Mooniana and the Secret of the Lost Chronicles of Sophia by Miranda Moondawn

[Literary Addicts]

In every epoch and age there are a handful of souls who hear the Earth's voice, hearken to the Muses's song and drink from the font of the Goddess of Wisdom.  These are the poets, artists and visionaries of our world: the creative geniuses like Dante, Milton and Blake, whose inspiration and insights have shaped our cultural memory. Unhappily, with the advent of the modern age the Muses's song has become silent and the font of the Earth's Wisdom has begun to dry up. To redress this precarious situation, six of the nine Muses have descended from Olympus to take birth upon the Earth. Their purpose is to re-awaken humanity to the inspiration of the great arts and restore the broken links between gods and men. But, the six Muses are not just daughters of Zeus, they are also the daughters of Mnemosyne, the Goddess of Memory, and the granddaughters of Gaia, Mother Earth herself. And when the Muses discover that their mother and Gaia have a totally different agenda for them than their father Zeus, well it is at this point that their loyalties become divided and everything becomes very bloody and messy. Find out how in this dramatic and spellbinding new novel by Miranda Moondawn "Mooniana and the Secret of the Lost Chronicles of Sophia.

Available at...

Amazon.com    Amazon.co.uk

About the Author
Romantic Poet, Gnostic and Faery Bard: Political Radical, Free Thinker and Mad Soul: How does one describe Miranda Moondawn? From her youth Miranda's passion for creative writing, music and art, along with her fascination with the philosophical and the spiritual, have always been totally inseparable. Coupled with her study and practise of the esoteric Wisdoms of Hermetic Magic, Gnosticism and Shaktism, Miranda also nurtures a passion for English Romantic poetry, Greek myth
and Hindu and Celtic lore. Many of her major literary and occult influences are from the 19th century: such as Dion Fortune (Moon Magic and The Mystical Qabalah),  William Blake (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Songs of Innocence and Experience) and George Macdonald (Phantastes and Lilith). At the same time, Miranda's work is strongly influenced by Grotowski Theatre, Peter Brook (Mahabharata), along with the Magic Realist School, Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses), and Amitav Ghosh (The Calcutta Chromosone).

Miranda has completed both a Master's Degree (in 2005) and a PhD (in 2011) at Copenhagen University. Both degrees were taken in the field of Post-Colonialism, Bollywood film and Hindu - Moslem cultural and religious studies. Through her university studies, Miranda has become something of a specialist in West Asian history, culture and literary traditions, including Jayadev's Gita Govinda and Bharata-Muni's Natyashastra. Much of this industrious research appears in the novel in the persons of the main protagonists; six young girls and women of varying ages, the
Muses of her tale, who all have a passionate interest in literature and the arts, along with a burning desire to attain self-knowledge or Gnosis through various esoteric practises such as Tantric Yoga, Shaktism, Shamanism and Ritual Theatre as process of internal psycho-spiritual transformation. In this way Mooniana reflects Miranda's own uniquely insightful philosophy that there is no essential division or separation between the path of the "spiritual seeker" and that of the creative artist.  Both work through insight and intuition, exploring deeper and deeper layers of the self in their attempt to express the inexpressible mystery of the unity between the individual's external everyday-world (microcosmos) and the greater universe of collective human memory and archetypes (macrocosmos).

Here are some of the links where Miranda Moondawn's book Mooniana can be
found:
Facebook Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Miranda-Moondawn/1421164734845754

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13550575.Miranda_Moondawn

Google Plus: http://www.mygoogleplus.com/timeline/110865823262334239634

Amazon: http://amazon.com/author/mirandamoondawning

Linked In: http://dk.linkedin.com/in/mirandamoondawnFacebook

Mooniana page:https://www.facebook.com/mirandamoondawn

Inspiration for the Book.
Miranda's novel was first conceived as a travel diary of shamanic dream quests and internal psycho-spiritual experiences in the power places of Scandinavia and Europe. It was in places like Lake Vattern Sweden, the mountains and fjords in Bergen Norway, the Lyngby Lakes of Copenhagen Denmark and the Rhineland in Southern Germany that the six heroines of her tale were born and given their human identities and magical Siren names. The Sirens were plotted in the various
power spots where Miranda experienced her dream quests and insights: and in her imagination, these enchanted heroines eventually became the Muses, the cultural bearers of a collective European awakening, through their mother the Mnemosyne, the Greek Goddess of Memory.. Some years later, after taking her PhD in West Asian culture, film and spirituality, Miranda travelled and made pilgrimages several times to India, visiting places such as Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur, Agra and Brindaban.  The six heroines and Muses in her novel faithfully reflect these later journeys and
pilgrimages - renegotiating the collective myths and iconography of the subcontinent and merging them with the gods and goddesses of the Greek, Nordic and Celtic pantheon. These later journeys and rites of passage into the heart of the subcontinent not only reflect the East-West dynamic of the author's creative and spiritual odyssey, but they also mirror the contemporary global phenomenon of blurring national borders and re-inventing cultural, religious and ethnic identities.

Miranda's highly original work holds true to the aesthetic ideal that successful art and literature should possess three central functions. These are:

1) It has to be aesthetically and skilfully crafted, capable of entertaining the audience
with the uniqueness of its characters, the originality of its narrative and the intrigues
of its plot.

2) It should be political and socially relevant, challenging the reader to seek the
meaning or moral purpose of our existence, thereby holding a mirror to the truth
behind the masks and hypocrisy of our daily lives. In so doing, important works of art
can help instigate social reform, as readers are encouraged to question and even
revolt against repressive and outmoded norms in their society.

3) Last of all, it should function as a rite of passage, an initiation for the reader into
the symbols, myths and archetypes of the collective memory of humanity. Great art
is both Mythopoeic and Mnemonic - through the subliminal and symbolic structure of
its characters and plot, this art synthesises the working of both the rational thinking
brain with the emotional intuitive brain. The former logically analyses the external
world of cause and effect. The latter draws sustenance from the inner world of
poetry, myth, dreams and magical (non-linear) causality. When both act in
harmonious unity together, the reader is awakened to the higher principle of
consciousness known as Gnosis (self- Knowledge) and Sophia (Wisdom). In
Mooniana and the Secret of the Lost Chronicles of Sophia, Miranda seeks to
incorporate all three of these elements into her art.

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