08/10/2025
A reading from the full moon last night.
Full Moon: Between Exile and Return
Tonight’s moon rides high over two peoples who knew exile, loss, and the long road away from home. The Yaqui, or Yoeme, once thrived in the fertile valleys of the Río Yaqui in what is now Sonora, Mexico. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Porfirio Díaz’s regime waged a brutal campaign against them. Thousands were killed outright; tens of thousands more were marched in chains to plantations in Yucatán and Oaxaca. Families were split; sacred ceremonies forbidden. Those who survived carried the deer songs into exile, keeping the Flower World alive in the harshest of lands. Many never saw their home valley again.
Six centuries earlier in medieval Europe, women known as Beguines built self-sustaining communities in the Low Countries and beyond—living in modest “beguinages,” supporting themselves through weaving, nursing, and teaching. Their independence drew suspicion from both civic and church authorities. By the 14th century, persecution escalated: some were condemned as heretics, imprisoned, or burned; others fled to sympathetic towns or rural hideaways. They left behind gardens, workshops, and chapels—exiled not for war, but for daring to live outside sanctioned roles.
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Two Centuries of Loss
From 1492 to 1692, Native nations of the Americas—Yaqui included—endured a staggering collapse in population from warfare, enslavement, forced removals, and disease. The Red Road was not a romantic ideal then—it was survival itself, walked through the ashes of villages.
From 1550 to 1750, witch persecutions in Europe took an estimated ~3,000 lives each year—around 600,000 people over two centuries—mostly healers, midwives and others holding community knowledge. The Beguines escaped mass trials in some regions, but they lived under the shadow of this violence; their exile was often a choice made before the pyre came for them.
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Loss of Cultures, Rise of Keepers
The destruction was not only of lives but of entire ways of knowing. Ceremonies outlawed, languages beaten from the tongues of children, plant lore and healing rites declared heresy or sorcery. The Yaqui were told the Flower World was superstition; the Beguines were told their visions were delusion. Every banishment, every book burned, every elder silenced was meant to make the culture itself vanish.
Yet the ancient ways do not die easily. Today, Yaqui deer dancers still wear the Maso Kova under the same moon that guided their ancestors. Beguine spirituality is being studied, revived, and lived again in new communities that take vows of service and simplicity. Language keepers teach children words their grandparents were forbidden to speak. Herbalists plant gardens with the same remedies that once cost their foremothers their lives.
The full moon tonight lights their work—quiet, steady, and resistant to erasure. It reminds us that exile is not the same as disappearance, and revival is not only possible but inevitable when memory is tended.
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And Man Never Learns
The same moon that shone on the Yaqui in chains and the Beguines in flight shines now on new tides of displacement.
• In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pogroms across the Russian Empire drove an estimated 2 million Jewish people from their homes—those who stayed often faced death, imprisonment, or forced assimilation.
• Since October 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war in Gaza has displaced over 1.9 million Palestinians, killed tens of thousands, and left entire neighborhoods in rubble—most of the dead are women and children.
• Since February 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced more than 6.5 million people to flee the country, with millions more internally displaced, many unable to return to their homes as cities lie in ruins.
The centuries change, the weapons change, the names change—but the pattern remains: whole peoples pushed from their land, their culture endangered, their future uncertain.
