Fellowship of Earth Moon and Sky
6 December 2003

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2nd Sight Magazine
http://secondsightresearch.tripod.com/

This and more can be found at 2nd Sight Magazine's Body & Soul
section. You can find the front page at:
http://secondsightresearch.tripod.com/bodyandsoul/

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"Time is but the stream I go fishing in." ~ Henry David Thoreau

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Contents:

- December Full Moon: The Oak Moon
- Business Under the Full Moon
- Full Moon Invocation
- A Note on the Celtic Tree Calendar
- The Cycles of the Heavens in Ancient History
- In Iceland, Spirits are in the Material World
- Do You Know the Answer to this Ancient Riddle?
- People Hearing Persistent, Mysterious Hum Aren't Alone

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December Full Moon: The Oak Moon

December 8, 3:37 PM EST

The Moon

The moon was but a chin of gold
A night or two ago,
And now she turns her perfect face
Upon the world below.
Her forehead is of amplest blond;
Her cheek like beryl stone;
Her eye unto the summer dew
The likest I have known.
Her lips of amber never part;
But what must be the smile
Upon her friend she could bestow
Were such her silver will!
And what a privilege to be
But the remotest star!
For certainly her way might pass
Beside your twinkling door.
Her bonnet is the firmament,
The universe her shoe,
The stars the trinkets at her belt,
Her dimities of blue. -- by Emily Dickinson

The Full Moon is the culmination of the Waxing moon phase, when the
portion of the moon's face illuminated by the sun is increasing. This
moon is in its aspect of the Mother, and its potential and promise is
expressed by the image of the fullness of the womb. The moon's cycle
now parallels the point in life's cycle when women become partners and
lovers, giving light to the world by providing children for future
generations.

Also known as the Cold or Long Night Moon, the Oak Moon is a time for
hope and healing. Historically, the Indians of what are now the
northern and eastern United States kept track of the seasons by giving
a distinctive name to each recurring full Moon, this name being
applied to the entire month in which it occurred. With some
variations, the same Moon names were used among most tribes in any
given region which experienced similar seasonal variations. Some
Indian Full Moon names are the Winter Maker Moon, Small Spirits Moon,
Moon of the Popping Trees, Center Moon's Younger Brother, Snow Moon,
Moon When the Wolves Run Together, When the Young Fellow Spreads the
Brush, Scattering Moon, Respect Moon, When Deer Shed Their Horns,
Real-Geese Moon, Buffalo Cow's Fetus is Getting Large, and Big Bear's
Moon.

In the Celtic Tree calendar, we are in the month of the Elder Tree,
the masculine Moon of Completeness. In Celtic mysticism, the Elder
represents the end in the beginning and the beginning in the end,
since the month of Elder ends on December 22, and December 23 stands
alone. This month favors exorcism; prosperity; banishing, and healing.
This is a time for taking control of your own life and protecting
yourself against control by others.

"This time of year the Moon has reign over the Earth, because there
are more hours of night than day. This is the time of year to complete
something you have worked hard on and to make sure that the task is
truly completed, all the details dealt with. It's also a great time to
let go of old patterns or problems and start anew. If something has
been eating at you for a long time, work to give it up at this time.
Let go of the negative and let the light of longer days shine inside
you. Working with children in a nurturing way can be very rewarding
and healing." -- from Moon Magick by Lynx Spirit
http://www.angelfire.com/on/wicca/MoonMagick.html

The Full Moon rises at sunset, and rituals should be timed
accordingly. December's Full Moon occurs when a total lunar eclipse
takes place, rising at 4:24 PM EST and setting at 5:54 AM EST,
becoming visible in time around the world. The Moon stands in the east
in mid-evening, near the edge of Taurus, with the "twins" of Gemini
appearing to the Moon's lower left. The constellation Orion, the
hunter, will be to the Moon's lower right.

December's Full Moon will be in the sign of Gemini. Gemini is a
masculine, mutable air sign ruled by Mercury, in the aspect of the
messenger. Relatives, communication, studies, writing, street smarts;
things of a social nature are important now. Charismatic but flighty,
things begun under a Gemini moon are quickly successful, but are
easily changed by outside influence. Things tend to go with the flow
of social trends during this time. Be careful not to ask for something
you only think you should want, you might later change your mind.
Under this sign, you can be in closer touch with others' thoughts and
desires. Look for guidance from the like-minded -- your spiritual
twins -- but keep in touch with your inner self.

Gemini's Full Moon is "the best time to work magick for communication,
change of residence, writing, public relations, and travel. Healing
rituals for illnesses of the shoulders, arms, hands, or lungs are also
done during this period of time." -- Celtic Lady's Lunar Magick
http://www.angelfire.com/de2/newconcepts/wicca/lunarcorresponds.html

Full Moon rituals and spell work should be focused on the expansive
power and nurturing aspects of objectives such as creativity, dreams,
love and sensuality, friends and family, psychic ability, healing,
prosperity, and personal growth. The full moon is an optimal time for
all spellwork. This is a fine time to give birth to ideas and works
that nourish the spirit and the body. Lucky energies are high now, so
take a chance at success. If you are making changes in your life, keep
your eyes open to see how you can move into a more desirable position.
Now is the time to get everything running smoothly. Additionally,
under this Elder "Moon of the Darkest Depths", spellwork with goals of
exorcism and banishing are favored.

The Full Moon "is a time to charge crystals, Stones and personal
items. This is also the time when I harvest the Wood for my Wands and
Bless the wands already made. The Full Moon is a boost to any magical
workings especially if they are a bit complicated. It is also very
beneficial to make 'Moon energized Water' to Drink or to use at a
later date." -- Aana's Moonrise Wands
http://www15.brinkster.com/kiwisearch/Moon%20Phases.html

Business Under the Full Moon:
-- from "fourteen to twenty-one days of the cycle. Time for a major
meeting; let everyone review, realign, and argue; if anything is to be
presented to the public this is the opportune moment. If it isn't
completely ready, wait till the new." -- Johanna Ellen
Corn-MacPherson's Astrojems
http://www.astrojem.net/moon.html

Full Moon Invocation

Bright Mother Moon,
Shining down on us all,
All truths are revealed by Your radiant light.
Womb of the world,
Mistress of waters,
Giver of life to the darkness of night,
Fill my body and spirit tonight.
From the East, Your breath sends perceptive visions (light incense)
From the South, Your fire inflames my heart with compassion (light
candle)
From the West, Your waters stir my blood with power (bless water with
salt)
From the North, Your earth supports and nourishes all life (anoint
self with water)
Invigorate both body and spirit tonight.
Isis, Vesta, Frigga, Macha,
O radiant Mother, swollen with life,
Ever-vigilant and all-seeing, your love without limit,
Your face -- seen and unseen -- always upon us,
Empower Your earth-bound daughter tonight!
Brighid, Hathor, Skaši, Juno,
Sacred faces and names from the shadows of time,
I draw down Your spirit, Your grace, and Your light,
I invoke Your energy, Your presence, and Your might,
Be manifest with Your daughter tonight!
Guide me in service to Your blessed will,
Your own brilliant wisdom within me instill,
Let it be so! Let your will be mine!
Let Your spirit fill me as I dance in Your light!
-- Juno, inspired by the rituals of Tempest
http://witch.drak.net/tempest/three.htm

Upon reaching fullness, the moon begins to wane and grow smaller, and
a dark crescent appears on the right side. When the right half of the
moon is dark, it has reached 3rd Quarter.This will occur on December
16th, in the sign of Virgo.. When the moon is three-fourths dark, it
is called waning gibbous, and its light will continue to decrease
until it is completely in shadow and reaches its 4th Quarter, becoming
the New Moon again on December 23rd, in the sign of Cancer.

-- More Father Sky News
http://secondsightresearch.tripod.com/bodyandsoul/id25.html

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A Note on the Celtic Tree Calendar

The Birch Tree, the first tree to grow on bare soil, will begin its
rule on December 24th through January 21st, as the rebirth of the
forest begins. The Birch moon is feminine, and rules inceptions and
beginnings. used in ancient Welsh and Irish poetry containing
calendrical themes as interpreted by the scholar Robert Graves. --
Hob's Green
http://www.hobsgreen.com/calendar/trees.html

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The Cycles of the Heavens in Ancient History

The Moon and the Sun have been charged with certain attributes ever
since the dawn of time. The Moon was the first universal measurer of
time. The Moon symbolizes time, fate, spinning, wheels, weaving,
cauldrons, and of course the Great Mother or feminine influence. The
cycles of the heavens are symbolized in the Medicine Wheel of the
American Indian Tribes; the Egyptian Wheel of the Law; and the Tibetan
Prayer Wheel, all of which the Moon is an integral part. In Astrology,
the Moon is sometimes said to symbolize the horoscope itself.
http://www.moonlghtsys.com/themoon/ancient.html

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In Iceland, Spirits are in the Material World
Many on island nation believe in other-worldly beings

HAFNARFJORDUR, Iceland -- This can be a tough country for blasting out
a foundation or building a roadbed.

Never mind the boiling geysers, wind-blasted precipices or frozen
barrens. It's not the razor-sharp lava rock that daunts builders; it's
the hidden people lurking below. "There are all sorts of beings
beneath our stones," said Brynjolfur Snorrason, a folklorist often
asked to advise contractors on how best to avoid the lairs of
Iceland's elves and other seldom-seen creatures whose presence
nonetheless still seems to permeate this far northern island nation.

Highway engineers in recent years have been forced to reroute roads
around supposed elf dwellings. Similarly, builders of the country's
first shopping mall took care to lay electrical cables and other
underground installations well away from suspected abodes of gnomes
and fairies. Couples planning a new house will sometimes hire
"elf-spotters" to ensure the lot is free of spirit folk. In Iceland,
such precautions are seen as simple prudence.

"It can be a strange country," said Arni Bjornsson, head of
ethnological studies at the National Museum of Iceland. "Even
hard-headed engineers, who say they don't hold with superstition, will
build a road around a certain hill or boulder rather than take the
risk of offending elves."

Icelanders love to boast of how their beloved island republic marches
in the front rank of modern times. Literacy is 100 percent. Poverty is
zero. And high-technology is pervasive. Iceland is the most
geographically remote of Europe's nations -- a thinly populated realm
of fire and ice rising from the North Atlantic, just below the Arctic
Circle -- but it's plugged in, powered up and prosperous. And also
overrun with elves, gnomes, trolls, light-fairies, lovelings and a
unique species called "huldufolk," or hidden people. Iceland even has
a glut of 13 unjolly Santas, the so-called Yuletide Lads, who skulk
about cities, towns and rural farmsteads each Christmas --
traditionally bringing more mayhem than merriment, although lately
they've stopped stealing children.

The nation's president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, theorizes that the
surfeit of spirit-beings stems from Icelanders' abiding sense of
loneliness and isolation. "Icelanders are few in number, so in the
old times we doubled our population with tales of elves and fairies,"
he said in an interview at the presidential residence, Bessastadir,
located on a remote moor where snow dervishes and sea spume whip over
bizarrely shaped formations of lava rock.

Even today, there are only 273,000 people occupying a land roughly the
size of Maine and Massachusetts. And Icelanders still take spirit folk
seriously: Public opinion polls and academic studies show more than
half of all inhabitants think it possible or probable -- 10 percent
call it "certain" -- they share their island with otherly beings,
ranging from grumpy glacier-dwelling trolls to occasionally gregarious
hidden people.

That lore is the occasional bane of construction engineers and real
estate developers. Earlier this year, Iceland's highway agency had to
change the course of a new road leading out of Reykjavik after
citizens protested that the original route would disturb an elf's lair
under a big rock. "There are people who believe in elves, and we try
to show respect for people's beliefs," said Viktor Ingolfsson, an
official of the department. "If that means building around an elf
stone, we try to accommodate."

Such broadmindedness might be just self-protection. Tales abound of
broken limbs, busted equipment and other woes befalling builders
daring to go where elves and hidden people traditionally tread. "For
the most part, huldufolk are harmless, even gentle beings," said
Magnus Skarphedinsson, a schoolteacher and self-described elf expert.
"But if you brutalize them, bad things will happen. Perhaps only that
your project will have big cost overruns. But also you could fall from
a disease. Or die. It can be very dangerous to bother elves."

There are skeptics, of course, the National Museum's Bjornsson among
them: "Hidden folk have provided a wonderful excuse for clumsy
workers: 'I didn't wreck that bulldozer, boss, an elf did it!'"

Bjornsson, one of Iceland's foremost experts in folklore, called
himself a disbeliever, adding quickly: "But not entirely, not 100
percent. It is hard to be totally scientific in a country as
spectacularly strange as ours."

Iceland was first settled in the late ninth century A.D. by Vikings
from Norway and smaller numbers of Gaels from the British islands.
They found an eerie, treeless wasteland still in the first throes of
creation -- with vast billows of steam hissing from geothermal vents,
volcanos spouting fire and new islets heaving into existence off the
boulder-strewn shores. Iceland remains a land in extraordinary
natural flux. And its prosperity is very recent: Until this century,
most Icelanders were impoverished sheep farmers or fishermen huddled
in damp turf homes. The population was regularly -- and heavily --
culled by famine, plague and Earth cataclysms. The rarely seen races
populating Iceland are said to include elves, gnomes, light-fairies --
sisters to Tinkerbell -- dwarves, lovelings (slender wee creatures
inhabiting hedgerows) and mountain spirits. Most of these have
counterparts in the folklore of other lands. But Iceland's huldufolk,
or hidden people, are a unique breed: Human-sized, highly sociable
beings dressed in colorful costume, seeming to inhabit a sort of
parallel universe.

"But sometimes they will invite humans to their cliff homes for a chat
and pancakes," Skarphedinsson said.

Inevitably, perhaps, there's been an attempt by some entrepreneuring
Icelanders to cash in on the elves. Tourist agencies flog "hidden
world" maps purporting to show locations of elf homes. Guided tours of
elfdom are also on offer. All this is less troubling to folklore
purists than attempts to revise Iceland's spirit people to make them
seem more correct and wholesome.

A prime example is what's become of the Yuletide Lads. Originally,
these 13 creatures were nasty sons of the ogress Gryla, sent forth on
dark winter nights to steal children for her stewpot. Then, earlier in
this century, they were downgraded to less scary mischief-makers,
leaving rotten potatoes in the shoes of bad children at Christmastime,
but ignoring the good. These days they are portrayed as rascally but
cute gift-bringers fitted out in wool coats and red caps, and soon to
be celebrated on Icelandic postage stamps.

-- By COLIN NICKERSON / THE BOSTON GLOBE as posted to Haunted American
Update
http://prairieghosts.com/

Related links recently updated at "Body and Soul"
-- Norse traditions and festivals at "Asatru: The Way of the Warrior"
http://secondsightresearch.tripod.com/bodyandsoul/id19.html

Ghosts
http://www.angelfire.com/zine/secondsight/ghosts.html

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Do You Know the Answer to this Ancient Riddle?

"The key to life and death is everywhere to be found, but if you do
not find it in your own house, you will find it nowhere. Yet, it is
before everyone's eyes; no one can live without it; everyone has used
it. The poor usually possess more of it than the rich; children play
with it in the streets. The meek and uneducated esteem it highly, but
the privileged and learned often throw it away. When rejected, it lies
dormant in the bowels of the earth. It is the only thing from which
the Philosopher's Stone can be prepared, and without it, no noble
metal can ever be created."

What is it?

-- a riddle from Alchemy Lab
http://www.alchemylab.com/riddle.htm

Take the Personal Alchemy Quiz
http://www.alchemylab.com/quiz.htm

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People Hearing Persistent, Mysterious Hum Aren't Alone

No one else in Phil Ciofalo's neighborhood in northeast Albuquerque by
the foothills of the Sandia Mountains is bothered by the humming sound
that irritates him constantly. They can't even hear it. In other
neighborhoods around the globe, however, Mr. Ciofalo has company,
other people who complain of hearing a persistent humming sound,
usually when they are in their homes seeking peace and quiet from a
busy world.

"These people are definitely not crazy," said Jim Cowan, senior
consultant for Acentech Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. Acentech was hired by
the City of Kokomo, Ind., to study a mysterious hum that residents
first complained about in 1999. "They are just picking something up
that others can't," Mr. Cowan said.

The preliminary investigation in Kokomo has determined one possible
source for the hum, but like other studies it concluded that there
could be several causes and that more research was needed. The people
who hear a hum do not appear to be suffering from tinnitus, a
persistent ringing in the ear that is not produced by an external
source.

Dr. James Kelly, an ear specialist and director of surgical sciences
at the University of New Mexico who examined complaints of a hum in
Taos, said that "tinnitus hearers report hearing higher frequency
sound" than the people he studied. "The Taos hum is a low-frequency
phenomenon," he said. Dr. Kelly added that most hearing disorders
affect perception at higher frequencies.

The most common description of the hum is that it sounds like the low
rumble of a distant diesel truck idling. Some people also feel a
vibration, or don't hear any sound but just sense the vibration.
Others report various maladies they associate with the hum, including
headaches, diarrhea, nosebleeds, dizziness, fatigue and memory loss.
There have been reports of hums in England, Scotland, Australia and
other places in the United States for decades. The "hummers," as they
are sometimes called, vary widely in age and in the times and
locations that the sound is most pronounced.

Billy Kellems, a 37-year old truck driver in Kokomo, has been hearing
a hum since 1999. "It's like a train yard or a jet on the tarmac in
the distance," he said, to describe the humming sound that he thinks
causes his headaches and diarrhea.

Mr. Ciofalo, 81, says the hum he hears in his New Mexico home has made
him irritable and gives him frequent headaches. "It started about four
years ago," he said. "It was a low hum sound that would come and go,
but now I hear it all the time." His housemate, Martin Schweighardt,
who has numerous health problems, including difficulty hearing, does
not hear the sound. They have lived in the house since 1984.

Mr. Ciofalo has contacted the county health and environment office and
written his senators and members of Congress. Representative Heather
A. Wilson, a Republican, forwarded his request to specialists at the
University of New Mexico, and Mr. Ciofalo has received technicians
from Sandia National Laboratories in his home to do tests. He has
temporarily had his power, security alarms, water and phone turned off
and now sleeps with headphones on. He also had his hearing tested and
found it to be "as good as a newborn baby."

In the 1990's, complaints about a humming sound in Taos reached
Congress and an investigation was done. But with the study
inconclusive as to a source of the hum, news of it nearly vanished.
The hum, however, continues for some people in that area who share
their problem by writing about it in local newspapers or in online
discussion forums.

Dr. Kelly said that a lack of financing was the reason no further
study had been done, but both he and Mr. Cowan recommended more
research on low-frequency hearing to learn how it might affect human
health.

Not everyone is convinced that the hum is real. In most cases there is
simply no evidence that the hum people are hearing is coming from an
external source.

-- From the New York Times, as posted by Conspiracy Journal
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/health/02HUM.html

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"Come the millennium, month 12, in the home of the greatest power, the
village idiot will come forth to be acclaimed the leader." --
Nostradamus in 1555? -- Or an internet hoax?

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