We do not know what the Moon is. We stand under her, strangely compelled to stare at her face, but never understand her. Claims to the contrary might just be a case of lunacy – what La Luna does to the psyche of one running reckless under her full gaze.
The myth of the Moon affecting every creature on the planet, humans included, is deeply rooted in culture, language, and history. Myth here refers to mythology, and not its corrupted modern meaning of untruth. All creatures are creatures of the night, for the night is an inevitable reality, whether they wake to it or sleep through it. At times the shy maiden and at other times the showy queen, the Moon rules the rhythm of that half of time. For billions of years, life evolved under her rising and falling belly. Her daily tides and monthly light pulse is what all organisms learnt to dance to, but one species has lately fallen out of step with the beat and sulks instead about not being able to hear the music.
Ancient civilizations revered the Moon and regarded her as an equal to the Sun and the Earth. Modernity though has relegated her to a bit player in our modern global affairs, a mere satellite to the main action, a lifeless lump of gray rock. Leftover debris from the construction of the Earth long ago. Yes, a prominent feature of the night sky, responsible for rising tides, howling dogs, and inspired poets, but not amounting to much else.
Still, ask the ten quintillion (that’s a billion billion) insects on earth, the majority of which are nocturnal in feeding and mostly being fed upon, if the Moon and her waxing and waning light might have any import to their existence?
Ask the ocean, where the synchronized mass spawn of billions upon billions of coral sperm and eggs – a planetary orgasm that fertilizes the waters for all sea life, five days after a full moon – what it thinks of the Moon being called lifeless?
Ask the gazillion plants on the planet, all reacting to her light and gravity – the two fundamental ways of exerting influence across the vastness of space – if the Moon might be just a bit player in their affairs?
Moonlight increases the night activity of species that use vision as their primary sensory system (such as primates) and suppresses activity in species that primarily rely on the other senses of smell, touch and hearing (such as deer, rabbits, hares, rodents, and bats). This tendency to lie low under the glare of a full Moon is strongest in open habitats where prey can get easily spotted. Predator species have no choice but to wait for their prey to emerge in order to hunt them, and thus stay inactive as well during the full Moon. Big carnivores such as lions and cheetahs spike their hunts a week or so after a full Moon, when they are hungriest and the light has dimmed till their keener nocturnal vision becomes an advantage. Humans are fundamentally primate-like, but our behavior is highly adaptable. We struggle to see in the dark, but we can light fires if needed, either to hunt or to not be hunted. Fishermen have their best hauls when they hunt with torches to target unsuspecting fish during the new Moon. Farmers often harvest on the cool night of a full Moon, while their crops are most likely to get raided under the cover of a new Moon.The phases of the Moon matter for critical survival behaviors. What is most telling is that most animals maintain their synchrony with the Moon’s cycles even when they can’t see its light, suggesting that they have internal clocks, perhaps based on tides, that run in time with the Moon even when it is not in sight.
“Oh, but dozens of studies have invalidated claims that the Moon has any effect on us modern humans. Its gravity is too weak and its light isn’t significant. All those cases where mood, mental disturbances, hospital admissions, fatalities, sleep quality, stock prices, fertility rates, etcetera correlate with the cycles of the Moon are just that, mere correlations …”
In other words, the Moon’s effects on us are apparently not supported by epidemiological studies. Meanwhile, there are plenty of longitudinal studies or specific individuals’ experiences showing cyclic correspondence to the Moon, yet these are easy to dismiss as just isolated weirdness. Or at least, we don’t dare give them any credit because that would make us look superstitious, believing in all sorts of mysterious twilight happenings, and good heavens who knows what one might say or do next!
Strange that science itself tells us that every plant responds to the Moon via the tidal gravitational forces inside the cells, making them gain or lose water, and their roots grow at different rates accordingly. Our cells are even more water than plants, and feel the same daily tidal forces. And we have eyes sensitive enough to detect single photons of light. The 9x difference in luminosity between the full moon and new moon is plenty to affect retinal photoreceptors that regulate sleep, not to mention our nocturnal behavior if awake. Why then is our species so insensitive or alien as to be unresponsive to the Moon’s cycles?
The one scientifically sound epidemiological study, albeit also one impossible to conduct, would be to compare our general health and sanity with a control group of hypothetical modern humans who still live deeply in tune with Moon cycles. Studying just us as we are today – disconnected from nature, living indoors isolated from all other life, putting in late nights and shifts fueled by anytime food and artificial lighting – may be like trying to study the effect of seasonal variations of pasture grass on the health of cows that never eat that grass, and instead munch a steady diet of industrial grain from the feedlot all year long. Since we cannot perform the control study, can we smugly declare the case closed? Or should we admit ignorance, and allow for some humility that we do not know what we lost when the Moon became dead to us? That would be true science.
The waxing and waning of the Moon is the subtle yet powerful pendulum in the sky by which all creatures crest and trough too. Humans ignore that rhythm, but may pay for it in ways unknown.
By way of compensating for a loss of meaning, we often overwhelm ourselves with facts. All the dry certitudes about the Moon’s gravity, synodic orbital, axial tilt, albedo, perigee, etcetera, will never add up to anything of relevance to humanity at large. Yet, with every passing year, we cannot stop compulsively adding more facts, while losing track of the threads that reach deep into history and may help us make sense of reality today. Could our civilization’s massive subterranean insanity have something to do with this amnesia, that leaves us running overtime like mad, in complete disregard to the pulse of the natural world?
To know the true worth of what one has lost, one must feel the pain of loss. But how can we feel what we already lost generations ago? Perhaps we must turn to the realm of imagination, since imagination alone revitalizes what is gone from conscious memory. The Moon has always loomed large to our unconscious in the dark of night, the realm of fear, fantasy, and dreams. Our reckoning of the Moon was never a conscious exercise. As prominent as the Moon might appear on a cloudless night sky, she is hidden deep in the depths of our psyche. It is no surprise that the Moon has always been symbolized as the mysterious, the feminine, the cool and unknowable Yin to the hot and direct Yang of the Sun.
For eons, a sisterhood consisting of every fertile woman on the planet bled in monthly synchrony with the retreating Moon. For ages, on especially moonlit nights, across the vast plains we hunted fearful prey or ourselves fled in fear from predators. These cycles were lived as deeply as the rise and fall of breath by all members of the global tribe of humans. We cannot eliminate from our bodies the ancient memory and the need to respond in powerful synchrony to her periodicity, simply by drawing the curtains shut and turning off the lights. The archaic in us is still in there, even if we choose or pretend otherwise. We cannot simply out-engineer and out-civilize in a hundred years the million year old inside of us.
“Look, we’ve sent our men up there to investigate the Moon, and there’s no signs of any life on it. It’s just a small dead object, pitted with craters and covered with dry, chalky dust…”
We put a man on the Moon. We sent a mission to check for signs of life up there. Great. Now can we also be persuaded to check what signs she might be sending to life down here? The waxing and waning Moon is the subtle pendulum in the sky by which all creatures crest and trough. Her gift is to guide our unconscious through alternating cycles of frenzy and rest, action and retrospection, fertility and release. Seen in this light – her light, that silvery glimmer that can be equal parts lovely or cruel – to be close to her is to be in harmony with life, and to disregard her is to invite madness into it. The Moon grants life sanity.
A traveler in the desert comes upon a weathered old bone in the sands. He picks it up and watches as it crumbles to dust in his hands. What does he make of this skeletal remain? Only if he lacks any imagination is it just a small dead object, pitted, dry and chalky. If he dares to remember, he will recall that this bone supported flesh and blood around it, as part of a living, breathing creature. He just needs to imagine.
