The Sun and the Moon

The Sun is one eye, and the Moon is the other.

The Sun faces inwards. That’s why looking at it is blinding. It is already looking at us in here, and we are not allowed to look back at those watching us; for the same reasons, gods change their names from time to time: they are fragile and must stay unseen. Because it faces inwards, the Sun illuminates everything in here, as Plato and his followers observed.

The Moon faces outwards. For this reason, it is associated with dreams and divination; it is possible to look at it and see something that is somewhere else. Sometimes on the threshold of sleep, I suddenly know where in the sky (or under the horizon) the Moon is. And whereas the Sun is associated with outer reality, the Moon is associated with the soul; and through this association, it is also further associated with magic, because each individual soul also partakes in a common root network, and it is possible for a human to influence other humans—and also non-human beings, including the being called the World—via the connections from one’s own soul.

It is apt that humans should have came to be in a place where the Moon and the Sun appear equally large in the sky, because humans are, from our own perspective, almost exactly equally capable of reception and action. Indeed, it is inevitable that, whatever their objective sizes, humans would evolve in such a way as to view these two objects as equally large, since this is dictated by their symbolic meaning in relation to the structure of our soul. Perhaps a different kind of living thing would not think of humans that we are equally capable of inwards and outwards thought, but it is given first that we must think of ourselves that way, and then the notion of “equality” (for example) follows afterwards.