 Fantasy: December 21, 2016 Issue [#8038] |
  Fantasy
This week: Moon Lore Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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The moon looks upon many night flowers; the night flowers see but one moon.
-Jean Ingelow
They dined on mince, and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon.
-Edward Lear
Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
-Buddha
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Let's talk about the moon.
Inspiration for countless tales and legends, our moon is famous for its inconstancy, and yet is utterly predictable in its variations. The full moon illuminates the darkest of nights, providing light to hunter and gatherer alike; the new moon, coy in its disappearance, inspires secrets and stealth.
It's in our nature to see patterns. It's also very much in our nature to extrapolate meaning from these patterns. Meaning becomes myth, myth fosters understanding. All of our scientific knowledge about the moon, its composition, its orbit, its size and its mass, that helps our knowledge, but it doesn't take away from the majesty of a rising moon.
Long ago, various cultures assigned names to different full moons as they appeared throughout the year. These moons were tied to the seasons. You can still find lists of moon names if you poke around a bit, but most of these lists refer to months of the Gregorian calendar - but our standard "month" bears only a faint resemblance to a true month, which is the time it takes the moon to cycle through all its phases.
Originally, these full moon names referred to the order of the appearance of the full moon in a season - a season being defined as equinox to solstice, and solstice to equinox. This was probably the original basis of a calendar: to track the seasons, and the moons within a season. The full moon would have been important, before wires lit the night, simply because it provided light.
Normally, each season cycles through three full moons. Occasionally, when the first full moon of a season occurs shortly after the solstice or equinox, there can be four. This creates a "blue moon" (the modern definition of second full moon in a Gregorian calendar month is an egregious error that's been propagated for far too long). Moon names vary by culture, but some examples coming up after the (northern hemisphere) winter solstice and before the spring equinox are: Old Moon, Wolf Moon, Crow Moon.
Now, as far as I know, other phases of the moon don't get their own names, which is rather disappointing. I mean, they do, but not seasonal. There's new moon and full moon, of course; first and third quarter (which are half-moons, which led to no end of confusion for me as a kid), waxing gibbous (my personal favorite), and so on. The important thing to know, here, is that the phase of the moon depends entirely on the angle it makes with the Earth and sun, so that a full moon always rises close to sunset, and a first quarter moon is always highest in the sky at sunset, etc. The reason this is important is because if I'm reading a story and someone writes something like "a sliver of moon hung high in the night sky," I will be annoyed, because this can never happen (unless you broaden the definition of "sliver" into ridiculousness).
Another thing I'll address here is "supermoon." This is a recent appellation - it refers to a specific phenomenon that's not all that rare. Since the moon's orbit is elliptical (actually, the Earth and moon orbit each other around a common center of gravity, but let's not get too pedantic here), there is a point in the orbit that is closest to Earth. When that point coincides with a full moon, said full moon will appear very slightly larger than average. Similarly, there's a point farthest away in the orbit - apogee - where the moon will appear very slightly smaller than average. While this gets hyped, the reality is that the moon hits perigee and apogee once a month, and sometimes that happens to coincide with a full moon. Not a big deal - but if it gets people to go out and look at the moon, that's great.
Because we really need to look up more often. |
Some fantasy for your holiday viewing:
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Last time, in "Creating a Holiday" , I talked about coming up with your own holidays.
Casper Bailey  : The rising of the Specter Moon happens on the week before December 21. that's a holiday I created on my own for my own fiction stories.
Exactly the sort of thing I was talking about. Thanks!
Well, that's it for me for 2016. See you next year! Until then, have a happy New Year and...
DREAM ON!!! |
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