Sublunar Sublimity

2025-06-23T15:30:00+02:00

In this essay, I want to unpack the personal gnosis that emerged from my initiation into the sphere of the Moon in early 2021 — partly to make sense of the waves this experience set in motion over the past few years, and partly to share my notes with others who may find echoes of their own path. The insights that surfaced don't immediately align neatly with the Moon's typical associations, and I believe they offer a perspective worth exploring.

Lunatic Fringe

When I did my lunar initiation I lived in a house that was basically a row of caves carved into the basalt rock in the arid and rural volcanic slopes in the South of Tenerife. Sleeping in a cave gives you a very different quality and depth of sleep and in my case resulted in very vivid dreams.

During that time I was researching and practicing the Gateway Experience¹ developed by the Monroe Institute through a series of guided audio sessions called Hemi-Sync Tapes that helps practitioners enter altered states of consciousness through a technique using binaural beats to synchronize brain hemispheres. The tapes aim to facilitate out-of-body experiences, deep meditation, enhanced focus, and exploration of non-physical realms by progressively training the mind to enter expanded states of awareness. Every day I tried to get into an altered state by following the guided meditations on the first tape, with varying and overall unsatisfactory results.

Part of the reason why I wanted to initiate into the sphere of the moon at this point was the expectation of improving my research experience. I remembered reading that this initiation had helped other seekers improve their clairvoyant faculties, scrying abilities, and general intuitive skills.

What unfolded instead was a mirror turned inward, revealing a completely hidden terrain I didn't yet have a name for.

I performed the initiation ritual in something of a rush, with only about 15 minutes of preparation after a stressful morning running errands across half the island and just before a friend was due to visit. For suffumigation, I chose the local herb incienso (Artemisia canariensis), which grows abundantly in this part of the island and whose scent helped calm me. What stood out and had not occurred with any of the other Seven Spheres except Helios was a vivid inner image: an angelic being, seated in a contemplative pose, holding a long staff in one hand, with a large cape, shawl, or flowing fabric billowing behind him in the wind.

A few hours after my ritual, I had more friends over for barbecue and beers. Normally I slip easily into the role of the attentive host, managing the atmosphere and keeping things flowing. But something had shifted. My attention turned inward — or rather, toward one person in particular, let's call her M. I became acutely aware of M.'s rising discomfort, not just observing it but feeling it with an unfamiliar intensity. I couldn't perform my usual role. It was as if the ritual had altered my consciousness.

M., with her sun, and ascendant in Cancer, quite literally embodies lunar energy. That evening, it felt like I was seeing the world through her eyes — emotionally attuned, sensitive to atmosphere, and unwilling to override what felt wrong. When she unexpectedly ended the night by asking everyone to go home — calmly, and clearly — I was stunned. It completely broke the flow of social expectations, but it also felt right and necessary.

A memory surfaced: years ago, during a loud and boozy birthday dinner with a former partner's family, I had suddenly quietly disassociated, then got up and walked straight out into the night, completely overwhelmed. I hadn't thought of that moment in years, but now it returned with new clarity.

After sharing this with M. in the conversations that followed, we began speaking more openly about how we move through the world — about forgetfulness, fractured attention, procrastination, sensory overwhelm.

In the following weeks, I found myself diving into a series of rabbit holes — reading, researching, listening, watching — anything that could help me make sense of what was stirring inside me. Each discovery peeled back another layer of my past. I began revisiting old memories, moments I had long tucked away or brushed off, and saw them in an entirely new light. What once seemed like personal failings or quirks, of which some I had learned to mask, now began to take on a different shape — patterns, signs, clues that had been there all my life without me realizing it.

What had begun as an external initiation was becoming an inward unveiling. Maybe this wasn't just empathy. Maybe it was recognition of something completely new. I started to suspect that I have what the world of mental health professionals calls "ADHD", perhaps even with traces of "Autism".

I have struggled in the last years with associating the intense transformation of my self-perception with the Lunar initiation because of the lack of classic lunar archetypes. It initially felt coincidental and totally unrelated. Instead of unlocking psychic abilities or dream visions in the way I had hoped for, it seemed to draw me into something far subtler — into the realm of perception itself.

That's when I turned to astrology.

Drawing Down the Moon

In Hellenistic astrology, the Moon is closely related to sleep, dreams, and the imaginal realm — acting as a mirror or mediator and the ruler of the dream-state, which is fluid, symbolic, and emotionally charged.

The Greek Titan goddess Selene (Luna) embodies the orb of the moon and its constant change. She is the sister of the sun, Helios and the dawn, Eos. Her great love is the beautiful human shepherd prince Endymion who was granted eternal youth and immortality by Zeus and placed in a state of eternal slumber. His heavenly bride consorts with him every night.²

It is important to understand that being the planet closest to Earth the ancients also saw the Moon as much more tied with one's physical incarnation and physical body as opposed to one's mental or spiritual body. It governs moisture, change, and rhythm — all qualities tied to biological cycles.

This primal physicality is reflected in another lunar goddess often syncretized with Selene: Artemis, embodying the skill of hunting, wild animals, and the hostility of wilderness itself. She is an independent free woman who does not need any partner and is one of the three Greek goddesses over whom Aphrodite has no power. Surrounded by her nymphs she delights in hunting and punishes harshly those who cross her.³

The Moon represents the hardcoded unconscious assumptions we've carried since the beginning — deeply rooted attitudes absorbed from our parents, inherited instinctual tendencies, and, most significantly, psychological patterns shaped by our earliest childhood experiences, both nurturing and wounding.

The action of the Moon tends to be unconscious. Either it is part of the structure of the self that has not been examined (though it influences our thinking and perception every minute of the day), or it relates to experiences that were very early, even prenatal, and which are therefore not conscious.⁶

In my chart, these aspects are amplified by the Moon being placed in her domicile in Cancer and in the fourth house — the Hypogeion, or "under the earth." This position anchors her influence deep in the foundations of life: ancestry, home, and inner identity.

Being the lowest of the celestial spheres the Moon is also seen as a transmitter of images from the divine or astral realms above to the human soul in the sublunar realms below.

This aspect of existing in and being able to pass through different realms is best personified by the third great Hellenic Moon goddess Hecate, associated with crossroads, night, magic, witchcraft, and the underworld. She is also often syncretized with Selene, especially in Helleno-Kemetic magical texts.

Hecate is widely accepted as a goddess of the fringes, ambivalent and polymorphous in essence, evading conventional boundaries and clear definition. She is generally represented as three-formed, triple-bodied, or triple-faced, having one head of a dog, one of a serpent, and one of a horse. In other representations, her animal heads include those of a cow and a boar. Hecate is associated with borders, thresholds, crossroads, the 'between' and, by extension, realms outside or beyond the world of the living.⁴

The astrological associations of the Moon are informed by the mythological narratives of the goddesses embodied by the planet. Studying them helped me contextualize my initiatory experience with lunar archetypes and better understand their relation to a way of being in the world that is commonly labeled as 'neurodivergent'.

Masks of Selene

Regina nemorum, sola quae montes colis et una solis montibus coleris dea, conuerte tristes ominum in melius minas. O magna siluas inter et lucos dea, clarumque caeli sidus et noctis decus, cuius relucet mundus alterna uice, Hecate triformis, en ades coeptis fauens.⁷

Though often rather seen as a tale of desire and longing, the myth of Selene and Endymion also speaks to the discovery of love, beauty, and meaning in quiet presence, receptive stillness, and the liminal space of dreams and inward journeys. It resonates with my life-long tendency to introversion, quietly indulging in and getting a lot of joy out of my own weird special interests.

The goddess Artemis embodies a refusal to conform to social norms of affection, gender roles, or civility. Her fierceness and autonomy resonate with my own experiences of emotional intensity that defies domestication. I have always had a strong urge for autonomy and fierce resistance to normative social rules, often to my disadvantage but always with a strong inner feeling of satisfaction.

Her dominion over crossroads, thresholds, and liminal spaces makes Hecate the most potent archetype for neurodivergent experience. Her triple form not only alludes to the concept of masking⁵ but resists categorization and reflects a consciousness that is multifaceted, paradoxical, and attuned to multiple realities at once. As a goddess of liminality she dwells at the edges of normative perception, navigating unseen paths, and inhabiting states that are neither one thing nor another.

In many ways, I recognize myself in this archetype. I adapt easily to changing environments and enjoy moving fluidly between different social circles. I either daydream or hyperfocus. I am drawn to cutting edge novelty, yet desperately haunted by overwhelming nostalgia, often drifting between realms — caught in the tides of past and future. My fascination with liminal spaces and fringe ideas now finds full expression in the weird magical journey I'm walking today.

All three lunar goddesses clearly resonate with different aspects of neurodivergence — one through introversion and fluid states of consciousness, the other through non-normative sovereignty and instinct, and the third through liminality, and a polymorphous identity.

Looking back, I see now that the Moon initiation absolutely nailed it.

Lunar Landing

My newly awakened Lunar awareness didn't give me the clarity I thought I was seeking — it gave me something subtler, and ultimately more profound: a new way of seeing.

What I once labeled as weakness or failure now feels more like a shifting tide — the ebb and flow of focus, energy, connection, and presence. Traits I had spent years trying to correct or conceal now appear as signatures of lunar archetypes: sensitivity to mood, to memory, to atmosphere; a porousness to the inner and outer worlds alike.

This new awareness doesn't erase the past, but it allows me to feel it differently — to inhabit it with more softness and more nuance. It also won't change the future. This isn't resolution — the Moon doesn't resolve. It constantly moves, reflects, transforms.

But it provides light in the darkness — enough to navigate by.

CIA Document: Document and Analysis of the Gateway Process ↩
Information about Selene on theoi.com ↩
Information about Artemis on theoi.com ↩
Information about Hecate on theoi.com ↩
Article on Masking by the UK's National Autistic Society ↩
Hand, Robert. Horoscope symbols. Schiffer+ ORM, 1997. pg. 52 ↩
"O queen of the groves (Artemis), thou who in solitude lovest thy mountain-haunts, and who upon the solitary mountains art alone held holy, change for the better these dark, ill-omened threats. O great goddess of the woods and groves, bright orb of heaven (Selene), glory of the night, by whose changing beams the universe shines clear, O three-formed Hecate, lo, thou art at hand, favouring our undertaking." Seneca, Phaedra 406 ff (trans. Miller) (Roman tragedy C1st A.D.) ↩

SUBLUNAR SPACE - artemis

Sublunar Sublimity

Lunatic Fringe

Drawing Down the Moon

Masks of Selene

Lunar Landing