Tomorrow, Wednesday Feb 6, 2008 is a pretty special day for a select group of people in this country. I’ll just mention it in case those of you who might qualify haven’t been contacted. At 9:44 p.m. in the Midwest area what is called Stargate 222 will be activated. Those with Pleiades connections activated already will be able to receive data from the Stars of Taliesin, and not only Celts.

Astrologically there is a very interesting line up with Chiron, the wounded healer, patron of all energy workers, the Sun, Moon, Mercury and Neptune, all in Aquarius at the exact time of the solar eclipse. Depending on where you live this will occur on this continent at the time mentioned or 8:44 p.m. MST or whatever; do the math. If you are in Europe as some of my readers are, it will be on Thursday at 3:44 a.m. GMT.

If you want to be kept up to date about future Stargate openings just check www.stargate222.com whose site I thank for sending me the reminder. As one with a Taliesin connection I’m always alert for a Pleiades resonance.

That’s all I’m going to say about that. Those who know nothing about the Pleiades Sirius groups can just assume that Douglas has gone weird on them again, which reminds me that runists, magicians and other people with European DNA will now be able to get The Way of Wyrd by Brian Bates again, It has been reissued at ordinary prices and goes from $7.00 and up on used book sites. You won’t have to look at prices over $300 as we did last year. But retournons à nos moutons as the French say, the reminder did start me thinking about the New Moon and the Full Moon, and what their effect is on people largely ignorant even of the concept that the Moon has an effect on their metabolism, behaviour, blood circulation and agricultural and horticultural practices.

For example, when I was a younger magician of the Celtic variety I often worked with magically gifted women with long hair. Long for hair magick purposes meant below the bottom of the collar bone when hanging loose with the head held high. I didn’t know why that was the crucial point. I just knew that it had been found to be so in practice.

My introductory story to those women who were magicians without realizing it, went along these lines. Thousands of years ago the women of the tribe would point out to the men that it was time for the tribe to eat meat of some sort. When the men moved off with the most up to date weapons of the time, tipped with flaked flint, sharper than any steel edge we can make now, the women would gather round the fire, let down their hair, and with whatever passed in their tribe for brush or comb would stroke their hair while chanting together.

Some time later the survivors of the hunt would return, beating their hairy chests and dragging the corpse of some large animal that may have fatally damaged some of the hunters as it resisted being killed. The women would give their Mona Lisa smile and deal with the food and the wounded. The men would think they deserved all the credit for the result of the hunt, quite oblivious of the hair magic of the women that had brought the game into their vicinity, for the benefit of the children.

As a child you may have heard the story of the Cat that Walked by Himself in Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. In this story the woman brushes her long hair to do a Silence magick for the benefit of the baby. Kipling was a good friend of H. Rider Haggard who wrote King Solomon’s Mines and She. Haggard was a magical adept ‘beyond the Tenth’ on the Rosicrucian path and Kipling learned a lot about magic from him and both of them subtly wove it into their books in the Victorian era.

And they knew that every woman with long hair has the capacity for magickal work by brushing that hair to become thousands of antennae for picking up subtle vibrations not accessible to the grosser sense organs. The brush used becomes a magickal implement in its own right. This is true even of those brought up in a dogma drenched faith that treats women as definitely second class citizens.

It is not an accident that the first thing done to humiliate Jewish women prisoners during the War was to shave their heads. It was also a precaution by those Nazis, some of whom believed that the magic of the women could possibly be used against them. As a long hair aficionado myself I tend to think too that the short hair fashions, that are imposed on women at immense expense by the fashion industry, are a subconscious reaction by the men who create these hair styles to the superior psychic abilities of women generally. It’s certainly an effective way to prevent the first dawnings of magical ability in many.

Which brings me to the effect of the Moon phases on the vitality of the hair, among other things. I take it as obvious that the Moon which can move the oceans about must have some effect on a human body that is about 80% water, even if the effect is not blindingly obvious to the TV addict in that body. If that concept is nonsense to you just change channels.

The Hungarian gypsies I was brought up with had a few people in their little tribe who were specialists in various healing activities. Among them were those who specialized in curing warts. They always worked according to the phases of the Moon. Some were herbal based healers and they always collected their herbs according to phases of the Moon. Apparently their specialty depended on the phase of the Moon under which they were born. Astrologers note a nice research project. Our own Old Farmer’s Almanac recommends planting by the Moon without apology, as is done as a matter of course in the rural areas of Europe.

Rudolf Steiner, the multi-talented anthroposophist, showed that the effect of herbal remedies depended very largely on when the leaf or root or bud was collected, and at what phase of the Moon or time of day. Common sense indicates that IF a herbal remedy is to be used that the condition of the plant varies during the day and the night, and those who know about these things from ancient tradition or experiment can find an optimum time to collect the part of the plant required for the work.

The Germans in Europe have always had an interest in such matters. They are world class in organic chemistry , biorthythm and homeopathic research. Their physicians have access to a tremendous amount of validated scientific research on natural remedies, largely ignored and denied here.

And they are also ahead in matters of the hair and its health because they are willing to look at the research of others, that may be ignored in the country of origin. There are many books out now in the New Age bookshelves about Moon magick. Many of them are wacky mind trips that bear no relation whatever to practical experience and testing.

There is a book available in English in this country on the Moon and its effects on you, that is based on pragmatic testing of ideas over centuries. It was originally in German and if you can read German you may get a little more out of it. I’ll give you the English and German titles at the end of these notes. German ladies with beautiful, but very fine hair who know me, please note.

In the section on hair it describes how a German hairdresser named Georg Hirschbolz changed his views about thinning hair because of a remark by a client. He had as a client a young woman who came in regularly to get her thin hair trimmed. She was very unhappy that her hair seemed so fine and just didn’t grow thick and long as she wanted it to. Georg had to agree with her because he knew no way to solve her problem.

One day she was complaining as usual and another client chimed in with the remedy. She suggested that the lady had her hair trimmed on the third day after New Moon or three days before Full Moon. She said that her own hair had been very thin and her mother, wise in the Old Ways began the trimming regime according to the Moon phases and her hair became thick and long.

Georg checked the hair of the informant and it was indeed very thick and long. Not being an arrogant scientist he thought,“What harm!” and began making appointments for the thin haired ladies according to the Moon phases. As it happens he was a man after my own heart, and unlike many hairdressers he loved long hair. Apparently he has a thick mane himself. There we differ, at last count I think it was fourteen. But it worked. During the following months the thin hair became thicker and was at last able to go past the critical point of shoulder length.

Georg did not cut the hair of his long hair wanabees, he trimmed it about a millimeter or so. The Moon phase does not affect the rate of growth. Hair still grows maybe half an inch a month. What Georg did was to remove the split and damaged hair at the very end of the strands on the critical days so that eventually all the hair was in good shape. And it worked. Thin hair became thick and the shoulder length barrier was overcome.

Encouraged by this practical magic he began to research everything he could about hair vitality, and course there was much more available in Europe than here where so many good things are dismissed as superstition without any attempt to just try them out and see.

He found that investigators and the Elders of the people of the Old Ways had discovered that the hair reflects the health of the body generally, and that on the third day after the New Moon or on the third day before the Full Moon the hair doesn’t lose energy when trimmed. On other days it does, though healthy hair is little affected by trimming at other times.

And then, in apparent contradiction to my generally low opinion of New World attitudes, it is an American doctor and hair specialist whose work provided Georg with his clue, and mine incidentally, about the tradition of collar bone or shoulder length hair.

This physician, Dr.George Michael is an advocate of long hair for women. He investigated what was off limits to most physicians, the vibrations of the body energy concerned. He discovered and stated that the hair grows along energy lines in the body that have positive and negative polarities. Every energy worker knows about such matters and Chinese medicine has depended on these polarities for thousands of years, but for a Western physician to even consider them is a wonderful thing.

Dr.George, notice the similar names of the two men concerned, discovered to his own satisfaction that the hair from the crown chakra to the first cervical vertebra grows along positive polarity lines. The polarity from the first cervical vertebra to the nape of the neck is negative. From the nape to the line between the shoulder blades is positive.

This finding explained to me the old qualification that a woman could not have her hair magic energized unless her hair hung below the collar bone. It had to pass the negative energy barrier. The traditional Celtic vital point was in the front of the body, the discovered energetic point was the same, at the back. The critical point in hair growth is just where the positive polarity becomes negative at the first cervical vertebra. This is the point where a lot of women who do want long hair, give up in despair. When the hair reaches that point is the time to get the trims according to the third day rule.

Reading this was a great validation to me of a seemingly totally arbitrary rule about the length of the hair and the magick concerned.

There is of course a gold mine of other Moon related material in the book for the seeker without prejudice. Georg has advice for men’s hair too, rather too late in my case, and for people who use vegetable dyes for their hair and much else. And of course there are centuries of arbitrary rules about planting, cooking, making preserves, picking fruit and so on that have worked well over the centuries without any ‘scientific’ explanation.

I don’t doubt that one day, like the hair length qualification for hair magick, there will be such explanations. Until then we can just do the pragmatic thing and try it and see. Apples fell off trees for thousands of years before Newton discovered the laws of gravitation that were responsible. We don’t have to wait until something is explicable before using it. Neither do we have to deny it works just because we don’t know anything about it.

Here, as promised are the titles: Living by the Moon by Ute York, subtitled a Practical Guide for Choosing the Right Time. ISBN 1-885394-15-2 The original title, for the benefit of the German ladies previously mentioned, was Ein praktischer Ratgeber zur Nutzung der geheimnisvollen Kräfte des Mondes.

Don’t forget that the Moon is masculine in German, and the Sun is feminine. The practical toolkit in this book is not reliant on sentimental New Age schlock about the Moon being feminine and the Sun masculine. It’s just based on things that work. Have a great hair year!