What Is the Moon?
THE MOON IS A SATELLITE
For millennia, humans have gazed at the night sky and asked themselves the same question. What is the moon? The answers have varied—at times literal, sometimes metaphorical, often spiritual. Often these answers have led to more questions.
The moon is the earth’s only natural satellite. Johannes Kepler coined the term in the early seventeenth century, from the Latin satelles, meaning “companion” or “guard.” Formed at least 4.5 billion years ago, the moon is about the same age as the earth. General theories of how the moon was created all involve impacts, though scientists are still trying to figure out the exact genesis of our cosmic companion. The “giant impact” theory hypothesizes that the moon was formed when an object struck earth. The matter that came off that impact, over time, accumulated to become what we now call the moon.1
The moon is our closest celestial neighbor. The same side of the moon faces earth. This could explain the moon’s comforting familiarity to us, as her repeated visage has slowly been etched in our minds. The moon completes one orbit around the earth in approximately 27.3 days, which is called a sidereal month. Because the earth is also moving around the sun, it takes additional time for the moon to complete one whole phase, to realign with the sun, from new moon to new moon. This is called a synodic month, and for us on the earth, it appears as 29.5 days: approximately the length of a month. The moon’s elliptical orbit rotates counterclockwise. At times it is quite close to us, other times much farther away. This is how we get “super” and “micro” moons. One month the full moon looks show-stoppingly huge. The next, it appears as distant as a lover departing.
The moon is made up of a variety of different matter, some of which is shared with our planet. Igneous rocks, feldspar, and iron are some of the types of material found on and in the moon. One of its minerals, olivine, is found both in the tails of comets and in the upper mantle of the earth.
There is no atmosphere on the moon. Aside from intermittent moonquakes, it is a still and quiet place. The footprints left behind by the astronauts more than fifty years ago will stay forever. The moon is sensitive, just like you.
Similar to the maria are the lacus: smaller basaltic plains. (Lacus is the Latin word for “lake.”) There is the Lake of Luxury, which resides near the Lake of Forgetfulness. The Lake of Hatred, or Lacus Odii, is on the same latitude as the Lake of Happiness, or Lacus Felicitatis. Intense dramas alongside pools of contentment; such is life in the lunar realm.
There are smaller, similar features called sinus (Latin for “bay”) and palus (Latin for “marsh”). These include the Seething Bay, the Bay of Rainbows, the Marsh of Sleep, and the Marsh of Decay.
The moon is not a circle. Like the earth, the moon is shaped like an egg. The cosmic egg figures in many ancient creation myths. The moon is about 33 percent smaller than the earth—its diameter is slightly less than the distance between Los Angeles and New York.3
What are we looking at, when we look up at the moon? A reflection of the sun from across the universe. The moon does not generate its own light. It is a very dark gray, with some green due to the olivine. The moon appears bright white, silver, or yellow, or red, or even slightly blue sometimes, due to the way light changes moving though our atmosphere. Most folks have particular moon memories: a full moon that seemed to follow them as they walked home alone one cold winter night, or stare them down through their bedroom window as they unsuccessfully tried to sleep. A full moon disco ball as backdrop to the perfect summer dance party. The unique angles, reflections, temperature, atmosphere, season, and weather conditions make each appearance completely unique, enhancing our experience with the element of surprise.
The moon is responsible for the gravitational force of water on our planet. It affects all the tides—not only the ocean, but the lakes and rivers. Not just the water on the surface of our globe. All the water on the earth and in the earth. That includes all the water in plants, animals, and humans. People consist of up to 60 percent water. The moon influences all the water inside of you.
The sun’s gravitational pull also has an effect on the tides, but as the moon is closer to the earth, its influence is much greater. The moon’s gravity affects the earth so much that the earth itself may rise as much as a foot when the moon is directly overhead.4 The moon stabilizes the earth’s axis. Without the moon, the earth would shake more, and shift on its axis in unpredictable ways. This gravitational relationship regulates our seasons. If the moon didn’t exist, seasons would be irregular and the weather more extreme. Days would be much shorter; life on earth would be very different. The earth’s only companion is a helpful one.5
The moon helps crops grow. Humankind originally planted and grew their crops by the moon. Many still do. Lunar gardening uses the phases of the moon, the moon’s path, and the moon’s sign, to sow, plant, and harvest vegetables. This system was developed thousands of years ago and is still used today. There are various “elemental days” that correspond to what astrological sign the moon is in: An earth day corresponds to roots, water corresponds to leaves, air corresponds to flowers, and fire corresponds to fruit/seeding days. Moon calendars for gardening are based on astronomy, not astrology. They use a sidereal zodiac to determine recommended times to plant, harvest, propagate, and sow.6
Human’s evolution is partially linked to the moon. Our bright satellite helped humans see at night, while they traveled, worked, and worshipped. The moon helped humans keep track of time, which led to the proliferation of agriculture, which led to the formation of organized societies.
Acknowledging the moon in this way brings us back to our bodies, our lineages, our life. It reminds us of our bodies’ natural intelligence, its circadian cycles, our other responses and rhythms. We observe the moon’s changing light reflected in the seasons, in our gardens. We connect to the tides inside of us.
THE MOON IS FOR EVERYBODY
No one owns the moon. This world is so extractive, though, it’s only a matter of time before the moon becomes just another place to pillage and destroy. The 2015 S.P. A.C.E. Act (Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship) is allowing U.S. citizens and industries to “engage in the commercial exploration and exploitation of space resources.” In other words, any corporation can mine the minerals of any planet, asteroid, or satellite. Any corporation can drill on Mars, can drain the moon of its fabled stores of subsurface water. Profit above all.
Already, our globe can barely contain the emptiness disguised as greed that courses through it. Even the men who landed on the moon left trash on her. People still regularly litter her surface, routinely crashing probes on the moon at the end of unmanned lunar exploration missions. All in all, we’ve left upward of 400,000 pounds of debris on the moon. Tossed in the Sea of Tranquility, strewn about in the various lunar maria are twelve pairs of moon boots; several Hasselblad cameras; a plaque signed by Richard Nixon; 96 pounds of urine, excrement, and vomit; multiple hammers, five American flags, and much, much more. Because the moon has no atmosphere, these objects will never decompose or be blown off.7 Nowadays, with lunar tourism on the horizon, it’s not so far-fetched to imagine a universe filled with candy wrappers, plastic bottles, and diapers floating past one’s spaceship window.
This is the trash that we leave on the holy face of the cosmos. This is the extractive way we are taught to treat sacred nature, and our sacred natures. This is the extractive way we are taught to consider relationships. The extractive ways we try to use and sell magic. The moon has watched us this entire time. She was overhead as Alexander the Great pillaged; she circled us during the Tiananmen Square protests. She has always been a muse, beaming her rays of inspiration down on poets from Rumi to Rilke to Audre Lorde. She watched as the buffalo were slaughtered, wiped almost entirely from the plains of Turtle Island; she was overhead as the Trail of Tears left an entire land almost empty of its stewards. A full moon shone down on the last moments of the Stonewall riots, beer bottle missiles glittering in the night. The moon shines upon us still as coral reefs disintegrate and as we protest seemingly endless injustices and as we continue to figure out ways to love one another without destroying ourselves. She will continue to shine even in our absence. The great moon, mother of the heavens, does not belong to us. She exists beyond human time. She does not care. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about her.
If you are involved in any spiritual or justice work, then you know: We do this work for a future we can’t see. For a future, quite frankly, we may never see. We know not to underestimate the power of one person’s intentions and repeated actions. This is a long, heartbreaking road, but one that must also be pleasurable, beautiful, and connection-filled. Part of our responsibility is to heal the wounds of those who came before us. To love something is to want to protect it, to save it, and to share it. Love offers us a way to live on after our bodies are no longer.
The moon belongs to no one and the moon belongs to all of us. For each of us, she is a cosmic crystal ball, helping us to see, encouraging us to pause, cajoling us into wonder. Even in this age of ultra-futuristic special effects and uncanny simulations, a bright moon still makes us gasp as though we’ve stumbled upon a favorite celebrity. She prompts us to point up at the sky mesmerized, pull the car over, change plans, stay in, go out, gather with like-minded strangers and friends. For millennia, the moon has inspired and guided humans—pyramids and sculptures and songs and entire religions and ancient cults and fashion collections have all been created to worship and pay homage to our guardian of the night. The moon belongs to no one. The moon is for everybody.
THE MOON IS OUR ANCESTORS
To be a scholar of the moon is to study the entirety of human history. How we have behaved and what we have valued is reflected in the various ways we’ve interpreted the moon. Through the ages, her powers have been revered, then rejected, then utilized anew. The passage of months and years were archived through observing her. She’s been a partner to our fertility and to the earth’s fertility: our food, a tether to life itself. Later, the moon became a force of evil, the source of witches’ power and women’s wildness, an instigator of hysteria, something to be feared. The history of the moon overpowered the herstory of the moon. Her knowledge became folk knowledge, passed down over the centuries through mostly oral traditions; information disguised in myth, tall tales, songs, and recipes. But the Goddess never left, she just went underground. Only to show up and return to those who need her most.
All of humanity has looked up at the same moon and wondered. About the meanings of life, love, mystery, and all matters of existence. From Cleopatra to Cher. The full moon has been watched by our grandmothers’ grandmothers’ grandmothers, and all the ancestors whose names we will never know. They sat under the moon and cried, just like we have. Assimilation may have wiped out some, or all, of our ancestral connections: access to our mother tongues, our ancient rituals, certain recipes. Slavery and colonization have wiped out bloodlines, magical traditions, folk medicine, and languages. The moon is one tool that we can use to discover more about our ancestry, and to uncover traditions, rituals, and other practices our ancestors may have utilized.
The ways our ancestors understood the moon resides in the language used to name it. The English word menses comes from mensis—Latin for “month”—and is also the root of the word menstruation. The proto-Indo-European common root of “moon” and “measurement”—me, ma, men—also includes “to measure,” “mind,” and “mental.”
Many cultures named full moons; these names spoke to place, season, what was growing, the environment and more. For example, in North America, the Algonquin people named the autumnal equinox full moon the “Corn Moon” and the January full moon the “Wolf Moon.” Later, The Farmer’s Almanac inaccurately and problematically popularized the full moon names from the Algonquin as being the same for all Native American moon names. However, there are over 573 Native American tribes in North America. Many have different names for each full moon and month.8
Full moon names are time capsules of what people held precious. They describe specific periods of time, place, and ritual, and mark activities and traditions as well. For the Cherokee people, March was “Month of the Windy Moon,” or a nu yi. May was “Month of the Planting Moon,” or a na a gv ti. By reading these descriptors, we have record of what was happening in the American southeast. The Gaelic lunar months were mostly named for trees, as Celtic spirituality believed trees held healing and magical powers: January corresponded to the Birch Moon; mid-February, the Rowan Moon; mid-March, the Ash Moon. Some Chinese full moons were named for highly revered sacred flowers: April is the Peony Moon; June is the Lotus Moon; September is the Chrysanthemum Moon. Moon names as poetry, moon names as ritual reminders, moon names as a kind of home.
There are endless myths, parables, and stories of the moon. A Yiddish tale of two brothers recounts them attempting to steal the moon by capturing it in a bucket. But they can’t, and learn that one must not steal what is not theirs, especially when they already have their own light.9 Some explain why the moon appears the way it does. In the Jataka tales—Indian literature devoted to stories of the Buddha’s past life—the Buddha is a hare who selflessly offers himself up as a meal to a hungry Indra, who is the Lord of the Gods. The kind hare is memorialized in the face of the moon.10 Some are origin stories for the earth and its seasons. Demeter-Ceres, the goddess synonymous with grain and fertility for the Greeks and Romans, reaped with her moon-shaped sickle. Tlazolteotl, the Aztec Moon Goddess, gives birth to herself.11
If you have knowledge of the geographical region your ancestors came from, you can do some research. What stories did your ancestors share of the moon? How did they honor the moon? What were their names for the moon? Try to find out what they ate, what herbs they used, and any other traditions or folklore, if you feel called to do so. Lunar-associated traditions are an easy place to begin to gain more information, as almost all cultures had their own relationships with the moon.
This isn’t to say you can’t make up your own names, your own stories.
Our ancestors live inside us. They are our bones, our hair, our blood, our talents, our sorrows, our resilience. In honoring the moon in both old and modern ways, we honor ourselves and our ancestors.
THE MOON IS A MIRROR
The moon is a mirror. The sun shines light on the moon; the moon reflects that light onto us, illuminating our intimacies, shadows, and secrets. It is a symbol to help us find personal and collective meaning. Whatever symbol the moon becomes merely describes the seeker. How we speak of the moon, what we see in the moon, and how we work with the moon shows us much about ourselves. She strips away our pretenses and delivers us back to ourselves as we gaze into our reflections.
The moon mirrors our natural spiral processes. Our lives aren’t ever static, even if we worry they are. We cycle in and out of various phases in our lives, contracting and expanding, building and shedding. The moon dies, frequently. The moon sheds her shadow in order to be reborn. Sometimes, we too must rebirth ourselves in order to gain a truer version of the self. As we tune in to our own energetic patterns that so often mirror the moon’s, the self-knowledge gained facilitates transformation. Accepting all the impossible or challenging or amazing things about yourself forms the golden glue Kintsugi for embracing the imperfect complexities of life. We are many things at once. Our pain leads to our pleasure, our mistakes move us toward humility. This is one way to attempt wholeness: living with the moon’s varied reflections.
Observations are magical. The Talmud says: We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. We are all mirrors. Who are others, if not mirrors of our own perceptions, fears, hopes, and dreams? The moon illuminates the ways in which we need to receive love. This forces us to think about how to offer others care and compassion. We are asked to reflect on others’ needs, their love languages, their yearnings, and what they need to feel safe.
The ability to reflect is magical. In a world that emphasizes power over, reflecting is a gift. To think before one speaks is always a genius idea. Time put aside weekly, or daily, to reflect, to come back to ourselves, is a priceless practice. The pause becomes a place to truly see.
Part of lunar living is to be in a constant state of cleaning the mirrors of our psyche, our emotions, our inner landscapes. In order to stare into a clear looking glass means being in the present moment, unencumbered by the dust of the distorted stories of the past. To clean the mirror is to be as honest as possible: projections and delusions must be wiped away. To clean the mirror is to attempt to keep our perspective loving and our reflections in service to our evolution.
THE MOON IS OUR WATER
The moon dictates our inner tides. She tugs at all the water we hold: our blood, our sweat, our tears. Our amniotic fluid, our spit, and our milk. In witchcraft and tarot theory, water traditionally correlates with psychic ability, flow, intuition, our emotions, spirituality, nostalgia, and memories. In ancient times, priestesses built moon shrines at the mouths of springs, on the banks of lakes, in caves that sheltered secret pools, to guard and access their healing waters.12
Water is a force powerful in its versatility. It sinks massive ships, caresses seahorses in its cerulean depths, and travels down through the soil to offer sustenance to the roots that weave through the fabric of earth. Many people are not comfortable with fluidity. For them, the black-and-white rules are the only rules and their way is the only way. Rigidity is mistaken for safety. Water reminds us we are fluid. We are mirrors of the ocean, of the rivers, of the rain. When we own and practice fluidity, the experience of the spectrum of our existence turns technicolor.
When we ignore our emotions, when they become unbalanced, our actions turn dangerous. When water gets too cold, it freezes; it is completely impenetrable. Too hot, it scalds. Sweet sprinkles quickly become a thunderstorm; a warm spring turns into a boiling cavern. When our water is supported it is free to flow. Safety, boundaries, and other appropriately chosen vessels allow us to float easily on the rivers of our lives. We do not discount our psychic abilities, and we act on them just as we would with “tangible” or logic-based responses. Acts of care, love, pleasure, and beauty that heal others and ourselves are revered. The mysteries of our world are appreciated as much as the mysteries within.
Below the surface lies the subconscious, driving the patterns we enact and repeat. Within the basement of our subconscious are the old belief systems we’ve constructed in order to keep us safe: our ego, repeating the same reassuring stories. When doing the transformative, watery work of the moon, we will come up against the parts of our ego that are harmful. These are the parts that keep us punished, in scarcity, and underperforming. We will reencounter the parts of ourselves that were forged long ago, maybe not even by us. These will need to be examined, integrated, and in some cases, released.
Carl Jung famously stated that “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Our emotional patterns can point us to what exactly needs to be healed. Through practice, we can learn how to engage with our emotions without allowing them to overpower us. In doing so, they become sources of information. We come to understand we are not our emotions, any more than we are defined by one short moment. Our intuition also correlates with our subconscious—our knowing that lies beyond language, beyond critical or analytical thought. In the realm of our subconscious also lies our past: those beliefs and experiences that influence our reactions and behaviors in the present moment. The moon is a bridge between the subconscious as past and the embodiment of the present. Moon work offers us keys to open the doors of both our subconscious and our consciousness. This work allows us to understand what our responses are about, where the root source of that response began, and what we need to do in order to transform those response patterns that direct our lives in unwanted trajectories.
Noticing our larger patterns and cycles helps us integrate different facets of our consciousness. With practice, we easily access the direct line between our consciousness and our subconscious. This builds trust and greater self-intimacy. This fosters our belief in our innate ability to transform.
THE MOON IS FEMINIST ART
The moon is feminist art. Her phases take us outside of the binary; both dark and light simultaneously, she plays with our perceptions. Like the moon, we naturally move from one state to another. Our soul still emanates while our behaviors shift, and our identity discovers new realms to play in. We get to hyphenate until we can no longer count the hyphens. There are no limits to our becoming.
The act of art making is alchemical. Art saves lives. Nature is art. Both heal in multiple dimensions.
On the vast canvas of our evening sky, the moon is the closest symbol to us of the divine feminine. We can utilize the moon to examine what the feminine encompasses, and how this can be expanded upon and evolved. (Venus, the only other cosmic body who appears to have phases, has also been assigned a feminine gender by ancient peoples and astrologers.) Over time, there have been a lot of assumptions made around the feminine and the moon both.
The moon’s pronouns are whatever you choose. The moon isn’t picky or attached like that. There have been feminine moon goddesses and masculine moon gods and larger lunar energies that exist beyond gender. The moon is for all genders: trans, cis, non-binary, or however else one chooses to identify. If we get our periods the moon is for us. If we don’t get our periods the moon is for us.
That said, there is an undeniable connection between the moon and the menstrual cycle. Beyond the twenty-nine-day similarity between the lunar cycle and human menstruation cycles, there are theories that the moon helped regulate those cycles. This supported procreation, which helped us proliferate on the planet. Most people’s periods do not line up consistently with a lunar phase; they fluctuate.13 Electricity, screen exposure, medication, and stress may affect our hormones and pineal glands much more than they did thousands of years ago.
The period/procreation and lunar connection led to a widespread correlation between the moon and the feminine. This also contributed to perception of the moon as a malevolent force—tied to the witches, the stormy emotions, psychic wildness, and birthing abilities, access to which so many feminine folks naturally have. In many Neolithic societies, it was the moon mother—the goddess or goddesses who symbolized the moon—who was the most important or central deity to worship. Over time, most matrilineal societies were conquered by patrilineal ones. The matriarchal deities had to be subjugated accordingly. Gods are reflections of us tiny humans and the powers we crave, the fears we hold.
With increased colonialism and the rise of the patriarchy came the rise of the binary. With the rise of the binary came domination over women and femmes, which was enacted through violence, rape, menstrual shame, and other denigrations. The patriarchy destroyed the moon mother, and replaced her with the sun god, which then became a Christian God. Remnants of our former matriarchal lunar practices still hide in plain sight—the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit: the trinity that reference the three phases of the moon, the three heads of Hecate, the holy triumvirate that prances through a plethora of Goddess cultures.
Magical practitioners across the globe have always continued to worship the moon. Most recently, we’ve seen this with the rise of goddess-centered pagan religions, beginning in the 1960s and extending to the present day. Some of that has surfaced in popular culture, in Internet listicles about why this particular new moon is important, in tweets bemoaning the potent emotions around a full moon. The moon made me do it. All this digital popularity has its origins in religious reverence, in covens—in the ancient lunar worship that has been going on since the dawn of time. Many folks continue to awaken to their own spiritual interests, turning away from a patriarchal and white supremacist–induced, prescribed, religious dogma. Practicing nature-based, intuition-led lunar mindfulness is part of this spiritual recovery.
Some of the ideas and practices of the New Age goddess culture that emerged in the 1960s, which still has influence now in certain spaces, have been transphobic. It is difficult to imagine members of oppressed groups (cis women and cis lesbians) deciding to oppress others, but is understandable. Traumatized and oppressed groups will often try to find control wherever they can, will often enact violence on a projected “other.” That is one symptom of internalized abuse. Hate-led people deciding that they alone can deem who a “woman” is—and that it is based on gender assignment at birth, and genitalia—is a practice that must end. This sort of thinking is just as patriarchal as the idea that women’s magical identity is based on their life stage (maiden, mother, crone); their ability to give birth. A gender essentialist rhetoric is harmful and untrue. Having a biological womb doesn’t connect you to the moon any more than it does someone who doesn’t. As the doula, writer, and activist Latham Thomas says, “Your intrinsic worth has nothing to do with your ability to bleed or give birth.”
The moon affects us no matter what body parts we have. We are all made up of water; we all hold shadows and light. All of us feel the moon, relish her silvery glow on our skin, carry her songs inside of us. When I speak about the moon being feminine or femme, this is beyond gender. I am referring to an energy, a quality, a philosophy, and a relational structure that values mutual care, aid, safety, and nonhierarchical and nonviolent interactions.
The link between the moon and the divine feminine is in constant evolution. The divine feminine is not one gender. The divine feminine is all races, abilities, all body types. Men and non-binary people can embody the divine feminine. Not every woman may feel comfortable embodying the divine feminine. The divine feminine is a place of fertility and fecundity—the place where we create from deep down in our soul. The place where expressions flow freely. It is what we love, and how we love. This is Empress energy. The divine feminine can be fierce and fearless and juggle ten tasks one day, and go to her therapist and cry over takeout the next. The divine feminine is vulnerable, joyful, thoughtful, sexy, sweet, takes others along with her. She wants to do the best she can, not out of a fear-based drive, but out of a spiritual calling born out of a rendezvous with the transcendent.
Feminism is part of reimagining the divine. As we evolve, so does our feminism. A feminism that does not include BIPOC, sex workers, trans folks, non-binary folks, disabled folks, sick folks, poor folks, working-class folks, undocumented folks, and folk from any and all backgrounds is not feminism. The divine feminism invokes a form of feminism that is radical—one that is not interested in perpetuating the struggle to gain equality with men.
A divine feminism seeks to deprogram from abuse. We don’t want to mimic the patriarchy; we don’t want to preserve the violence of white supremacy and capitalism. There is something else entirely different to invest in. The cultivation of communities based on trust, mutual respect, and deep listening. The centering of pleasure over robotic productivity, generosity over competition. Gardens where everyone can thrive, places where everyone is thought of. Spaces to cheer each other’s accomplishments, because someone else’s success does not diminish our chances. This is about developing an abundance mindset. We want to find our way back to our natural states of being. This is about creating new ways of existence in the world that are complex, messy, personal, and intersectional. We wish to revel in the generosity of power within that is found in our witchcraft and spirituality. To remember, connect, create, and adapt our own unique forms of magic and belief.