Moon-pulled
Going tidal & other lunacies
Humans are constituted of about 60% percent water. The gravitational force of the moon pulls at bodies of earthly water and gives them consistent bulges called tides. So I’ve often wondered in the night of a full moon when I might want to turn my throat into a tube and just howl to cure the disturbed insomniac fantods, if I’m having an actual tidal bulge.
Is it possible that humans can be moon-pulled? Yes-ish.
“It is the very error of the moon. She comes more nearer earth than she was wont. And makes men mad.”
_the maid Emilia tells Othello, in Shakespeare’s Othello, Act 5, Scene 2
All bodies of water have tides, from a cup of a coffee to your bathtub, but you just won’t notice them on the smaller scale. Only the oceans (and the greatest of the Great Lakes) go tidal in a measurable way, not a puddle. In this scenario, humans are more of a puddle.
If we don’t quite go tidal, is the cycle of the moon aligning with the timing (and moods!) of a woman’s menstrual cycle also just anecdotal?
From National Geographic,
Since time immemorial, people around the world have believed that the full moon can alter the body and mind, for example by making us more violent and erratic. The very word “lunatic,” after all, derives from the Latin term for moon.
But lunatics and scientists alike haven’t been able to link full moons to human behavior officially (unrequitedly hunting for connections between homicide rates, admissions to trauma centers or mental health units, and lunar cycles to no avail)—until lately. There are some new studies, including one released this summer, that for the first time may at last link, if minorly, the full moon with unrest.
The tide is changing as recent research suggests the lunar cycle has a subtle influence on some people—specifically when it comes to cyclical phenomena such as sleep, the female menstrual cycle, and the periodic mood swings of people with bipolar disorder.
One study National Geographic cited tracked sleep between members of an indigenous tribe in rural Argentina with little/no electricity and undergrads in Seattle with no clue where or when there’s a moon event among so much artificial city light. Surprisingly, both showed a later bedtime and heightened sleep disturbance on full moon nights.
Another unexpected result: Many subjects in both study groups also slept less around the new moon, the lunar phase during which the moon generally isn’t visible.
That dashes another of my theories that perhaps the moon-somnia has more to do with light pollution of this bright body knocking on your window than any negligible gravitational pull. At least in my house this seems possible, where the curtains run thin. But nope. While the increased light is known to affect the life within oceans—corals, bristle worms, sea urchins, mollusks, fish and crabs may be lunar-triggered to spawn—but here on dry ground us wet humans perhaps are only harkening back to our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors who learned to accumulate more resources in the enlightened nights of the lunar cycle.
For the bipolar, they have linked in a study released in 2017, some synchronized shifts between mania and depression and the phases of the moon (while others didn’t). And a 2021 study revealed that some of the women’s menstrual cycles (with its similar 28 day cycle) coincided with the full moon, others with the new moon, some switching off, and others not at all. Still it’s all enough to exceed random. Perhaps, say researchers, the correlation between human and moon was always there but there were never such long-form studies done to properly detect them.
Science might be finally taking more seriously what those old weirdos like Nosferatu, of silent vampire film fame, have always known. Lurking in our moonlit nightmares and the ca-coffin-ous corners of our imagination, is this big-eared, terrible toothed, pale, bald, over-clawed fellow. By the way I just saw him lurching across the big screen at our amazing Tarrytown Music Hall the other day to the accompanying tunes of a robotic band (PAM for Partially Artificial Musicians), until the artificial part of the music unravelled into oblivion (computer/mechanical malfunction) and all that was left was the working arm of the real life cellist. I’ll write more about the robotic band’s desertion another time, but that was quite a moment, when the flesh and blood human and the fragile celluloid won out in stamina over the new tech of computer software miscommunicating with mechanized violin bows and drum kit run amuck. Blame this guy:
Are nocturnal vampires busier during a full moon? Logic would assume less busy since there’s more moonlight to blind them (with more of that reflected sunlight they hate), but if we’re going with the gravitational pull/innate hunter-gatherer theories, then it might make sense for them to further activate, though no movie ever seems to comply with any consistent ideas on this since cinema just loves a full moon.
If you’d like to test all these theories for yourself:
Our next full moon is Thursday, October 17, a supermoon, when it appears larger than the usual. Supermoons, according to Space.com,
occur when the full moon coincides with the moon being at the point in its orbit within 90% of its closest approach to Earth, called Perigee. October’s supermoon will be the closest supermoon of the year.
Interesting to note that most of the time, the “full” moon isn’t truly full, since we always see the same side of the moon and part of it is covered in shadow as the moon rotates. “Only when the moon, Earth and the sun are perfectly aligned is the moon 100% full.”
As unusual as a real full moon is, “blue” moons are actually more common, when the full moon happens four times in a season or, as some measure, twice in one month. The next blue moon is May 31, 2026. From Space.com:
A seasonal Blue Moon is the traditional definition of a Blue Moon and refers to the third full moon in a season that has four full moons according to NASA. The second definition—which arose from a misunderstanding of the original—is the monthly Blue Moon, referring to the second full moon in a single calendar month. Today, this monthly Blue Moon is accepted as an alternative definition rather than a mistake, according to Time and Date.
And, there’s a different flavor moon for every taste: We’ve got January’s Wolf Moon, February’s Snow Moon, March’s Worm, April Pink, May Flower, June Strawberry, July Buck, August Sturgeon, September Harvest, October Hunter’s (and this time a supermoon), November Beaver (Nov 15th in 2024), and December Cold (also on the 15th). Why these names?
Many cultures have given distinct names to each month’s full moon. The names were applied to the entire month in which each occurred. The Farmer’s Almanac lists several names that are commonly used in the United States. There are some variations in the moon names, but in general, the same ones were used among the Algonquin tribes from New England on west to Lake Superior. European settlers followed their own customs and created some of their own names.
These names tend to track with Native American seasons and agricultural cycles and most still make sense to us nowadays. So January acknowledges the wolves one might hear howling in the winter as they search for food, snow for obvious reasons if we should be so lucky, the worm for when the ground is thawing, pink for the bloom of the wildflower ground phlox (so don’t expect the moon to be rosy). Flowers, strawberries, bucks all make sense—but sturgeon? Sturgeon is less obvious to us now that their population has been in great decline due to overfishing and habitat loss (also apparent in my neighborhood river the Hudson), but back in the day, this large dinosaury fish was an important food source for Algonquin tribes around the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain; onto: harvest, hunter, cold.
If you’re feeling doubly moony right now and don’t know why: We are currently experiencing something of a two-moon moment, as our planet is as usual circled by our familiar moon plus we have an asteroid joining us that is temporarily in orbit here for a bit. This asteroid unpoetically named 2024 PT5 is a mini-moon while it lasts. Says an MIT astronomer, Richard Binzel on Earth.com,
“These happen with some frequency, but we rarely see them because they’re very small and very hard to detect. Only recently has our survey capability reached the point of spotting them routinely.”
Much like the better calibrated studies above that may now reveal things that were there all along. Can we say the same about the werewolves of ancient mythology who transform from men into hirsute man-wolves during a full moon, TBD.
From one lunatic to another, I love this!
I've been focusing on spontaneous synchronization lately. It's everywhere, not the least of which during human menstrual cycles... but also in the very smallest things all the way to the very largest things.
The Earth-Moon system is an incredible example of this type of sync. We only ever see one side of the moon, and that's because that side always faces the Earth. In other words, the Moon rotates at exactly the same pace as it goes around the Earth. That is not some cosmic coincidence, but instead another example of the much larger phenomenon of sync.
Sync can generally be explained by whatever field it occurs in, by mundane means, without evoking any sort of woo or mysterious stuff. The crazy thing is that the phenomenon of spontaneous sync seems to emerge everywhere, quite apart from the systems in which they originate.
Fireflies are another really good example you're already familiar with (and may have already written about).