For the last couple of weeks, I have found myself completely possessed by a now distant dream:
I dreamt that I was going to become a werewolf by the light of the full moon. My sole objective was to try and hide so I would neither be seen by my loved ones as a vicious creature of the night, nor would I be able to hurt them. Everywhere I tried to sequester myself, I would immediately realize that the doors would not be strong enough to hold me back once I turned. I suddenly found myself at the edge of a forest. I silently understood that the only solution would be to allow myself to be overtaken by this bestial form in the anonymity of the vast woods, where I would hunt innocent animals instead of people. I had absolutely no idea when the transformation would take place, and with every passing second I panicked at the idea of losing my ego consciousness and becoming a creature usurped by the night's shadow, my sole intention being to destroy. I was frozen with fright knowing I would inevitably have no control over my actions, no awareness of what was going on, and no ability to stop myself.
In waking life, I have never had much interest in the folkloric archetype of the werewolf/lycanthrope. In terms of mythological creatures, I found it to be a breed played out and uninteresting- perhaps because I wasn't able to recognize it as an archetype yet animated in the fabric of my own psyche, which it seems is often the case when we gloss over things. However, after awakening from my interlude at the edge of these moonlit woods- which somehow contained the utmost freedom and anonymity and simultaneously a deeply imprisoning sense of dread and doom- an inner recognition of the significance of a mythological human-turned-wolf was ignited. In lieu of more forecast-focused astrological writing, I'm choosing to take this time to delve into the richness of this stirring metaphor, even if the following words only scratch the surface.
Note: For the purposes of this essay I will also be favoring more alchemical interpretations of the sun + moon’s significations, which can differ from those which we see in the context of astrological delineation. It’s worth nothing that these are two incredibly complex archetypes, and my interpretations in this context do not claim to do that complexity justice- substack simply doesn’t have the word count for that, and unfortunately I do not have the academic succinctness. If you’re interested in more traditional astrological significations of the luminaries I highly recommend browsing Book I of Vettius Valens’ Anthologies, which lays them out pretty nicely for us.
The moon rules bodies, both physical and emotional. It presides over the tides, over the water in our human bodies and on our planet, pulling us toward it in its fullness as it blossoms with every cyclical lunation. Though once associated with the Egyptian god Osiris, the moon's symbolic significations have morphed over time to favor the archetypal feminine. We often find the moon specifically relegated to representing the internal mother archetype in modern astrological chart delineation: "Mother stands for comfort," Kate Bush once sang, and how true it is in the case of the moon, whose natal position often shows us what comforts we favor in times of emotional need. However, in many interpretations of the tarot, we see another side of her: the darkest depths of the unconscious, the ocean of the unknown, that silvery reflective substance at once impossible to consciously penetrate and far too easy to lose oneself within (here is the precipice of “madness”- when one falls so far into reflection that one loses sight of that which is being reflected). In the Moon arcanum, we see what could be interpreted as a reflecting pool, as reflection of the sun's light is the moon's very nature. Within this pool is the image of the crustacean, a primordial creature whose earliest iteration was the ostracod, a Cambrian sea-dweller who looks almost like a tick enclosed in a human womb (scary!). Incredibly enough, this card also depicts two dogs (perhaps, for our purposes, wolves?), oriented toward the moon, tongues poised as if to lap the drops of water that luna draws toward her. To be honest, I have always felt that there is something vaguely threatening about the moon card that stands in stark contrast with the emotional comfort the astrological moon may alternately evoke. I suppose therein lies the paradox of the moon's nature- alternating dark and light at opposite ends of her orbit, one night bathing the earth in heavenly silver; another night gone as if swallowed by the blackness of a starless sky.
Needless to say, the werewolf itself- in all of its selenophobic glory- speaks less to the maternal lunar archetype and more to the type of moon whose name lends itself as the root of the term lunacy. In the lycanthrope, we see a creature possessed by lunar consciousness, a creature simultaneously terrified of and submerged in the emotional abyss, naked as if born anew under the light of the full moon. The werewolf archetype is terrified of losing its connection to the solar consciousness- the incarnate personality, the light of the ego. The werewolf can imagine no fate worse that being pulled away from earth by the insurmountable gravity of lunar intuition and depth of feeling, into a hall of mirrors reflecting every inch of the psyche back at itself in all of its many iterations. To the werewolf, there is no fate worse than being trapped in an emotional labyrinth containing nothing but its own projections. In the werewolf, we see a "solar" human (in this incredibly simplistic metaphorical version of the diurnal/nocturnal dichotomy) who is so married to their warm, yang, diurnal version of reality- a reality where everything can be illuminated and no shadows are cast- that a descent into the nuanced, dark realm of night would mean a total loss of control and spiral into utter animalistic madness. To proverbially "turn" and succumb to the moon's light is equated with a violent act of murderous destruction- the destruction of the hyper-rational, intellect-driven daytime ego.
Of course, as the story goes, the only way to kill this creature of pure lunar consciousness is to inject it with more of its own poison- a silver bullet- silver being the metal both astrologically and alchemically associated with the moon. In order for the lunatic beast to perish, it can only be pierced with that which it fears the most. We see this same concept echoed in the idea of "exposure" or "immersion" as a mechanism of healing- whether it relates to the psyche or the immune system of the body. Granted, it is worth remembering that the lycanthropic creature can be someone who wants so badly to heal, to become "better," that the idea of looking squarely into the lunar reflecting pool becomes tainted by the fear of falling in.
Residing in a psychological culture that places a nearly competitive emphasis on wellness as an end goal, sometimes the silver bullet is switched out for a flimsy tin mask. This is the mask we put on to subdue the monster of tumult that hides within, covering our twisted, fanged animal faces with the sunny countenance of an unrelenting superficial positivism that promises total self love if we can only look away for long enough. The true silver bullet is not this cure-all attitude that is content to float on the surface, but an unconditional maternal force deep under our despair that accepts the ugliness of our wolven form because this force itself is as ancient as our strife. The true silver bullet does not direct our attention away, but penetrates our animal hearts deeply with a somber wisdom that sometimes we must hunt in the darkest forests of our psyche in order to feel the warmth of the dawn. The lunar monster itself is created by the suffering of the human being it once was- a human being who confuses facing a part of its inner/outer reality that it finds to be challenging with something that is life threatening and violent- and that suffering can only be cured by a sliver of the kind of moon that stands for the comfort of neutral frankness and honesty. This silver is unabashedly aware of what the struggling creature really needs in order to turn it human once again. Perhaps we can understand the silver bullet as the illuminating lunar part of our psyche that has the ability to discover that hidden deep within our madness is the cure.
It bears stating that without the light of the sun the full moon could never glow- just as the lunar needs the light of the solar to recognize itself, consciousness needs a body to actualize its essence. This truth can be a difficult one to swallow, more difficult even than the idea that madness contains medicine. Perhaps it is easier to succumb to one world than have a foot in both- depending on how you are oriented, it can be difficult to come to grips with the fact that we cannot reside all of the time in the realms of intuition, emotion, and imagination, and conversely we cannot reside in a world that is all rationalistic structure without being attuned to the rich, transcendent meaning that seeps through every crack of our at-a-glance ordinary world. However, as the rules of our reality tend to go, one cannot experience meaning without knowing emptiness, cannot heal without being wounded, and cannot be a body without a soul or a soul without a body. And so, the werewolf- in its refusal to accept this basic pattern of truth- is representative of the neurosis, the "one-sided development of the personality" (as defined by C.G. Jung, Collected Works 16) as it is oriented toward a specific framework of consciousness. This is a creature writhing uncomfortably under the tense pressure of opposites, afraid that it may lose control and become possessed by the very thing it represses- in the werewolf’s case, the primordial, lush, silver madness of night.
In one of his lectures on Alchemical Psychology (you may notice that this is not the first time I've mentioned this lecture series, and I fear it will certainly not be the last) James Hillman invokes Hegel in his insistence that "lunacy is a necessary condition of the soul." In order to know ourselves, we must be open to re-orienting ourselves to face that which we keep hidden: to heal, we must truly see ourselves, in all of our madness, in all of our sensitivity, in all of our strict rationality, in all of our ugliness. We must peer through the trees into the most fearful nights of our soul, nights where we are rabid creatures unleashed. In these glimmering moonlit spaces we must also trust that our primordial lunar instincts have the acumen to pierce through the bestial heart of the monster and dissipate its terrifying visage to reveal the pure gold truth that hides beneath.