Full Moon: Astrolomy of the aurora

It's Friday. Hello.

Though the days grow marginally longer, I sit now in the middle of the coldest month, blessed often by polar winds; I say blessed because although they carry death, cold death is what this land needs to regenerate properly in spring. As ever, thinking of the climate collapse I wish winter gripers around me would speak more mindfully. We do not need and cannot have eternal summer.

Last week I wrote of this season's darkness as a matter of timekeeping, embracing the long vigils and slumbers. But also, particularly when we approach the Icelandic holiday of Þorrablót, I've come to associate the dark, cold middle of January with the Northern Lights, as I first witnessed them during this same time eight years ago while standing on a snow-covered field situated a couple of hours outside of Reykjavik. It was an unbearably frigid experience; I knew Iceland receives uncharacteristically warm weather for its latitude, but I gave this an overly optimistic interpretation and did not dress for the island's constant, ruthlessly bitter wind chill, which is of course at its worst in winter. I nearly caught frostbite.[1] Nonetheless, whatever solar flare activity may or may not be happening, and whatever light pollution may still interfere, the aurora are easiest to view when the nights are longest, without even a hint of twilight for hours. Between this and the Moon being new that week, I had some of the best chances I ever would to look north and see the shimmering ribbons — and see them I did.

I wrote about the aurora last May as part of an update on my night sky observations, having seen a dim but unprecedented display amid that month's geomagnetic storm activity. Some of my thoughts today will retread that ground. But as the lights returned in October amid more such storms, I have developed a number of new instincts about where the aurora fit in my cosmology. Now feels like a good moment to record them.

A content warning applies here for ongoing trauma processing around miscarriage and infertility.

An animist heaven

In May, I had been called by the thought of the aurora as all our ancestors dancing. This does not feel prompted by any one cultural tradition. To be frank, although I have periodically encountered claims that a surviving indigenous group regards the aurora as embodying the ancestors, spirits of the dead, and similar, I have always read this from non-indigenous or unattributed sources so I don't know if it's reliable. I would love to corroborate it properly, but as the internet continues to become an unsearchable bowl of word salad — and as the indigenous-created media I'm familiar with has yet to address this topic — I simply do not know, no more than I know what my personal ancestors believed. However, if there are peoples who do specifically contextualize the aurora within ancestor worship or reverence, I also wouldn't be surprised, and I hope that my own framing would form part of a natural continuity with those beliefs rather than oppose or exploit them.

My reasoning that our ancestors dance in the aurora comes, oddly enough, from the kind of Saganesque view of the cosmos that more typically pushes so-called Westerners toward non-animist positions like secular humanism or skeptical atheism. Accepting and indeed welcoming the value of scientific inquiry when it exists separately from forces like capital or empire, I still love the phrase we are all made of star-stuff, because of how it combines logic and magic into one luminous whole. Scientifically speaking, the Earth and everything on it including us are formed of matter that was first produced by stars; it only seems fitting that many creator deities dwell in the firmament, Queens of Heaven and Sky Fathers alike, and that many mythologies and faiths conceive of the afterlife as a celestial realm where the dead return home, implying our original home is out in the wider cosmos.

Now indeed, my imaginings of an afterlife do not just involve that which is above, but also what is below. The Underworld is another very obvious place: the chthonic kingdom of decomposition and rot beneath our feet. With my preferred funereal rites oriented toward inhumation (burial) rather than cremation, paying our blood debt to the life that has supported us by returning our flesh to our earthly ecosystems, I believe our bodies belong at death to the land, and if our consciousness goes anywhere[2] it follows where the body that generated it has gone. But there is more to our personhood than the intertwined body and mind; there is also our memory, our identity, our name, our reputation, our place in the great web of relations. That aspect of oneself is, I think, what describes us as ancestral figures, both to our direct descendants and to whatever humans follow us in general. And just as looking up into the ever-expanding universe shows us a glimpse of the past, when our memory-selves become part of the past we belong somewhere above.

To dwell among the stars themselves would mean traveling a little too far from the Earth to be in much contact with the life that remains upon it. But in the magnetosphere, I think that would put us all within orbit, so to speak. And in such a liminal realm, it would make our ancestors perfect negotiators between we the living and space the infinite.

But while I feel all of this in my bones, I sense there is even more that that ghostly glow has shown me when I've seen it.

Seeking omens

As far as Gregorian calendar years go, 2024 seemed to be one of traditional astronomical portents over this continent or in general. A total solar eclipse, a comet, and the expected — though not yet realized — periodic nova of binary star system T Coronae Borealis, which should look like a star appearing where no star is ordinarily visible. And since various people in various places throughout history have read portents into the aurora's appearance, especially at latitudes where it normally doesn't extend, perhaps the startlingly visible aurora last spring and autumn could also be seen as significant.

Perhaps. This is one of those areas where my astrolomy[3] favors a less mystical worldview, mostly because of my feeling — reiterated here often — that divination is a matter of looking inward to better understand one's own place within an array of likely though not-guaranteed futures. There are limits to what divination can actually predict, and what predictions can be made from. For me as above, so below does not equate to a clear, causal relationship between all things above and below, nor even to a loose correlation; the statement more reflects the universality of various cosmic principles.

But while an abundance of celestial events during a tumultuous, increasingly apocalyptic time on the Earth may seem like no more than coincidence, I am also not one to ignore coincidences. Their uncanniness has often struck me as their very purpose. A coincidence may not speak of what is predestined, yet it jolts us to consider what ought to be, or what we should prepare for just to be safe. If the coincidence seems like a good one, it can help us make an otherwise deferred decision that will affect the future positively; if the coincidence seems bad, it can remind us to use extra care to avert whatever ill events are still within our control.

Given that attitude I do hold, I think it is a gift to have witnessed the aurora so spectacularly — and multiple times — within the same calendar year as a symbolically apocalyptic eclipse and a devastating political election. For if the ancestors are dancing, they remind me to dance. They remind me I am still within the chain of events. If it isn't overwrought to quote Whitman:

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
                                       Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

I have needed that reminder this winter. The physiological postpartum depression of my miscarriage has mostly left, but the grief remains and has not come without remaining bursts of dismay.

And in that vein, the aurora events of 2024 have also meant something else to me.

The many-colored veil

In my last Full Moon post I wrote of my psychedelic experience opening the veil to the Otherworld and then recurring involuntarily during many nights of my short-lived pregnancy, as if the barely formed shadow-child spoke to me of fairy things in a fairy tongue.

I still hold this to be true, but over the last month I have thought more of those nighttime hallucinations and seen an additional story emerging.

Right before December's Full Moon, still immersed in the worst of my miscarriage recovery, I visited a museum with my owner and as a souvenir we happened to buy a plush toy, as we collect those from museums. The toy was a fox, and I named her Aurora in honor of the aurora we had witnessed lately, thinking of the Finnish aurora story: revontulet, fox fire, the sparks made by the glittering tail of the mythical tulikettu (firefox) as it brushes against the sky.

Within a few days of that purchase, although I haven't slept with such a toy in ages and ages, I found myself wanting to not just keep the little fox separate from the rest of our collection for now, but also to keep her in my arms at night. I didn't understand my impulse at first, because I normally think of such actions as childlike, age-regressive, and I'm really not given to such things. But then I realized I didn't want to feel like a child — I wanted to be holding a child. A basic mammalian, simian compulsion in the wake of my loss.

That little fox has been there for me to hold when I need, and I think she will remain that way until I either bear a living child, feel entirely assured that I will do so, or make whatever peace I can find (if I can find, if, if, if) with never doing so. I called her Aurora without thinking, but over the ensuing weeks it occurred to me that the first time I saw the aurora over this land, not over Iceland, was during May's geomagnetic storm, and I referenced it here in Salt for the Eclipse the day right before I undertook my psilocybin ordeal. The next time I saw the aurora, it was October, and I was pregnant although I didn't know it yet — just a few days from learning the blood test results.

And when my pregnancy symptoms began, the hallucinations in my night vision were like swirling, faint ribbons of color not really so different from the aurora. Besides seeing something from beyond the veil or the veil itself, I now think perhaps I was brought into deeper ancestral connection, visited with the knowledge that I was on the brink of establishing myself as an ancestor as well, even if that wasn't what came to pass.

I am still trying to make sense of all these connections any further than the above, but I feel almost as though my lost shadow-child has found a temporary home within that representation of a fox, or as though the spirit of a fox is what entered my womb for a short while. If I had more of a claim to Finnish folklore, I would feel certain. But regardless, perhaps the child's name should have been Aurora.

[1] If you visit Iceland, I recommend avoiding the increasingly disastrous tourism peak in summer, but personally I preferred the next year's visit in early May and I would not go back in November through February unless I were planning to live there like my mother does.

[2] I remain genuinely agnostic on this front.

[3] Defined for newer readers: astronomy and astrology interlaced together, as they once were.

Thank you for reading — continuously reading. I am close to 50 subscriptions since I started writing here, which I never predicted. However, most of these subscriptions are still unpaid; and while I'm no longer losing money on this project and I also prefer to avoid keeping too much knowledge or insight behind a paywall, many posts here take the better part of a day to write and I am about to become unemployed in two weeks. If even $1/month is too expensive, I completely understand; but from anyone with a comfortable income who's found meaning in my writings, situationally I must ask again for some support.

In any case, next Friday's post is for Occult subscribers only, but after that I will have a special post on romantic kink in the context of Gŵyl Fair (Imbolc).