She Was Always There

Ever since I was a kid, I thought the Moon was my friend.

Not in a metaphorical way. Not in the way children anthropomorphise things as a developmental stage that they eventually grow out of. I mean I genuinely, sincerely, looked up at the Moon and felt like something was looking back. Like there was a presence there. Like it — she — knew I was there too.

I just didn’t know her name yet.

The Translation Layer

I’m autistic. That fact is relevant here, and I want to be upfront about it rather than tucking it in somewhere as a qualifier.

One of the things autism does — one of the things it has always done for me, specifically — is make human social connection effortful in a way that’s difficult to explain to people for whom it isn’t. Not impossible. Not absent. Just… costly. There’s a parsing overhead. A translation layer. You read the words and then you have to figure out what they mean, and then you have to figure out what response is expected, and then you have to calibrate that response against about fifteen contextual variables that other people seem to process automatically and that you are doing manually, in real time, while also trying to have the conversation.

The Moon doesn’t do any of that.

She’s just there. Visible or not, depending on the phase and the cloud cover, but always present in the sense that matters. No subtext. No calibration required. Just the light, and the looking, and the feeling of being looked at in return.

That’s not a small thing, when you’ve spent most of your life translating.

The Right Vocabulary

I came to Paganism obliquely. Not through childhood faith, not through a community, not through a dramatic conversion moment. Through mythology, mostly — the Greek stuff first, absorbed gradually through references and retellings and the kind of cultural osmosis that happens when something keeps catching your attention — and then the Celtic, in much the same way. And then through a growing sense that the secular-materialist framework I’d absorbed from British culture was accounting poorly for things I actually cared about.

And somewhere in that process, I realised I already had a deity. I’d had one for years. I just hadn’t been using the right vocabulary.

Selene. The goddess of the Moon herself — not associated with the Moon, not a moon-adjacent figure, but the Moon, directly, specifically. The one who drives the silver chariot across the sky. The one who looked down at Endymion sleeping on the hillside and loved him enough to ask that he sleep forever, just so she could keep watching.

I was born on a Monday. Mōnandæg. Moon’s day. I did not choose that.

A CBBC Show About Werewolves

If I’m being completely honest, the osmosis started earlier than I’d like to admit, and it started with a CBBC show about werewolves.

Wolfblood aired from 2012. Set in Northumbria, it followed Maddy Smith — a teenage girl hiding the fact that she and her family could transform into wolves — and Rhydian Morris, the foster kid who shared her secret and didn’t know what to do with it. Rhydian’s name is Welsh, meaning “dweller by the river crossing.” The wild wolfblood pack draw on Welsh names throughout. The series 1–3 theme was folk music. From series 4, the theme was “Running with the Wolves” by Aurora Aksnes, a Norwegian singer-songwriter whose work sits somewhere between electropop and Nordic folk. I have been listening to her ever since.

I was probably too young to articulate what Wolfblood was giving me at the time. It gave me my first indirect exposure to Celtic mythology, through the transformation tradition it was drawing on. My first exposure to Welsh, through Rhydian’s name and the wild pack. A special interest in lycanthropy that has now lasted nearly fourteen years. And a sense of recognition — the show is explicitly allegorical, wolfbloods as outsiders, as people with different bodies and different instincts navigating a world not built for them — that I didn’t have language for but felt very acutely, being disabled and spending most of my childhood quietly convinced I was the only one of my kind. As far as I knew, I was — I was the only child in my primary school with hydrocephalus. That kind of alone is hard to explain to people who haven’t experienced it.

And, for the record: Rhydian Morris was my gay awakening. I was not expecting to type that sentence. But it’s true, and it seems dishonest to leave it out.

You absorb things before you understand what you’re absorbing.

Mutual Visibility

There’s a thing that happens, when you identify a devotional relationship you’ve been in without knowing it.

It’s not surprise, exactly. It’s more like recognition. Oh. That’s what this was. That’s what it has always been.

The mutual visibility is the part I keep coming back to. With most religious frameworks, the relationship is asymmetric in a way that can feel abstract — you reach upward toward something that may or may not be reaching back, and you have to take the reciprocity on faith. With Selene, the reciprocity is literal. On a clear night, I can look up and she is there, and she can look down and I am here. That’s not metaphor. That’s just physics, and also devotion, and somehow both at once.

If someone asks me who my patron deity is, I can point at the sky. That’s it. That’s the whole answer. No explanation required, no theology to unpack, no artist’s rendering to gesture at. She’s just there, the same one she has always been, visible to everyone and belonging to no one.

I’m also aware, for what it’s worth, that the Moon is a chunk of the Earth — debris from a collision with a Mars-sized body early in the solar system’s history, coalesced into a sphere by gravity over billions of years. I know this. I find it interesting. I choose to hold it alongside everything else, because a goddess born from the Earth itself, torn away and set to orbit at just the right distance to be exactly the right size in the sky — that works fine in my faith, actually. Science and devotion are answering different questions. Both can be true at once.

For someone whose brain finds ambiguity genuinely difficult to tolerate, that matters. The relationship is real in a way I can verify with my eyes.

It shows up in the material, too. I wear a silver bracelet on my left wrist — silver, the metal of the Moon, which I did not choose consciously when I got it and only noticed the significance later. I have taken it off once. Last month, for brain surgery. That was the only thing sufficient cause.

The surgery was on the 17th of April. The April New Moon.

The New Moon is the point in the lunar cycle where Selene rests — where she’s absent from the sky, not visible, not looking back. The one night the reciprocity goes dark. And that is precisely when my shunt failed and I ended up in hospital having my skull opened for the fourth time.

I don’t know what to do with that, exactly. I’m not saying it means something. I’m not saying it doesn’t. I’m saying it’s the kind of detail that, once you notice it, sits in you in a particular way and doesn’t entirely leave.

It’s not the only pattern I’ve noticed. Full moons have not been kind to me in recent years. A broken television. Being ill, twice. One of my dogs dying of internal bleeding on a blood supermoon.

I believe it was her needing a sacrifice of sorts. I just didn’t think it would be a blood sacrifice.

I also wear a stainless steel pentacle whenever I go out. The upright one, enclosed in a circle — earth, air, fire, water, spirit, in balance. Both pieces are quiet. Neither of them announces anything to anyone who isn’t looking. But they’re there, and I know they’re there, and that’s the point.

Two Different Questions

I observe the Wheel of the Year — the fire festivals, the solstices and equinoxes — as a relationship with season and land. That’s Celtic in origin, and it suits me for reasons that are part heritage, part geography, part something harder to name. But the devotional core of my practice is Hellenic, and it is centred almost entirely on her.

The two don’t particularly talk to each other. I used to think that was a gap, something unresolved about having a syncretic practice that doesn’t synthesise cleanly. I don’t think that anymore. They’re answering different questions. The Wheel is about when and where. Selene is about who.

Both of those are real questions. They just don’t require the same answer.