Extracted text
“Since the moon is never darkened by the earth getting between it and the sun, why does it not shine upon us constantly?”
The moon does not shine upon the earth constantly because in actual fact, and not in appearance only, it waxes and wanes every month. The process of waxing and waning changes the aspect of the moon, and these aspects are called phases. The term “new moon” means in reality a great deal more than is conveyed to the mind of the believer in the modern astronomy. The words moon and month are from the same Sanscrit root; the moon is the month, because the month in time is the measure of the period of the moon, the moon being renewed every lunation. During a given moon or month or lunation, the moon waxes and wanes as to its light and other energies radiating from it.
The new moon is dark, not because it is eclipsed, but because it is reflecting darkness. When the moon is full its entire discular area is illumined, not because of reflected light on a globe as is usually supposed, but because the moon has itself waxed to the degree of entire self-luminosity. The phases of the moon are directly related to the position the moon occupies in relation to the hemispheres of light and darkness in the earth; and the moon has its phases presented in the sky because the earth possesses hemispheres of light and darkness.
The moon is not a material sphere in the heavens, a dead world; it is a complex reflection of conditions in the body and shell of the earth; and we therefore see in the heavens a representation of the earth, with its light and dark hemispheres—the phases being dependent upon the relation that the visible moon or picture in the sky sustains to the area of light and darkness in the earth. This may be vividly illustrated by the appearance of the moon at the first quarter, when the moon is seen at six o'clock in the evening directly in the south, one half of the disc being light and the other dark; the moon is then directly over the dividing line between day and night in the earth. The Koreshan conception that the real moon is the earth, is strikingly borne out in the science of the relation of words. When we refer to mundane affairs, we mean things related to the earth or world, from the Latin mundus. That the moon is the world is shown by the fact that the German for moon is mond. The French for world is monde. The physical moon is the physical earth or world, of which the visible moon is a definite cosmic picture implanted in the sky by and through very complex processes.
Editorial transcription checked against the cited scans; historical claims remain those of The Flaming Sword.
The Flaming Sword · Vol. 19, No. 23 · Nov 14, 1905 · PDF p. 12