Lunar Myths and Mysteries

On July 21, 1969, at a time when most people didn’t have televisions, one fifth of humanity watched a live broadcast of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin climbing down from their landing craft onto the surface of the moon. I was among those millions of watchers. That night, standing in our hilltop garden with my parents and friends and gazing at the night sky, I remember feeling stunned rather than thrilled, unable to reconcile this feat with the moon of nursery rhymes—the old man in the moon, the cow jumping over the moon, the moon made of cream cheese—and the moonlight and magic of folktale and song.

Lunar and Our Moon both explore that powerful appeal to the imagination as well as our growing scientific understanding of the moon and its relationship to Earth. Yet the two books could not be more different. Our Moon by Rebecca Boyle, a contributing editor at Scientific American, is a compact, sparkling, fact-filled work of popular science. By contrast, Lunar, edited by Matthew Shindell, a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and full of astonishing illustrations, is a large quarto volume so weighty that one would need a strong coffee table to display it.

Lunar’s size is dictated by its content. It is effectively an atlas, containing forty-four maps of the moon’s surface that are accompanied by photographs from satellites and lunar missions and interspersed with short, vivid essays, crisply detached in tone, on everything from myth to movies. The mapping project began in 1961, when President John F. Kennedy declared to Congress that America would land someone on the moon “before this decade is out,” and it was completed over the next thirteen years by a team of twenty-two geologists, cartographers, and illustrators from the US Geological Survey (USGS), reflecting the way that the moon, Shindell says, had become “the territory of human exploration and an extraterrestrial extension of geopolitical competition.” These maps look startling, principally because of their array of colors, from swaths of purple and brown to streaks of raspberry and bright dots of yellow: geological color codes for the presumed age of different features, from the Pre-Nectarian era around 4.6 billion years ago to the Copernican a mere billion or so years in the past. But while the kaleidoscopic rendering might seem at odds with the gray, dusty lunar surface, when the first astronauts landed they were astonished to find “a landscape flecked with color,” and volcanic glass recovered from the surface reveals a mineral spectrum “from yellow and orange to green and brown and blue.”

Many of the minerals found resemble those on Earth, and this similar chemistry has prompted different ideas about the origin of our planet and its satellite. In Our Moon Boyle writes about the current theory (warily set aside by Shindell with the words “some scientists even see evidence”) that Earth and the moon were created when a wandering planet the size of Mars named Theia collided explosively with Earth, forming a synestia—a spinning cloud of rock and gasses—that eventually coalesced into two separate bodies. The moon’s mountains, craters, and maria, which earlier astronomers thought were seas but are in fact large, lava-filled basins, record its violent history; its pockmarked surface is the result of intense bombardment by huge asteroids. Although Earth experienced the same bombardment, the scars of the impacts have been obliterated by the movement of tectonic plates and the oceans.

The moon stabilizes the Earth’s tilt that gives us our seasons; without it, Boyle writes, “gravitational interference from Jupiter would push Earth around like a playground bully.” Lunar gravity also affects Earth’s magnetic field and creates the bulges in the oceans that produce the tides. One bulge is pulled toward the moon, while another, smaller one is created on the opposite side of the globe by centrifugal forces as Earth and the moon rotate around their barycenter—their shared center of gravity. Reading of how complex the tidal movements are and how they are also influenced by the gravitational pull of the sun and amplified by the shape of basins, shores, and headlands, I shivered to think of the impact of climate change and relentlessly rising seas.

This tidal pull has changed over time. Although their elliptical orbits may appear fixed, the moon is always spiraling away from Earth, if very slowly, at a rate of 1.5 inches per year. In the early period of their formation they were much closer, and Boyle describes the hellish, aptly named Hadean eon of fiery spinning globes and wild tides. Living organisms developed as amino acid chains formed complex proteins in deep ocean vents or tidal pools. Eons later, 400 million years ago, “just as tetrapods were emerging from the seas to walk on land” and air-breathing lungs were evolving, the moon was still about 5 percent closer than it is today. Its powerful pull led to unimaginably fierce spring tides. Slowly the fins of fishes stranded in the intertidal zone morphed into primitive limbs that helped them move and eventually walk. It has been shown that many organisms—from corals and sea urchins to bean sprouts and trees—have an internal lunar clock as well as the more familiar circadian rhythm. In a genetic sense, our cells, too, learned to tell the time by the moon and the tides.

Archaeological evidence suggests that human measurement of time may have grown from charting the phases of the moon. It was easier to note the good times for hunting, planting, and harvesting by counting a sequence of twenty-nine-day lunar cycles rather than the long 365-day movement of the sun. One of the earliest putative records, dating from the Paleolithic era 30,000 years ago—beautifully illustrated in Lunar—is a bone discovered in a cave in the Dordogne that is engraved with marks representing the moon’s cycle. A later example is a series of round pits in Aberdeenshire in Scotland that are aligned with the winter solstice. Dating from around 8200 BCE, five thousand years earlier than Stonehenge, these made up a “calendar” that was carefully tended for a remarkable two thousand years.

Rational, mathematical calculation was intricately entwined with belief—“science” and imagination flowed together from the start, twinned as closely as Earth and moon themselves. At significant points in the Sumerian era, from roughly the fourth to the third millennium BCE, the moon god Sin, or Nanna, the “father of the gods,” was worshiped with his wife, Ningal, and their son, the sun. Nanna was the principal deity of Ur, one of the earliest Sumerian cities, but later, around 2300 BCE, the goddess of love, Inanna—regarded as Nanna’s daughter—became another moon deity, celebrated in the lyrical temple hymns of her priestess Enheduanna. Over the course of three thousand years of Mesopotamian civilization, priestly observers produced cuneiform records of the movement of stars and planets and worked out the cycle of eclipses. One problem endured: how to reconcile the passing of twelve lunar “synodic” months (on average 29.53 days) with the solar year. The Babylonian calendar adjusted for this by adding an “intercalary month.”

A series of absorbing essays in Lunar follows different constellations of myths and calendrical calculations. In the funerary texts of ancient Egypt, for example, the sky gods included Khonsu, responsible for the creation of life in animals and humans and for marking the passage of time, and Thoth, the controller of the stars, inventor of writing, and god of astronomy and mathematics. In their worship, the early Egyptians developed a calendar of twelve months of thirty days, adding a thirteenth month every few years to coordinate the lunar year with the seasons. The mathematics of adjustment in different cultures can be mind-bendingly intricate, the most elaborate being the Mayan system, which used a 260-day count (thirteen numbers with twenty “day signs”) in conjunction with a 365-day count (made up of eighteen months of twenty days plus five “nameless days”) and a “long count” that moved forward from zero, set around 3100 BCE. These abstractions were accompanied by a richly animated pantheon, illustrated in Lunar by a Mayan “Skyband Bench,” in which the moon goddess holds a rabbit in her arms—the rabbit in the moon’s face being the Mesoamerican version of the familiar “Man in the Moon.”

The moon’s gender fluctuates. In contrast to the largely male-dominated Egyptian myths, Greek and Roman myths associated the moon, as the classicist Karen ní Mheallaigh notes in her essay in Lunar, “with the intimate rhythms of female life.” In the poems of Sappho from the seventh century BCE, the moon goddess Selene gazes on Endymion in his endless sleep, while Persephone, in one version of her story, represents the moon, separated by the darkness of eclipse from her mother, Demeter, the Earth. In Platonic philosophy, the moon is the place where souls are purified after death before returning to Earth for another lifetime, hoping to reach a state of perfection that allows them to be united with the sun. The moon, with its waxing and waning, not only provides a calendar but is “connected with both death and rebirth in a cosmic doctrine of reincarnation.” The curator Elisabetta Fabrizi also explores the moon’s feminine symbolism, seeing this as “the opposition of scientific patriarchy versus natural feminine force.” She discusses the Chinese moon goddess Chang’e and the Incan Mama Quilla as well as classical goddesses, and traces this legacy in modern works of art, such as Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–1979) and Aura Satz’s installation Her Luminous Distance (2014).

Seeking understanding, early Western cultures held firmly to a geocentric model of the universe. Aristotle’s treatise De caelo followed Plato in conceiving of the sun, moon, and stars floating “in perfect circles in a heavenly aether” around the motionless Earth. Other ideas were proposed and set aside. One was the fifth-century-BCE Pythagorean notion of a Central Fire, around which Earth also moved. The composition of the moon also came under scrutiny. Detecting mountains on its surface, the Ionian philosopher Anaxagoras proposed that it was not a divinity but a rocky sphere, like Earth, and his study of eclipses, offering a new, geometrical approach to astronomy, suggested that the moon reflected the light of the sun, which he believed to be a burning rock. In the third century BCE Aristarchus of Samos supported this idea, and by calculating the angles between Earth, the moon, and the sun, he became the first to propose that Earth revolves around the sun in a year.

The study of the moon moved from a religious exercise to a search for a rational understanding of the universe. In the second century CE, in his Almagest, Ptolemy of Alexandria added the idea of epicycles, in which the planets move at different speeds on their own circles. Shindell explains that medieval Europe clung to the Ptolemaic model and to the belief that the moon, being the closest celestial body, had the most power over earthly life: the universe, created by God, was “an assemblage of parts and subtle interconnections, and so too the human body.” The microcosm reflected the macrocosm, with the bodily fluids of the four humors—black and yellow bile, phlegm, and blood—influenced by the moon, like the tides.

It was not until 1543, in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, that Copernicus questioned Ptolemy’s mathematics and, using different mathematical techniques developed by Persian and Syrian astronomers, put forward the idea of a heliocentric universe. The history of astronomy is scattered with clashes between entrenched beliefs and new ideas, from the suggestion that the moon and sun were not deities—which led to Anaxagoras’ trial and exile from Athens—to Galileo’s conviction two thousand years later in 1633 on suspicion of heresy for following the views of Copernicus, said to run contrary to Holy Scripture. But the story is also one of the transmission of knowledge between cultures, of the determination and vision of individuals, and of the potent combination of imagination, observation, and reasoning.

Fiction is a safe place for speculation, as Galileo and his contemporary Johannes Kepler both found. In his Sidereus nuncius (Starry Messenger, 1610), using the newly invented telescope, Galileo noted that far from being a smooth sphere, as Aristotle had proposed, the moon was “full of inequalities, uneven, full of hollows and protuberances, just like the surface of the Earth itself.” A year earlier, in Astronomia nova, Kepler had developed new mathematical laws for the orbits of the planets. But both men, wary of putting all their speculation into definitive treatises, turned to imaginative modes. In Galileo’s invented dialogue between “the Two Chief World Systems” (1632), his character Salviati suggests that some of the moon’s dark areas might be forested and the mountains snow-covered, and admits that he has even played with the idea of living creatures there. In Kepler’s novel Somnium (The Dream, 1634), dense with footnotes—sometimes called the first science fiction—he claims that Earth’s motion would be visible from the moon’s surface, and he imagines it alive with plants and animals, suggesting, too, that one day humans might reach it.

The telescope was the great driver of this new knowledge, prompting the first maps of the moon’s surface. Lunar conveys this excitement through its superb illustrations, from Thomas Harriot’s rough sketches of 1609—the first using a telescope—to Grimaldi’s map for Giovanni Battista Riccioli’s Almagestum novum (1651), in which the plains (described as seas) and the craters first received their familiar names.

Lunar excels in the visual evocation of the growing understanding, imagining, and representation of the moon over millennia, from the cave paintings of Lascaux, dating to 15,000 years ago, up to today. In the modern era, the misty luminosity of Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon (circa 1825–1830) stands in contrast to Gustave Doré’s Gothic illustrations for the Adventures of Baron Münchausen, while the moon’s popular appeal is felt in the whimsical paper moons of late-nineteenth-century cartes de visite as much as in the dramatic film posters of the twentieth century. One outstanding double-page spread is filled with the “darkly beautiful” illustrations of an English edition of Jules Verne’s novels From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1870). As Lunar and Our Moon point out, the tradition of linking fiction and space travel, as well as the dystopian use of the moon as a mirror of the dark side of earthly life, follows a line from Poe, Verne, and H.G. Wells to the films of Georges Méliès and Fritz Lang to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Within this sequence, From the Earth to the Moon stands out as the first work to concentrate on the journey itself, its story propelled, Boyle notes, by the “technological challenges, from the Columbiad’s construction and launch base to the primitive telemetry used to track it.” The Apollo command ship of 1969 was called Columbia, perhaps with an implicit nod to Columbus’s “discovery” of America. Building on Verne’s ideas, the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who read the book as a boy in bed with scarlet fever, worked out that multistage rockets would be the best way of reaching the moon—a solution developed by the German physicist Hermann Oberth and after him by Wernher von Braun. After World War II, with a new generation of rockets, the moon was at last within reach.

Just as Sumerian and Egyptian priests and rulers sought to dominate through their knowledge of the moon’s phases, so “our Moon” became the site of power struggles and rivalries. Politics had always been entwined with space ambitions. Writing in Lunar of the beliefs of the Native American Lakota people, in which the patterns of the cosmos mirror those of Earth, the artist Suzanne Kite comments that the charts produced by the USGS

map the United States’ desire to colonize, to own and to know…perpetuating systems of domination and exploitation even within the cosmic domain, reinforcing hierarchies that privilege human interests above all else.

Competing interests dominate recent history. Kennedy’s announcement of the moon program came around six weeks after Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth in April 1961. Throughout the 1960s American Rangers, Surveyors, and Lunar Orbiters and Russian landers sent back images and collected lunar dust and rock, exploring possible landing sites. After the Apollo projects there was a lull from the mid-1970s as attention turned to other, less expensive space projects. But the moon race began again in the 1990s, and since the millennium other nations have joined in, including the European Space Agency, Japan, India, and China.

In 2024 China’s Chang’e-6 collected the first samples from the moon’s dark side. Sixty-five years earlier in October 1959, when the Soviet Luna 3 mission sent back the first views of it, they had taken everyone by surprise. Instead of being covered with the familiar maria, craters, and ridges, its surface was almost entirely highland terrain, with a thick crust, high peaks, and plunging basins. One area, the permanently shadowed South Pole Aitken, is now a focus of interest, partly because its deep basins “may host large deposits of water ice, which could help maintain a sustained human presence.”

Boyle writes atmospherically of the moon’s airless, dusty, silent environment, its temperatures swinging from 246 degrees Fahrenheit at noon on its equator to −300 degrees Fahrenheit at night. This is far beyond human endurance, yet the idea of human settlement persists and intensifies. We are now on the verge of a new wave of moon landings, with NASA’s manned Artemis III mission to that shadowed south pole due to start in 2027. But this time, as Emily A. Margolis writes in Lunar, “NASA intends to stay”: the American landings will be the beginning “of a permanent human presence offworld, the development of a cislunar economy, and future human exploration of Mars.” Europe, Japan, and Canada have supporting roles in NASA’s project, while China is planning its own program of crewed missions, also heading to the lunar south pole with the aim of setting up a research station.

In 1967, two years before Apollo 11, the Outer Space Treaty ruled out national claims on a celestial body, but the treaty contains suggestive language safeguarding areas of landing and research that companies or countries might exploit. One of a series of separate bilateral NASA agreements allows for “extraction and use of space resources.” In other words: Drill, baby, drill.

In this international competition the global possessive of Boyle’s Our Moon takes on a sour tinge. In late 2022 a privately funded Japanese lander, which crashed on arrival, was carrying a rover from the United Arab Emirates. Global corporations and ambitious billionaires are riding the new surge: Elon Musk’s SpaceX now controls nearly a quarter of all space launches. Two human landing systems are being developed for the Artemis missions: one is Musk’s SpaceX Starship; the other is Blue Moon, from Jeff Bezos’s aerospace company, Blue Origin. Both are currently being tested. “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars,” declared President Donald Trump in his 2025 inaugural address. The moon is a staging post: the stated aim is to plant the Stars and Stripes on Mars.

Blue Origin was founded by Bezos, according to its website, “with a vision of millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth.” Yet for most of us sentimental Earth-bound mortals, watching it swell from crescent to full and back to dark again, the moon retains its poetic, mythic power. However disputed, exploited, crowded, and despoiled it may become, we will cling stubbornly to the mystery of the Queen of Heaven, alone and resplendent, lighting the darkness of our night.