Moon spell: humanity’s love affair with our silver satellite

Humanity was captivated by the Moon long before the Apollo 11 module touched down on July 20, 1969, though. It has shaped our myths and religions, how we farm and hunt, how we travel, our concept of time, our festivals – it has directed our technologies, influenced our science, guided our concept of love, and inspired great poetry and music.

Anthropologists have argued that there has been no greater cultural influence on humanity than the Moon, except perhaps the Sun. It has sunk so deep into our collective unconscious that we often forget just how powerfully it has affected the world ...

MYTHOLOGY

A GIANT, mysterious shape moving magically across the sky ... no wonder the Moon (and the Sun) has been seen throughout time as divine.

More often than not – primarily as the lunar cycle has long been associated to the female menstrual cycle – the Moon is a goddess rather than a god.

Selene was the ancient Greek goddess of the Moon, sister of both the Sun god Helios and the goddess of the dawn Eos. One of the strangest love stories of Greek myth features Selene’s obsession with the human shepherd Endymion. Selene thought Endymion so beautiful as he slept that she asked Zeus to keep him like that forever. The goddess visited her sleeping lover every night and had 50 daughters with him.

It is thought that within the story lies the roots of how early farmers and shepherds would literally spend their life beneath the Moon trying to understand her mysteries – just like Endymion.

Selene’s Roman counterpart Luna was a goddess vital to agriculture, without whom crops and animals would fail.

In Celtic myth two women are connected to the Moon – Cerridwen and Rhiannon. Cerridwen, whose name comes from the word for cauldron, is linked to wisdom, rebirth, creativity – and, once again, farming. She’s also the goddess of magic, as well as fertility, poetry and prophecy.

In pre-history, the concept of what was considered “female attributes” shaped the ideas we still associate with the Moon.

ASTROLOGY

It was astrologers who first studied the moon. By the 4th century BC, astrologers in Babylon, China and India understood lunar eclipses and knew the Moon was a rock reflecting sunlight. By the second century BC, early scientists realised the Moon affected tides, and had established its size and distance. In 1609, as astronomy began to supersede astrology, Galileo Galilei drew the first illustration of the Moon using sightings through his telescope.

CALENDARS

In Europe, 30,000 years ago, humans used lunar cycles scratched on to bones or cave walls to measure time and seasons. The first calendar is believed to have been made by people from the Aurignacian culture who lived in southern Europe in the Late Stone Age.

A calendar dated around 10,000 years ago was found in Aberdeenshire where a series of 12 pits corresponded to the phases of the Moon, and aligned on the winter solstice.

Australia has sites showing ancient Aboriginal people were keen lunar students.

Many religious festivals still follow the lunar cycle, like Easter, Chinese New Year, and Ramadan.

CULTURE

The first fictional story about the Moon was written in the 2nd century AD by Lucian of Samosata. In A True Story, Lucian travels to the Straits of Gibraltar where he’s caught in a whirlwind and taken to the Moon. Up there, a war rages between the King of the Moon and the King of the Sun – both backed by armies of strange aliens. The book is seen as the first instance of science fiction.

In the 1620s, English bishop Francis Godwin wrote the The Man in the Moone, which tells the story of an adventurer who travels to the Moon using a flying machine powered by swans. By the Victorian age, the Moon was a hardy staple of science fiction.

Poets often used the Moon to evoke romance or mystery – think of Shelley’s To the Moon. However, the anonymous 14th-century poem Mon in the Mone ponders what sort of life the Man in the Moon might lead.

Other poets have used the Moon to symbolise sadness and depression – such as Sylvia Plath’s The Moon and the Yew Tree – or ageing, in Philip Larkin’s Sad Steps.

In cinema, the Moon is usually about one of two things – us going there, or something from there coming here. One of the most successful early films was A Trip to the Moon in 1902, famous for the image of a space rocket stuck in the Moon’s eye. It lasted nine minutes and cost director Georges Méliès 10,000 francs to make.

Most sci-fi films with a lunar theme are pretty predictable fare, but some are more experimental. There’s Moon, made in 2009 by Duncan Jones, David Bowie’s son. It tells the story of lonely clones living on the lunar surface. Iron Sky imagines Nazis who fled to the Moon in 1945 returning to conquer Earth. In 1989, Nick Park brought a little humour to the usually serious business of moon travel with Wallace and Gromit in A Grand Day Out, bumbling their way into space in their homemade rocket.

Where the Moon really makes its cultural mark is in music.

Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Sinatra’s Fly Me to the Moon, Van Morrison’s Moondance, Blue Moon, Moon River – music uses the moon to speak to us of yearning romance.

When it comes to art, the Moon strangely doesn’t figure that much. Henri Rousseau was drawn to a moonlit sky in works like The Snake Charmer and The Dream, as were the Pre-Raphaelites in paintings like Helen of Troy. Goya’s The Witches Sabbath features a devilish goat worshipped by moonlight, and Joan Miro’s The Sun, The Moon and One Star is probably the best-known lunar sculpture.

But it’s Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night – with its throbbing hazy yellow half moon – which sits most prominently in the public consciousness.

FEAR

The Moon isn’t just about seduction and romance – it’s also about blood and death. Think of horror movies from the 1930s to the slasher gorefests of more recent times.

No so long ago, the Moon was thought to be linked to madness – thus the term lunatic. Just as the Moon affects the tides, so too it was once thought that the Moon could affect the water in the brain. It was believed that the full moon triggered crime sprees. Today, some people believe they dream more vividly during the full moon.

The Moon is also key to one of the greatest supernatural legends – the werewolf, a human cursed to change into a flesh-eating monster during the full moon. It’s thought the werewolf myth was based on the activities of real "lunatics" – early serial killers whose crimes were so appalling that they could only be interpreted as supernatural in origin.

THE NATURAL WORLD

Our ancient ancestors used the sky to navigate. One method involved the crescent Moon: draw an imaginary line connecting the two points of the crescent, then follow the line to the horizon and you’ll have found south.

If it wasn’t for the Moon we’d have no tides. Its gravitational force “pulls” ocean water towards it, creating high tide in parts of the Earth facing the Moon. The Moon also slows the Earth’s rotation – and without it days would last only six to 12 hours.

Without the Moon, the tilt of the Earth’s axis would also vary, creating wild weather. Due to our satellite, the Earth is at a permanent 23.5 degree tilt giving us the seasons we see today.

ORIGINS

The moon is about 4.5 billion years old. The most accepted theory is that Earth and Moon formed together when a planet, which astronomers call Theia, collided with a “proto-Earth”. It is called the giant impact theory, or the Big Splash. The impact blew huge chunks of the old earth into space, the resulting debris eventually coalescing into the Moon and Earth we know today.

Until the Space Race, humans could only see the side of the Moon facing us – until, that is, photographs were taken by the Soviet space-probe Luna 3 in 1959. Apollo 8 astronauts were the first humans to see the dark side during a Moon orbit in 1968. It was Apollo 8 which also took the famous “Earthrise” photograph from space – an image credited which creating the environmental movement.

All manned and unmanned soft landings took place on the Moon’s near side until January 2019 when China’s Chang’e 4 spacecraft made the first landing on the far side.

EXPLORATION

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

With those words, Neil Armstrong announced that the Apollo 11 mission had touched down on the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility at 20:17 on July 20, 1969. His next words, as he stepped foot on the surface, made him history’s most famous explorer: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The Moon had now come to represent humanity’s restless pioneering spirit.

If it hadn’t been for the Nazis, however, it would have taken us much longer to reach the Moon. Much of the Apollo missions’ successes were down to German scientist Werner von Braun, a rocket genius who designed the V-2 flying bomb. He was secretly moved to America after the Second World War and worked for Nasa, developing the launch vehicle that got Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, who remained in the Command Module, to the Moon.

The Apollo missions cost more than $25 billion between 1961-1973. The last mission – Apollo 17 – took place in December 1972 and marked the last time humans walked on the Moon. Money, public apathy and the need to fight the Cold War on Earth grounded the Apollo programme.

The 21st century has seen resurgent political and commercial interest in space. In 2018, Nasa revealed plans to revisit the Moon, initially with robot missions prior to “human return”. Future crewed missions, using the Orion spacecraft, could take place between 2022 and 2028.