Good Luck, Mr. Gorsky

40 years ago tomorrow, two men set foot on the Moon for the first time in human history, one of the most poignant achievements of mankind. While the scientific and cultural merits of the Apollo 11 Moon landing have been praised for decades, the spiritual impact of this event has yet to fully sink in.

Humans have been curious about the nature of the moon since the dawn of religion at least 70 thousand years ago. We have come to understand this celestial body in a number of ways: as a goddess of witchcraft to the ancient Greeks and Celts; to Chinese astronomers, as a reflective orb made of silver; and as a watery planet filled with various flora and fauna to Americans in the 1830s (1). Today, scientists are fairly confident in the theory that the Moon was formed some 4.5 billion years ago as the result of a Mars-sized body of rock colliding with the Earth. Across cultures there is a day of the week named after this satellite, always coming between the day of the Sun and the Day of Mars (Tuesday in English, after the Norse war-god Tyr who represents that planet), and from the root moon comes the words month and menstruation.


In occult practices across the world, the path to the Moon has been considered a journey of extreme importance, albeit a more metaphorical one than that undertaken by Armstrong and Aldrin. The Kabbalistic tradition describes ten spheres of existence, called the Sephirot, which represent the ten stages between God and Man. It is the goal of the Kabbalist to climb these spheres in order to understand God more completely. Each of the Sephirot correspond to one of the planets in the Ptolmic model of the universe, with the lowest being Malkuth, relating to the Earth, and the next being Yesod, represented by the Moon. The transition from Malkuth to Yesod represents the transition from base matter to a more spiritual state of being, a connection with the unconscious mind and an awareness of the higher powers in the world.

The moon represents the unconscious in nearly all religious traditions, both popular and esoteric, from the goddesses Diana and Hecate to the Shinto deity Tsuki-Yomi. The psychologist Carl Jung interpreted the alchemist's search for silver, as symbolized by the Moon, as a quest to understand the unconscious and feminine aspects of one's self. Similarly, the 18th major Arcana in a Tarot Deck, the Moon, is said to signify intuition, dreams, and life after death. Tarot cartomancers associate the Moon with Qof, a letter in the Hebrew alphabet that also means "the back of the head," and thus can be associated with the unconscious mind.


Like the Kabbalists and their Sephirot, Indian mystics consider the journey from the earth to the Moon to be the first step in spiritual progress. The root chakra, Muladhara, is said to contain the energies relating to instinct and the most basic conditions of human awareness, while the chakra above it, Svadhisthana (aka. the Moon Chakra), is said to empower a person's creativity, sexuality, and emotional well-being. In all of these traditions, reaching "the moon" represents a contact with one's own intuition and spirituality, something that many of the astronauts of the Apollo missions claim to have experienced.

There is a popular urban legend which states that Neil Armstrong heard sounds in a strange language while on the Moon, and that after returning to earth he realized what he had heard was in fact the Muslim call to Prayer and subsequently converted to Islam (2). While this story has about as much truth to it as the belief that Nixon hoaxed the Moon landings, there were other astronauts who equate their space travels with nothing short of a spiritual experience. Apollo 17 Captain Eugene Cernan said that viewing the Earth from the Moon was "like standing on God's front porch." Jim Irwin of Apollo 15 became a minister after returning to Earth, while Apollo 12's Alan Bean dedicated the rest of his life to detailing his experience in paintings. Buzz Aldrin famously took communion on the surface of the Moon (3). Most remarkably, Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to have walked on the Moon, claims to have had a transcendental experience while on the return trip to earth and founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a research center for the understanding of meditation and psychic abilities (4).

The Apollo 11 Astronauts in quarantine due to the 1969 Extraterrestrial Exposure Law (5).

The Moon landing unified people across the planet as a distinctly human, and not just American, achievement. However, the primary initiative for lunar travel stemmed from our conflict with the Soviet Union, and as soon as that cooled down, the incentive to send men to the moon also waned. The last time mankind has set foot on the Moon was December 14th, 1972- nearly 37 years ago. Although NASA plans to return humanity to the Moon by 2018, this is low on the list of priories for a nation currently battling two wars and an economic collapse and which has shifted its position on the importance of science dramatically since 1972. That said, I believe that the American people can be swayed to supporting the space program again if we phrase the debate in terms of social and spiritual implications and not just scientific ones. Regardless of one's religious background, we should all agree that the Moon landing represents the actualization of one of mankind's oldest and most unattainable desires: to travel to the Heavens and touch the unknown.

Links:
1. The Great Moon Hoax of 1935, on Wikipedia
2. Neil Armstrong Converts to Islam, on WikiIslam
3. Astronauts After the Moon Landings, on CNN.com
4. Dr. Edgar Mitchell's Spiritual Conversion, on Hinduism Today
5. The Extra-Terrestrial Exposure Law, again on Wikipedia