The Time Before the Moon

What if I told you that some of the oldest voices in human history — philosophers, poets, oral keepers of entire civilizations — all carried the same quiet memory: that there was a time, long before recorded history, when there was no moon in the sky?

Not a metaphor. Not a creation myth where the gods hadn't gotten around to it yet. An actual memory, passed through generations, of a moonless Earth.

It's one of those things that, once you come across it, you can't quite un-find. So, let's go there together.

The Greeks Who Remembered Being Older Than the Moon

The trail begins in ancient Greece, in a mountainous region called Arcadia.

The people who lived there — the Pelasgians, the pre-Hellenic inhabitants — were known by a very specific name: the Proselenes. It comes from the Greek pro (before) and Selene (the moon). Before the moon. That was their identity. Their defining characteristic was not their king, their lineage, or their gods — it was the fact that they had existed before the moon arrived.

And this isn't fringe material. These weren't the ramblings of one eccentric scribe. The list of Greek thinkers who referenced it reads like a classical philosophy roll call.

Democritus and Anaxagoras both taught that there was a time when the Earth existed without the Moon. Aristotle wrote that the Pelasgians had occupied Arcadia since time immemorial — since before there was a moon in the sky. Apollonius of Rhodes, in his Argonautica, spoke of a time when not all the orbs were yet in the heavens, when only the Arcadians lived, dwelling on mountains and eating acorns, before the moon existed.

Plutarch, in his Morals, recorded the same tradition. So did Ovid, who wrote that the Arcadians were said to have possessed their land before the birth of Jove — and were older than the moon itself. Hippolytus noted the legend that Arcadia brought forth Pelasgus, of greater antiquity than the moon. Even the satirist Lucian — who thought the whole thing was ridiculous — still recorded it, writing that the Arcadians affirmed they were older than the moon.

When even the skeptics are still documenting it, you have to sit with that for a moment.

The oldest known reference traces to the fifth century BCE historian Hippys of Rhegium, preserved through later writers, placing this oral memory well into the classical era and probably much, much earlier. What strikes me is not just that so many people recorded it — it's that they recorded it as common knowledge, as cultural identity, as something the Arcadians themselves insisted upon.

The Same Memory, A World Away

Here's where it gets genuinely fascinating. Because Greece isn't alone.

The Chibcha people of the Bogotá highlands in Colombia — the eastern Cordilleras of South America — begin their oral creation accounts with a very specific phrase: "In the earliest times, when the moon was not yet in the heavens." Documented by the explorer Alexander von Humboldt in the early 1800s, this wasn't a throwaway line. It was the starting point of their understanding of the world. Before the moon. That's where time began for them.

In Zulu tradition, oral history preserved by figures like the keeper Credo Mutwa tells a story of the moon being brought to Earth long ago by two brothers — Wowane and Mpanku — described as being of unusual, alien form. In this account the moon did not always exist here; it arrived. It was brought. And before it arrived, the world was different.

In Bolivia, at the ancient site of Kalasasaya — a structure estimated to have been built around 13,000 BCE — symbols carved into the courtyard walls appear to record astronomical information that scholars have interpreted as evidence of a time when a different, smaller satellite orbited the Earth, and when the moon's arrival was a specific, dateable event. The calendar gate at the same site has been analyzed as showing a lunar cycle that places its creation at a point vastly predating conventional written history. Whether you take those interpretations literally or symbolically, the intent seems clear: people were marking a before and an after.

Across Siberia, fragments of early cosmological thought speak of a sky that once appeared different — darker in ways beyond just nighttime. And early Tengrism, the Central Asian tradition of sky worship, focused almost entirely on the eternal blue sky and ancestral connection rather than lunar deities, which some researchers read as a cultural echo of a time when the moon wasn't yet the dominant force in the night sky it became.

Even the Nihongi, the Chronicles of Japan completed in 720 CE, has been cited alongside these other sources as part of a global pattern — a world in which traditions from opposite ends of the Earth share the quiet, insistent memory that the sky above wasn't always what it is now.

What Babylon and the Bible Quietly Agreed On

The Enuma Elish — the Babylonian creation epic, one of the oldest written texts we have — describes the creation of the heavens in a specific sequence.

The Earth and sky come first. Then, later, the moon is installed into its orbit. It's treated as an event. Something that happened at a particular point in time, not something that was simply always there.

The Hebrew Bible (or rather, the "By-Baal"), does something remarkably similar. In Genesis, light is created on the first day. But the sun, moon, and stars don't appear until the fourth day. Which means, within that framework, the Earth existed — with light, with water, with the separation of land — for three entire creative periods before the moon was ever placed in the sky. Whether you read that as literal cosmology or as theological metaphor, the structure is the same: a world that pre-existed its moon.

Psalm 72 contains passages that some translators render as references to a state of divine existence before or beyond the moon's presence — a kind of eternal backdrop against which the moon is not a given, but a later addition.

These aren't texts that were trying to make the same argument. They come from different cultures, different languages, different theological frameworks. But they arrive at the same structural memory: the moon came after.

What the Yogis and the Philosophers Made of It

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna describes what he calls the lunar path — the dakṣiṇāyana, or southern path — as one of two roads a soul can take after death.

One leads to no return. The other, the lunar path, leads back into the cycle of rebirth. The moon, in this framework, is not simply a light source. It is a kind of holding space, a waystation, a mechanism of the cycle of return. The moon as matrix.

Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, in their later chapters dealing with direct perception, mention in Sutra 3.28 that concentrated meditation on the moon brings knowledge of the arrangement of the stars. B.K.S. Iyengar and other commentators interpret this as pointing to the moon's association with the mind — with consciousness that fluctuates, that reflects, that is never quite its own light. The moon, in Yogic understanding, governs what we might today call our mental and emotional weather. Our tides.

Sutras 3.51 and 3.52 go further, warning the advanced practitioner not to be seduced or captured by even the most elevated celestial rewards or astral beings — because that attachment re-traps the consciousness in exactly the cycles it's trying to transcend. Some commentators read this as directly addressing what might be called the moon's gravity on consciousness: its pull toward repetition, reflection, and return rather than liberation.

Theosophical thought, particularly through writers like Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater in the early twentieth century, described the moon as the former body of the Earth — a dead world through which early forms of life once passed, and from which they eventually migrated to this plane. In this view, the moon is deeply entangled with our evolutionary history in ways that go well beyond its gravitational effects on ocean tides.

What's interesting about all of this, across very different traditions, is the consistent framing: the moon is associated with cycles, with reflection, with the perpetuation of patterns. With what keeps things going around again rather than through and beyond.

Personally, I have always felt the Gita is just the yogic version of the Bible. And I've been teaching yoga for 27 years. Same language, same veiled threats to keep making ‘sacrifices and worshiping me above all others’ (or be damned) message. But of course, make up your own mind.

What Would It Actually Mean?

This is where I like to let the question just sit openly, without rushing to an answer.

If there was truly a time before the moon — and some voices in the modern fringe science world, following Immanuel Velikovsky's controversial but extensively sourced work from the 1950s onward, have argued that the moon was a relatively late arrival in our solar system rather than a primordial companion — what was that time like?

Without the moon, the nights would have been profoundly darker. The tidal forces that shape coastal life, that regulate the rhythms of so many species, would not have existed as we know them. Human biological cycles that track lunar patterns — the 28-day cycle, the emotional ebb and flow, the pull of the full moon on sleep and on the mind — would presumably have been entirely different, or absent.

The occult and esoteric traditions tend to describe the pre-lunar era as a time of different consciousness. Not necessarily more advanced, but less fragmented. More directly connected to solar and elemental forces rather than the reflective, cyclical, emotionally complex energy the moon is said to introduce. Magic in that era, if we're being playful about it, would have been less about lunar timing and more about direct will, direct presence, direct fire.

Some traditions go further and suggest that the moon's arrival — however it happened — brought with it a kind of veiling. A thickening of the material world. An introduction of the very cycles of forgetting and remembering, of dying and returning, that so much spiritual practice is oriented toward transcending.

Whether you take that cosmologically or metaphorically, it's a beautiful and provocative frame. The moon as the introduction of the forgetting. The pre-lunar era as the time before the veil.

What Happens When a Woman Cuts the Cord

I want to share something personal here, because I think it's the most direct evidence I have that this isn't just abstract cosmology.

For years I experienced significant menstrual issues — cycle irregularities, pain, the kind of chronic disruption that so many women are told to simply manage or medicate. I had also, during that period, been deeply involved in moon-based women's work. Leading full moon circles. Facilitating goddess gatherings. Doing the rituals. I genuinely believed I was participating in something sacred, something that honored the feminine and aligned women with their natural rhythms. I believed the moon was our ally.

At some point, through my own inner work and energetic exploration, I became aware of what I can only describe as a cord — a connection between my etheric womb space and what felt like the moon's energetic system. And I made the decision to disconnect from it. Consciously, deliberately, and with full intention.

The menstrual issues went away. Not gradually. Not with a new supplement or a change in diet. They resolved. And that resolution coincided directly with that disconnection. As I grow older and continue to deepen my inner-standing of the medicine path, I find myself working with more and more women suffering from similar ailments as I did when moon-struck. I also notice the lunar circle trend is alive and well, yet despite knowing everyone is on their own journey and must learn their own lessons in their own time, I can't help but feel concerned for their energetic health and safety.

Perimenopause and menopause were also very different to what I was told to expect. As in, I had no dramatic symptoms, none of the usual ‘ailments’ that women are programmed to believe and anticipate. I know this was also thanks to my Chrysalis blood tonic, but even before I created that sacred medicine, my hormones were happy and harmonious after doing this ritual. I have since ushered many women through it, and each reports miraculous improvements with their bleed, their moods, their overall connection to their body as it matures and changes. None of them attach their well-being to what the moon is doing on any given day (or night) anymore. And that is a massive sign their energies have been liberated for the better.

I am not telling you what to make of that of course. I'm simply telling you what happened, as someone who has spent decades paying close attention to the relationship between energy, the body, and the unseen.

What I've since come to understand — and what I wish someone had told me far earlier — is that the moon is not neutral. Nothing in the energetic landscape is neutral. And the assumption that moon rituals are inherently safe, inherently feminine-empowering, inherently aligned with women's health, is one of the most widespread and, I now believe, dangerous assumptions circulating in spiritual women's communities.

I see it constantly. Women in goddess circles, women's red tents, full moon ceremonies — gathering at peak lunar intensity, opening themselves energetically, pouring their life force, their womb energy, their creative power into rituals oriented toward something that the ancient world itself described as a matrix of return. A cycle that traps rather than liberates. A reflective force, not a generative one.

The irony is devastating when you see it clearly: women seeking to reclaim and honor their sacred feminine energy, not realizing they are in many cases offering it upward to something that feeds on exactly that. The emotional intensity of a full moon circle is real. The energy raised is real. The question nobody asks is: where does it go?

Women come away from these gatherings feeling temporarily high, temporarily connected, temporarily seen — and then often depleted within days. Their cycles become more erratic, not more harmonized. They feel more emotionally volatile around the full moon, not more grounded. And they're told this is awakening. That this is what it means to be a moon woman.

I led those circles. I know the energy in the room. And I know now, in a way I didn't then, that we were not always working with benevolent forces. The entities that congregate around moon-amplified ritual space are not all aligned with women's liberation or women's health. Some of them are interested in something else entirely.

This isn't to say that every woman who has ever done a full moon ritual has been harmed. Context, awareness, protection, and discernment matter enormously. But the blanket cultural assumption that moon worship is “women's work,” is feminine reclamation, is safe by default — that needs examining. And urgently, I think.

It’s also concerning that most women leading and participating in these moon circles, many of my peers, missed the biggest neon sign the universe has sent us in our lifetime — meaning, they took and advocated the covid jabs. For me, that is the biggest indicator that way too many people have been hijacked or at least disconnected from their higher intuition. If you work with organic energy, with Mother Nature, you would have seen right through that charade. So perhaps these people were blinded by the moon’s (false) lunar light??

If you are a woman whose cycles are dysregulated, whose energy consistently crashes after lunar-charged spiritual gatherings, whose womb space feels somehow not entirely her own — I am not telling you what to do with that. But I am inviting you to ask questions you may not have thought to ask yet.

Why Does Any of This Matter?

I think what draws me to this topic — and why I wanted to write about it (again)— is what it asks of us as curious beings living on this strange rock, platform, or hologram... depending on your views.

When you realize that so many ancient civilizations, separated by oceans and millennia, carried the same peculiar memory, it raises a question that can't really be answered through a Google search: what else do we carry, without knowing we carry it? What are the other deep memories embedded in our myths, our bodies, our recurring dreams?

We live under a moon that most of us have never thought twice about. It's just there, hanging in the sky, doing its thing. But it was doing something specific to every human who ever looked at it — pulling the tides of the ocean and the tides of emotion alike, governing the agricultural calendars of every civilization, threading itself through every spiritual tradition on Earth. And according to voices from Greece to Japan to Colombia to Zimbabwe, there was a time before all of that.

A different sky. A different rhythm. A different kind of night.

The next time you're outside and the moon is up — really look at it. Not the quick glance we usually give celestial objects. Actually stop and look. Consider that you are looking at something that may have arrived. That wasn't always there. That introduced something into the experience of life on Earth that altered everything — the tides, the seasons, the dreams, the cycles, the very structure of night itself.

And then sit with these questions. Not to answer them immediately. Just to let them move through you and see what shifts.

What would it mean for you if the moon is not a natural satellite — if it was placed, constructed, or brought here by something with intention? Not as a conspiracy theory to adopt or reject, but as a genuine enquiry: what would that change about how you understand this reality?

How attached are you to your current beliefs about the moon? About lunar cycles, moon rituals, the idea that aligning with the moon is the same as aligning with the feminine. And can you hold those beliefs lightly enough to let new information in — not to destroy what you've built, but to refine it?

If you've been involved in moon-based spiritual practice, have you ever noticed what happens to your energy in the days after? To your cycle? To your emotional state? Have you been calling that awakening when it might have been something else entirely?

Are you willing to go back into the religious and spiritual texts you were handed — Genesis, the Gita, the Yoga Sutras, the oral traditions of your own ancestry — and read them again with new eyes? Not to discard them, but to ask what the people who wrote them actually knew, and what may have been buried in plain sight?

And perhaps the biggest one: how much of what you experience as your natural rhythm, your emotional landscape, your cyclical nature as a woman, as a man, as a human being — how much of that is truly yours, and how much of it has been entrained by something that arrived in the sky one day and has been running its program ever since?

These are not comfortable questions. They're not meant to be. The most important enquiries rarely are. But somewhere in the mountains of Arcadia, a people who lived before all of this looked up at a dark, uninterrupted sky — and simply knew themselves as free.

I think that's worth sitting with.

AHO