Caussey's Corner

Traveler in the Sky—Goddess of the Night: The Lesser Light

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For tens of thousands of years, she has been worshipped in shrines and studied in science warehouses built in pyramid form, while used for measurement of time by American aborigines in calendar display. Western culture for centuries chiseled her movement in Central American rock and on Yucatan jungle walls. Her subjects were named Inca, Maya, Aztec, and Mound Builders.

Early man, called Neanderthal, moved into the Mediterranean area around 30,000 B.C., living in clans among the caves of France, Spain, and the Aegean Sea islands. They warmed by campfires, hunted mammoth beasts, and watched the night sky.

Ten thousand years later, the faster, smarter and more agile Cro-Magnon Man from Central Africa migrated northward through Kush, scaled the Zagros Mountains, destroyed the Neanderthal, challenged the great frozen water now called the Bering Sea, and settled the Western World. They, too, feared the darkness, and found comfort in the small-orbed night light. Their migration started as individuals or in small groups. Eventually the groups became tribes, and then they formed nations.

In the beginning, great civilizations developed along the Fertile Crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, North Africa, and the grasslands of Central Africa. These nations worshipped the sun and stars. The God of the Hebrews had yet to become active in the direction of mankind’s religious evolution.

Traveler in the Sky—Goddess of the Night: The Lesser Light
Photo: envato elements

Between 3,000 and 4,000 B.C., the great pyramids of Gizeh were built. The Egyptians, Chaldaeans, Persians, and Babylonians stretched forth their bloody hands, destroyed their enemies, and invited the sun to be the center of their religious universe.

But in the western world, the night princess was worshipped in song, and by sacrifices at the religious altar. Men moved, hunted, fought, married, planted, died, and gave birth in living their life, as it was all chronicled by the markings of the night light. Even the Hebrew God mentions the night guardian in the Holy Writ by referring to her as the “lesser light.”

Tonight, as I look out the high-tall window on the south wall of my house, I see the moon, lovely and aglow, hanging there on a curtain of ebony. She labors toward fullness, but appears determined to stand vigil as the guardian against eternal darkness regardless of density.

During the summer, when I was a boy, I slept on a screened-in porch.

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