Something that gets my goat 🐐

Greetings, fellow explorer of the map of Time that we call the 13 Moon Calendar!

Have you ever bought a map? Like, have you traveled to someplace new and wanted to get a lay of the land? Maps are very useful, aren’t they? Filled with specific, reliable and relevant information! A map-maker doesn’t say: “You know what? This mountain would look better over here.” Or “I think it would be better if the highway curved this way” hacking up the map to his liking.

No, of course he doesn’t do that, because the purpose of the map is to help you navigate accurately. The 13 Moon (Dreamspell) Calendar is like this! It is a thoroughly integrated whole system cosmology of Time and synchronicity, including archetypal patterns and rhythms describing the evolution of life and consciousness, and more!

From Dragon (Birth) to Sun (Enlightenment) and back again… From Magnetic (Purpose) to Cosmic (Transcendence) and back again… This wasn’t just thrown together on a whim, or to fit into a pre-made box!

In principle, I’m thrilled when anybody creates anything to help educate their people about the 13 Moon Calendar. But, I get a little (okay, a lot!) irked when I see new students learn it only to decide they’re going to “fix it” and sell a distorted version to the world.

Of course, whenever you use a map you’ll probably find shortcuts or special spots you want to return to. You may even find something that wasn’t on the original map, like a hidden stream or a favorite tree, and mark them on your map. But in doing so, you would be careful not to change or obscure the landscape that the map is describing, right?

Well, making fundamental changes to the structure of the 13 Moon Calendar is like adding to a map water sources that don’t exist, or erasing ones that do! Even worse, if you sell this “improved” map, you may as well peddle a jacked-up GPS system that lands your customers in the middle of nowhere every time, far from their destination!

In terms of the 13 Moon Calendar as a tool for cultivating cosmic perceptions, teaching a radically distorted version of it will only confuse and hinder your students from finding its real value and reaching its true depths.

There is more to the 13 Moon Calendar than meets the eye. If you really want to get to the heart of it, to the juicy stuff, you need to utilize it as it is. This does require a little discipline of mind. In fact, Jose Arguelles strongly encouraged anyone following the 13 Moon Calendar to also practice meditation. Meditation will help you see (and appreciate!) things clearly, as they are.

All this might sound contradictory to my previous article in which I encourage new students to find their own meaning within the codes of the calendar. But… Utilizing the codes of the 13 Moon Calendar and applying them to your subjective experience is quite different than re-wiring the whole thing to your liking, and then positioning it as an authority which everybody else ought to follow (or pay for!).

The 13 Moon Calendar is very precisely formulated, and has so many facets to explore as it is! Tacking extras onto it would be like adding 12 verses to Bob Dylan’s “Everything is Broken”. Distorting it would be like declaring Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy” shouldn’t be in D minor! And teaching a twisted version is like a weight trainer telling her student to deadlift using only her lower back muscles! Her student is certainly not going to benefit, and may just give up…

So, let the 13 Moon Calendar inspire your creativity! But for the love of all things good and true, please don’t change it into something it isn’t! The system of the 13 Moon Calendar is whole and integrated. Distort a part of it and you’ll miss the bigger picture. To use a metaphor: A damaged seed will yield no fruit.

Develop your relationship to the 13 Moon Calendar like you would a person, where you accept it as it is. Relationships like that are usually more fulfilling anyway! 😘