love's arrow

Luminous full moon, the bow of your brow

Shoots an arrow, and fills heart's cup with blood.

I ask, "This heart, this blood... what can compare?"

I take the cup of wine as she says, "There".

#903: From Rumi's Kolliyaat-e Shams-e Tabrizi

Search word: moon

Still following the moon's trail, I come across this juxtaposition of blood with wine.

Theosophy Dictionary on Wine

Used as an emblem of life and spirit, as in the Mysteries, where at one stage of the initiatory rites wine and bread were offered to the candidate as symbols of spirit and body, the meaning being the same as that conveyed elsewhere by fire and water, or blood and flesh. It was necessary for the aspirant to be perfected in both ways.

The rite was very early adopted from the Dionysian Mysteries by the Christian churches in the sacrament of the Eucharist where wine represents the blood of Christ, and the bread his body. Wine is also connected in the same mystical manner with the Greek god Dionysos or Bacchus, for this divinity represented the Christos or initiator, teacher, and savior of mankind; and thus wine stands for inspiration and holy enthusiasm, varying from divine inspiration and spiritual quickening all down the scale to merely phrenetic exaltation, and even when grossly degenerate, orgiastic, and drunken excitement, such as marked the degraded forms of Bacchic worship.

In the New Testament the parable of the turning of water into wine is another way of stating that exoteric or mythologic teachings were explained and illustrated so that the inner wisdom became known, the wine standing for the inner aspect. Only an adept or initiate is able to do this.

source

Rumi is saying very simply that blood and wine are comparable. In the Eucharistic rite literal wine is transformed into spiritual blood. In this quatrain, the life blood of the heart is equated with the wine offered by the moon goddess. Neither is literal, neither is flesh-like. Both are psychic or spiritual in nature.

H.J. Ford: "Aphrodite brings Cupid to Psyche." @ lib.rochester.edu

The heart blood is what "I" or the smaller self desires, what "I" fall in love with when wounded by Cupid's arrow. Cupid (or Eros in the original Greek) is, of course, son to the love goddess (Venus or Aphrodite). It is She who orders the shooting of the arrow and determines its target. It is She who is behind this whole falling-in-love fiasco. It is Her way of gradually leading each human soul towards its fulfillment, as if drawing us out from an initial fine crescent of consciousness into the full round luminous glow of the moon when it faces the sun full on.

And yet this luminous full moon is She all along, it is She in the first place and She in the last. The cup of love drunkenness that she offers is, in some mysterious way, identical with the cup of my own desire. It is mysterious because She is, after all, divine and feminine while Rumi's "I" is mortal and masculine.

Margaret Evans Price: Psyche and Eros @ story-lovers.com

To a woman, the divine would be male. It has often occurred to me - and I push this thought away with dread when it does intrude - that it was a woman who first invented a masculine deity and not, as might seem more obvious, a man. There is no mystery and, above all, no fecundity if the God is envisaged simply as a larger version of the smaller self. This is closer to what Freud conceived of as the superego. Even if a masculine god was first conceived by woman, is indeed the son of woman, when a man is proclaiming the God supreme, he is essentially on an ego trip.

This, for me, is one of the key differences between Mohammad and Rumi, between mainstream Islam and Sufism. The first is God as grander ego, the second is God as friend. I would not mind seeing men parade about, puffed up with their "God is great" slogans. Let them make clowns of themselves. What I do mind is when they disallow others from uniting with God as friend. What I do mind is when they kill their fellow creatures in the name of this ego-God.

Quran 4:48 (Yusufali)
Allah forgiveth not that partners should be set up with Him; but He forgiveth anything else, to whom He pleaseth; to set up partners with Allah is to devise a sin Most heinous indeed.

This Allah will not allow even a divine partner. Imagine how much harder for him to swallow that a mortal partner be allowed (as Yahweh deigned to take Mary for his concubine). It was the Sufis that conceived of God as She, as divine lover and partner. There is absolutely no room for this kind of conception inside Mohammad's ego trip. Absolutely none. It is and always has been as sterile as a room full of self-admiring males.