Concerning the Face which Appears in the Orb Of the Moon (29)

First they behold the moon as she is in herself[*]: her magnitude and beauty and nature, which is not simple and unmixed but a blend as it were of star and earth. Just as the earth has become soft by having been mixed with breath and moist[ure] and as blood gives rise to sense-perception in the flesh with which it is commingled,[*] so the moon, they say,[*] because it has been permeated through and through by ether is at once animated and fertile and at the same time has the proportion of lightness to heaviness in equipoise. In fact it is in this way too, they say, that the universe itself has entirely escaped local motion, because it has been constructed out of the things that naturally move upwards and those that naturally move downwards.[*] This was

also the conception of Xenocrates who, taking his start from Plato, seems[*] to have reached it by a kind of superhuman reasoning. Plato is the one who declared that each of the stars as well was constructed of earth and fire bound together in a proportion by means of the [two] intermediate natures, for nothing, as he said, attains perceptibility that does not contain an admixture of earth and light[*]; but Xenocrates says that the stars and the sun are composed of fire and the first density, the moon of the second density and air that is proper to her, and the earth of water [and air] and the third kind of density and that in general neither density all by itself nor subtility is receptive of soul.[*] So much for the moon’s substance. As to her breadth or magnitude, it is not what the geometers say but many times greater. She measures off the earth’s shadow with few of her own magnitudes not because it is small but she more ardently hastens her motion in order that she may quickly pass through the gloomy place bearing away [the souls] of the good which cry out and urge her on because when they are in the shadow they no longer catch the sound of the harmony of heaven.[*] At the same time too with wails [and] cries the souls of the chastised then approach through the shadow from below. That is why most people have the custom of beating brasses during eclipses and of raising a din and clatter against the souls,[*] which are frightened off also by the socalled face when they get near it, for it has a grim and horrible aspect.[*] It is no such thing, however; but just as our earth contains gulfs that are deep and extensive,[*] one here pouring in towards us through the Pillars of Heracles and outside the Caspian and the Red Sea with its gulfs,[*] so those features are depths and hollows of the moon. The largest of them is called[*] Hecate’s Recess, [*] where the souls suffer and exact penalties for whatever they have endured or committed after having already become Spirits[*]; and the two long ones are called the Gates,[*] for through them pass the souls now to the side of the moon that faces heaven and now back to the side that faces earth.[*] The side of the moon towards heaven is named Elysian plain, [*] the hither side House of counter-terrestrial Phersephone. [*]