The “lunar period” on this page is Anne Baring’s term for the first great phase in the evolution of human consciousness. Baring, a former Jungian analyst, developed the idea with Jules Cashford in their book The Myth of the Goddess (Viking, 1991) and returned to it in her own book The Dream of the Cosmos (2013). The summary below follows her lecture “The Dream of the Cosmos”, published on her website in 2010, and cites it by slide number.
Two phases of consciousness
Baring describes two phases, which she and Cashford called the lunar and the solar. In the lunar phase, people felt part of nature and the cosmos. In the solar phase, the conscious mind split off from nature and came to see God, nature and the cosmos as separate from itself.
Baring defines the lunar phase as participation.
In the first lunar phase, we lived in participation with the life of nature.
Anne Baring, "The Dream of the Cosmos", lecture 19, anne-baring.com (2010), slide 15 (short excerpt for review and study)
The lunar era
Baring dates the lunar era from about 25,000 BC to about 2000 BC. In her account this era was ruled by the feminine archetype, and the Great Mother or Great Goddess was the image of spirit. All life came from her and returned to her, and the earth and the cosmos were sacred because they were her body.
She illustrates the era with two goddess figures from about 25,000 BC and the statue of Artemis of Ephesus from about 200 BC. She also places the origin of shamanic rituals that connected earth and cosmos in this phase, and says they survive in indigenous cultures today.
In Baring’s account, the Moon was the mythic focus of the time. Its cycles were linked with the seasons, the crops and the course of each human life.
Baring names the central theme of lunar myth.
Following the cycles of the moon, the mythic theme of lunar culture is Birth, Death, and Regeneration and this theme was reflected in the great myths of the lunar age.
Anne Baring, "The Dream of the Cosmos", lecture 19, anne-baring.com (2010), slide 17 (short excerpt for review and study)
Because the lunar cycle holds both light and dark, Baring argues that lunar cultures kept light and darkness in balance rather than in opposition. She sees ceremonies at Stonehenge and Avebury as rites that joined the earth with the heavens. In her view the shamanic tradition of the lunar era lived on later in alchemy and in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah.
The shift to the solar era
Baring dates the solar era from about 2000 BC to the present, roughly four to five thousand years. In this phase, she says, Western civilisation came to see God as outside the created order and nature as no longer sacred.
Baring sums up the change of focus.
In this era the spiritual focus moves from the Moon to the Sun and from the Mother Goddess to the Father God.
Anne Baring, "The Dream of the Cosmos", lecture 19, anne-baring.com (2010), slide 22 (short excerpt for review and study)
She gives two main causes. The first was the invasion of the goddess-worshipping cultures of the Mediterranean by tribes who worshipped warlike sky gods. The second was the invention of writing around 3000 BC, which moved religious authority to revelation in written sacred texts. In her account the warrior king became the cultural hero, and the main mythic theme became the battle between light and darkness.
Baring and Cashford describe how darkness lost its sacred meaning.
Nature is no longer experienced as source but as adversary, and darkness is no longer a mode of divine being, as it was in the lunar cycles …
Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess (1991), p. 298, as quoted in Baring, "The Dream of the Cosmos", lecture 19, slide 26 (short excerpt for review and study)
A third phase
Baring does not ask for a return to the lunar era. She calls for a third phase that unites the lunar and solar sides of the psyche: the rational mind with the instinctual soul. She names this new state “stellar consciousness” (slide 35).
