days of darkness, in every Lunar Cycle, when the moon cannot be seen at all. The ancients called it the land of no return, for it is experienced as a complete cessation of the life process. Many, many tears are shed during this time. In ancient Egypt they were called the Tears of Isis.
All the myths, legends and fairy tales considered here, begin in a kind of dark moon situation, in which the previous cohesion is shattered. The old form falls suddenly away and for the duration the characters and the world they inhabit are plunged into darkness.
All begin because of a disregard of the qualities associated with the feminine realm and all involve, in their working out, a way of coming into a more harmonious relationship with what this represents.
Now, the Grail legends tell that -
– since the raping of the maidens of the well, the land has dried up and turned to waste, the mysterious castle where the Grail is kept has vanished and paths to the courts of joy therein, are lost beyond recall.
Demeter was far away on Mount Olympus when it happened, when she discovered that her beautiful child had been stolen. A sharp pain ceased her heart and like a wild bird she set forth, across dry land and sea searching.
Meanwhile, far away in the Sleeping Beauty,
a princess pricks her finger upon an old spindle and falls down upon the cold stone floor - as from the centre of the palace where she lay, there spread, like water round a stone, ring upon ring of sleep. The sun went out, the wind fell, the flags hung motionless on the flagpoles, and round it rose, in the wink of an eye, an enclosing hedge of thorn. No one could have guessed that behind those battlements of briar, there lay a living rose.
‘Where there is gross injury’, writes C.P.Estes, ‘the soul flees.’
The Grail Maidens, Persephony and the Sleeping Beauty all represent the soul and the landscapes of their stories, the state of the earth when the soul is lost.
...For many days and nights Demeter wandered in terrible grief and rage - but nowhere could she find her child....
And in the Grail Legends we see - that of the many who set forth - few were destined to succeed.
In the Sleeping Beauty too – many knights come and try to hack their way through the enchanted forest – in order to settle the matter once and for all. But it is not the destiny of such men to penetrate the wood. For the true hero, we discover, will come at the right time and in the right way.
Yet what does this mean for us?
In her song Famine, Sinead O’Connor sings
If there is ever gonna be healing. There has to be remembering and then grieving – so that there then can be forgiving. There has to be knowledge and understanding.
It is this imperative, that finally brings us out of the condition of the dark moon.
The Moon Boat
Esther Harding writes of this time,
It is repeatedly recorded that when the moon sent a deluge upon the earth she also provided a means of salvation – a boat that carried her children to a new world where they could live redeemed lives. The boat that she provided was an ark, a crescent moon boat and in this her people were carried to the sun, the place of warmth and light.
The arrival of this boat, this crescent shaped vessel of light is of great significance for, says Harding,
...instead of being engulfed by the water’s of the moon, the initiate can embark in her boat and so become one of her company. It is a poetic and religious symbol with which we are very familiar. The salvation being found by taking a new attitude toward the powers of the instinct.
The new light comes from the sun, from the positive masculine aspect of the psyche. Symbolically it is a wonderfully hopeful moment, for it creates the first form or meaning to what has happened and it does so by coming into relationship with the feminine soul.
This new light prefigures and is in fact an aspect of the emerging hero within – the positive animus – to use Jung’s term - who will eventually overturn the values of the old and triumph over the darkness brought about through their dominance. He is the rightful bride-groom of the feminine soul, her own spirit if you like. And he is the helper, more than any other needed to put things right.
Now it is very important that this role of inner helper is not appropriated – or over-shadowed by the external helper. For the soul needs – more than ever at this time - to come into relationship with what it represents, in order to proceed toward maturity or individuation.
People rush forth to offer assistance, to rescue us from the darkness. But helping is a tricky thing. It has a dark side as well as a light one. It may support the heroic journey or impede it.
Those who are wise know this. They do not attempt to take over – but to facilitate this voyage – and in this way and in their holding of the individuals process they can support and in a sense, become part of the structure, part of the vessel of light that sets forth – with the initiate, more and more at the helm of her own life.
And this is what the first half of the cycle really involves, a gradual gathering, a remembering, a piecing together of a new body of light that will manifest symbolically – as the full moon.
So the light is consciousness, that not only reveals new facts, but different and evolving perspectives from which to view them - and we see as we follow our questers that their stories are indeed ones of evolving consciousness – as is our own –
So that in Demeter we see she is enabled to move through and beyond the extremes of grief and rage and her attention – like our own - turns toward finding the magic that will bring about the recovery of what has been lost.
More and more the quest, like that for the Holy Grail, turns upon the ability to ask the right question. To quest is to question. Our questions unlock the truth and move the cycle on. The old ways prove fruitless, as we rapidly discover – what is needed – in order to come into a new relationship with the soul – is a radically different approach.
The process of discovery, says Evetts –Secker (another Jungian) must never be an abrupt uncovering, a ripping away of the covers of defence and resistance.
The parameters of invitation and prohibition – concealment and revelation – are spiritually and psychologically compelled.
Approach
There is a beautiful book of Celtic Spiritual Wisdom called Anam Cara, by the Irish writer John O’Donahue. Anam is soul. Cara is friend. And the soul, says the author, responds better to candlelight than electric light.
Candle light perception is the most respectful and appropriate form of light with which to approach the inner world – our own - or that of another. It does not force our tormented transparency upon the mystery. The glimpse is sufficient. Candle light perception has the finesse and reverence appropriate to the mystery and autonomy of the soul. It is at home on the threshold and neither needs nor desires to invade the temenos where the soul lives.
All who succeed, in coming into relationship with what has been lost, within the self, in ones relationships and within the kingdom at large – ultimately discover this approach. –
It seems so simple - self evident – but if this were really true – if it was just that easy – there would have been no need for our explorations.
What we call the beginning, writes T.S. Eliot,
is very often the end.
The end is where we start from.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our searching
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
References
J.R. Tolkien : Lord of the Rings . George Allen and Unwin. London 1955
Esther Harding: Women’s Mysteries: Ancient and Modern, Rider and Company, London 1971
C.P.Estes: Women who run with the Wolves. London: Rider, Random House Group, 1992
Sinead O ‘Connor: Lyrics from Famine. Chrysalis Records Ltd London. 1995
J.Evetts-Secker : ‘Noli’ and ‘Ecce’ – Dis-covering Psyche. 1996
John O ‘ Donohue: Anam Cara - Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World. Bantam Press 1997
T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets. London: Faber and Faber 1944
There is a wonderful scene in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, where Galadriel, the powerful Elvin Queen, gives the hobbit Frodo a phial of pure light to guide and protect him in the perilous realms ahead.
“It will be a light for you in dark places, she says, “where all other lights have gone out.”.
MOSAC is like that. It was for me, years ago when I first called, and it is still for countless others, struggling to hold onto their very lives.
We were like Frodo and his companions at the start of our story, abruptly awakened to a perilous danger that had already crossed our borders without our consent. And we too, all of us who set forth, were like those gentle hobbits of the shire, snatched from our everyday lives by dark forces that seemed to threaten our very existence. In the Lord of the Rings, the darkness emanated from a maleficent ring, forged by the Dark Lord. The whole of middle earth is threatened, not just the shire. Yet for reasons unbeknown to them, it is the Hobbits who are charged with the terrifying task of returning the ring to Mount Doom, where it can finally be destroyed.
In our story, the darkness that threatened our small group of family and friends emanated from a crime that affected all of us - from our daughter at the center - through all of our relationships - as it affects others too - far away and beyond our little world - and what was our story, turned out to be their story too - and what was their story, turned out to be mirrored in myths, legends and fairytale throughout the wide world.
“I wish the ring had never come to me,” says Frodo to Gandalf , “I wish none of this had happened.” “So do all who come to know such things – but that is not important. What is important is what we do with the time left over to us.”
What I want to do today is to give a flavour of The Dark Moon and to introduce some of the symbolism and the stories that shed light upon our predicament along the way. It's not possible in 25mins, to gather more than a few threads -
But suffice to say – to embark is to become an initiate – the route leads through deepest darkness where one is tested to the hilt – to arrive is to precure a new consciousness and to transform what could so easily, be only a tragedy – into a heroic journey, in which those who succeed stand taller, not smaller as a result.
Each person’s process will be unique and yet have universal meaning that is both inclusive of and transcendent of the personal dimension. This is true for us and also the characters of myth, which for the duration, become profound meditations - that shed much light on the path of the hero and heroine ahead.
The Stories
Now, these stories are part of storytelling since people first used language and the themes must in fact be older still. People felt like that even when they had no way of expressing it. And it’s the universal theme of loss and search - we have lost the past, the present is bleak, we are in a wasteland. That is where all longing starts and from where the great internal journey begins. We make literal journeys, physical journeys, but we make internal journeys too and the two are often very closely related. And the great internal journey is the search for PARADISE LOST.
The Moon
The myth of loss, searching and finding is a Lunar Myth, and the search for the lost loved one follows the course of the moon
The moon is a symbol, perhaps more than any other, that is associated with the feminine and with the feminine soul. And the Lunar cycle, this progression of phases becomes the framework for the story of The Dark Moon.
Elizabeth Kubla-Ross
Now, these phases are very similar – to those stages of recovery – first put forward by Elizabeth Kubla- Ross in her work on death and dying, in which she describes a series of progressions through shock, denial, anger, grief, through to eventual coming to terms and letting go. In the Dark Moon, these same progressions are transposed onto a mythological landscape, so that the stages become phases through which we must pass on the long road to recovery.
The linear model is transformed into a circle that offers a trusting hospitality to that which is complex and mysterious, rather like a Mandala or an Inuit medicine wheel.
Now, there are three days of darkness, in every Lunar Cycle, when the moon cannot be seen at all. The ancients called it the land of no return, for it is experienced as a complete cessation of the life process. Many, many tears are shed during this time. In ancient Egypt they were called the Tears of Isis.
All the myths, legends and fairy tales considered here, begin in a kind of dark moon situation, in which the previous cohesion is shattered. The old form falls suddenly away and for the duration the characters and the world they inhabit are plunged into darkness.
All begin because of a disregard of the qualities associated with the feminine realm and all involve, in their working out, a way of coming into a more harmonious relationship with what this represents.
Now, the Grail legends tell that -
– since the raping of the maidens of the well, the land has dried up and turned to waste, the mysterious castle where the Grail is kept has vanished and paths to the courts of joy therein, are lost beyond recall.
Demeter was far away on Mount Olympus when it happened, when she discovered that her beautiful child had been stolen. A sharp pain ceased her heart and like a wild bird she set forth, across dry land and sea searching.
Meanwhile, far away in the Sleeping Beauty,
a princess pricks her finger upon an old spindle and falls down upon the cold stone floor - as from the centre of the palace where she lay, there spread, like water round a stone, ring upon ring of sleep. The sun went out, the wind fell, the flags hung motionless on the flagpoles, and round it rose, in the wink of an eye, an enclosing hedge of thorn. No one could have guessed that behind those battlements of briar, there lay a living rose.
‘Where there is gross injury’, writes C.P.Estes, ‘the soul flees.’
The Grail Maidens, Persephony and the Sleeping Beauty all represent the soul and the landscapes of their stories, the state of the earth when the soul is lost.
...For many days and nights Demeter wandered in terrible grief and rage - but nowhere could she find her child....
And in the Grail Legends we see - that of the many who set forth - few were destined to succeed.
In the Sleeping Beauty too – many knights come and try to hack their way through the enchanted forest – in order to settle the matter once and for all. But it is not the destiny of such men to penetrate the wood. For the true hero, we discover, will come at the right time and in the right way.
Yet what does this mean for us?
In her song Famine, Sinead O’Connor sings
If there is ever gonna be healing. There has to be remembering and then grieving – so that there then can be forgiving. There has to be knowledge and understanding.
It is this imperative, that finally brings us out of the condition of the dark moon.
The Moon Boat
Esther Harding writes of this time,
It is repeatedly recorded that when the moon sent a deluge upon the earth she also provided a means of salvation – a boat that carried her children to a new world where they could live redeemed lives. The boat that she provided was an ark, a crescent moon boat and in this her people were carried to the sun, the place of warmth and light.
The arrival of this boat, this crescent shaped vessel of light is of great significance for, says Harding,
...instead of being engulfed by the water’s of the moon, the initiate can embark in her boat and so become one of her company. It is a poetic and religious symbol with which we are very familiar. The salvation being found by taking a new attitude toward the powers of the instinct.
The new light comes from the sun, from the positive masculine aspect of the psyche. Symbolically it is a wonderfully hopeful moment, for it creates the first form or meaning to what has happened and it does so by coming into relationship with the feminine soul.
This new light prefigures and is in fact an aspect of the emerging hero within – the positive animus – to use Jung’s term - who will eventually overturn the values of the old and triumph over the darkness brought about through their dominance. He is the rightful bride-groom of the feminine soul, her own spirit if you like. And he is the helper, more than any other needed to put things right.
Now it is very important that this role of inner helper is not appropriated – or over-shadowed by the external helper. For the soul needs – more than ever at this time - to come into relationship with what it represents, in order to proceed toward maturity or individuation.
People rush forth to offer assistance, to rescue us from the darkness. But helping is a tricky thing. It has a dark side as well as a light one. It may support the heroic journey or impede it.
Those who are wise know this. They do not attempt to take over – but to facilitate this voyage – and in this way and in their holding of the individuals process they can support and in a sense, become part of the structure, part of the vessel of light that sets forth – with the initiate, more and more at the helm of her own life.
And this is what the first half of the cycle really involves, a gradual gathering, a remembering, a piecing together of a new body of light that will manifest symbolically – as the full moon.
So the light is consciousness, that not only reveals new facts, but different and evolving perspectives from which to view them - and we see as we follow our questers that their stories are indeed ones of evolving consciousness – as is our own –
So that in Demeter we see she is enabled to move through and beyond the extremes of grief and rage and her attention – like our own - turns toward finding the magic that will bring about the recovery of what has been lost.
More and more the quest, like that for the Holy Grail, turns upon the ability to ask the right question. To quest is to question. Our questions unlock the truth and move the cycle on. The old ways prove fruitless, as we rapidly discover – what is needed – in order to come into a new relationship with the soul – is a radically different approach.
The process of discovery, says Evetts –Secker (another Jungian) must never be an abrupt uncovering, a ripping away of the covers of defence and resistance.
The parameters of invitation and prohibition – concealment and revelation – are spiritually and psychologically compelled.
Approach
There is a beautiful book of Celtic Spiritual Wisdom called Anam Cara, by the Irish writer John O’Donahue. Anam is soul. Cara is friend. And the soul, says the author, responds better to candlelight than electric light.
Candle light perception is the most respectful and appropriate form of light with which to approach the inner world – our own - or that of another. It does not force our tormented transparency upon the mystery. The glimpse is sufficient. Candle light perception has the finesse and reverence appropriate to the mystery and autonomy of the soul. It is at home on the threshold and neither needs nor desires to invade the temenos where the soul lives.
All who succeed, in coming into relationship with what has been lost, within the self, in ones relationships and within the kingdom at large – ultimately discover this approach. –
It seems so simple - self evident – but if this were really true – if it was just that easy – there would have been no need for our explorations.
What we call the beginning, writes T.S. Eliot,
is very often the end.
The end is where we start from.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our searching
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
References
J.R. Tolkien : Lord of the Rings . George Allen and Unwin. London 1955
Esther Harding: Women’s Mysteries: Ancient and Modern, Rider and Company, London 1971
C.P.Estes: Women who run with the Wolves. London: Rider, Random House Group, 1992
Sinead O ‘Connor: Lyrics from Famine. Chrysalis Records Ltd London. 1995
J.Evetts-Secker : ‘Noli’ and ‘Ecce’ – Dis-covering Psyche. 1996
John O ‘ Donohue: Anam Cara - Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World. Bantam Press 1997
T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets. London: Faber and Faber 1944
