Carrion Luggage

Phased Out

The moon's close to last quarter now (which really looks like a half, not a quarter), but my random number generator doesn't always produce coincidences. From Mental Floss:

    The History of How Each Month’s Full Moon Got its Name  
Each month’s full moon marks the changing seasons.

I've harped on this sort of thing before, I know. It's the closest thing I have to a crusade, apart from visiting all the breweries. But hey... new blog, new rants, right? I've half a moonmind to consolidate all my arguments on this subject into one item, including counter-counterarguments.

My basic premise can be summed up as such: We need to stop associating full moon names with Gregorian calendar months, and return them to a system based on other, verifiable astronomical events such as equinoxes and solstices.

The moon is an integral part of the sky above us. Over time, each month’s full moon has acquired a unique name of its own:

(There follows a table, which is too hard to reproduce here, listing full moon names and their Gregorian calendar dates for this year.)

I get that definitions change over time. But some changes, I think, need to be walked back, and this full-moon-to-calendar-month definition is one of them.

Many of the names we use today come from Native American traditions, though some originate in Europe as well.

While this is true enough, what's missing is that these naming traditions preceded the adoption of the Julian/Gregorian calendar. They might not have held the English names we use now, but I'll accept that those are close translations. Translating the full moon name does not, however, require changing the seasonal definitions to the arbitrary calendar month definitions.

The monikers correspond with the seasons in the Northern Hemisphere.

And there's a hint that it wasn't always J/G calendar based.

Read on for more information about the history behind the name of each month’s full moon.

Now, I'm not going to take the time to verify all the history behind the names they present. It's Mental Floss, so based on other articles from that source which I've picked apart, I assume they got some stuff right and some stuff wrong. I feel like that's important overall, but not very relevant to the point I'm trying to make today; one can change the name of a particular full moon, or confirm or dispute the history behind it, without changing the basic premise.

So instead, I'll just list the same full moon names they do, with my preferred definition of when it occurs. Calendars can start at any point, but I'll stick as close as I can to the familiar Gregorian, just so we have reference points. So we'll start with the northern hemisphere winter solstice, closest to January 1.

Wolf Moon: First full moon after winter solstice. This has an approximately 2/3 chance of occurring in January, as described, but it could happen in late December.

Snow Moon: Second full moon after winter solstice. Weather tends to lag astronomical seasons, and the period of late January sees the lowest average high and low temperatures in the northern hemisphere. February sucks, too. The Snow Moon can occur in late January to just past mid-February.

Worm Moon: Last full moon before spring equinox. Could happen late February through around March 20/21 (today is the 21st, but yesterday was the equinox).

Pink Moon: First full moon after spring equinox. March or April.

Flower Moon: Second full moon after spring equinox. April or May.

Strawberry Moon: Last full moon before summer solstice. May or June.

Buck Moon: First full moon after summer solstice. (You get the pattern now, I hope.)

Sturgeon Moon: Second full moon after summer solstice.

Corn Moon / Harvest Moon: Last full moon before autumn equinox.

Hunter's Moon: First full moon after autumn equinox.

Beaver Moon: Second full moon after autumn equinox. (This is the one that can, rarely, fall on or close to Halloween.)

Cold Moon: Last full moon before winter solstice.

And that brings us full circle.

Since the orbits of the Earth and Moon don't match up, on rare occasions (every few years), there are four full moons between solstice and equinox or vice versa, which I refer to as an "astronomical season." That's where the Blue Moon comes in: it's like a leap moon, occurring as the third full moon in an astronomical season with four full moons. It will always appear in February, May, August, or November, never in any other calendar month.

Is this system harder to follow than the simplified full-moon-to-calendar-month system? Yeah, probably. Is it worth it? I think so. As I said, these cultures who initiated the tradition didn't have the Roman calendars. Many cultures these days use lunar or lunisolar calendars, notably the religious calendars for Jews and Muslims, and some Eastern timekeeping systems. These weren't just full moons; these were months, one way they told time. While the Gregorian calendar is a useful tool for coordination, much as English is a useful language for international communication, it's decidedly Eurocentric and tailored for one specific religion. It is also pretty damn good at calculating solar returns, and it's baked into the fabric of the internet. But it's not culturally universal; solstices and equinoxes are, even if they mean different things in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

I should note, as an aside, that the full-moon naming conventions are not just Northern Hemisphere in origin, but generally from the upper latitudes of said hemisphere. Seasons have somewhat different effects in Norway than in, say, Libya. The names themselves reflect those environmental conditions that prevail in northern latitudes: long, snowy winters and mild-to-moderate summers. But as I said, it doesn't matter what name you use, as long as we know we're talking about the same full moon.

The system I'm describing here works irrespective of the calendar used to track it. A Beaver Moon (or whatever you want to call it) will always happen at (close enough to) the same moment for everyone, though local times may vary due to time zones. Same with a Blue Moon; under the mistaken "calendar month" definition of that, sometimes, you get a full moon that occurs at the end of one month for some areas, and the beginning of the next month for others. I have a rather long explanation for that, but I'll have to save it for my future dissertation.

Now, one might say that none of this has any real import. I can understand that. It doesn't affect science, technology, or, in an industrialized world, even its traditional purpose of agricultural planning. But I feel that returning to the seasonal definitions might connect us better to ancestral folklore that comes from other sources than the ubiquitous Mediterranean (Egyptian, Levantine, Turkish, Greek, Roman, etc.)

The stories we tell each other have value, and I think the calendar is one such story. Let's take this one back to its roots.