I see the moon and the moon sees me...

...the moon sees the ones that I want to see.
God bless the moon and God bless me
and God bless the ones that I want to see.

Last night was the Full Moon.

I know that my amma likes to go to the Vidyaparameswari Temple for their Full Moon celebration. It is a small temple, mostly outside, tucked away in a quiet little neighborhood on the other side of Madurai. I've never met anyone else who has heard of it. I tried to research the deity one time in the USA but found nothing on Her - even talked to a number of scholars, none of whom had heard anything of Her. The temple is usually very quiet - no one there exept perhaps one of the priest who will come running out of his nearby house upon seeing us arrive. Maybe one or two women sitting silently on the platform. But on Full Moon days...the temple is packed.

My amma is a loyal devotee of this rarely known Goddess. Whenever there are troubles, she goes to the Vidyaparameswari Temple and asks for help. She attributes most good things in her life to this goddess.

Whenever one goes to the temple, one is suppossed to circle the main shrine and platform 12 times.

I've circled that shrine more times than I can count. Have asked for a number of things that have in fact later come true. I have a small photo of the deity, given to me as a gift from the proprieters of the temple. I always make sure to go with my amma and appa when I am in Madurai. I don't know whether I "believe" in this deity, or in any one particular deity as such. It isn't a question of that for me, really. I believe in power: the power of ritual, the power of the individual, the power of stories, the power of belief, and the power of awe. The power of possibility, the power of something beyond me that I cannot even hope to understand.

It was here that I witnessed all of these.

It was here, that on my last night in Madurai as a student, I witnessed a woman I knew very well get possessed by the Goddess. I had seen possession before - studied it intently at a different temple for most of my semester. But this was different, for this time I knew the possessed. And I knew that whatever was in her body as she danced spasmatically on the temple floor was not her. It was different because I was processing this, at the time, in the midst of a crowd of about 10 little Tamil girls who were thrilled to be asking me a million questions in Tamil (Hi. What's your name, where are you from, how are you?) while the drummers drummed and the women chanted and the priests let their voices ring out above the others'. It was a Full Moon ritual, the last that I had been to here - that was in December, 2 years ago.

No one got possessed last night, though the drumming and chanting and music are enough to send anyone into a sort of trance. On the way home, my nephew (age 2) kept pointing at the moon and saying in English "Moon. Circle."

I gazed up at the moon through the window of the car. The Full Moon which has come to mean so much to me after one year of writing a senior thesis on Wicca. The Goddess. The Mother. Fertility. Wholeness. Being in a certain temple in Princeton, Massachusetts, casting a circle. Standing in a certain backyard in a circle of bodies around a fire, cold in the Massachusetts October air, staring upwards at a giant red moon. Being in awe.

And I never made the connection between the Full Moon rituals in Princeton and the Full Moon rituals at the Vidyaparameswari Temple. Perhaps there is none. But last night, the Moon I saw overhead carried all the meanings that it came to have for me over the past year. I see the moon, and I see the Goddess. Last night I saw it, and it grounded me. Perhaps, without my knowing it, the moon had grounded me in Princeton last fall too - had grounded me with a familiarity of another Full Moon ritual, had grounded me with the power I once had witnessed - the power of a different Goddess, a Goddess many thousands of miles away. Perhaps while I had stood in that yard in Princeton, my amma had stood in front of Vidyaparameswari. Perhaps last night while I drank blessed milk and had kumkum powder dabbed on my head, my Wiccan teacher had stood out under the moon and worshipped Her.

The thought grounded me, and I smiled. I turned to my nephew, who was still pointing, impatiently waiting for my attention. "Yes," I said. "The moon. A perfect circle."

He was satisfied.