The ancient Norsemen believed (and I think they were right) that a blood moon like the one that entranced us all last weekend was caused by the wolf-gods Skoll and Hati devouring the moon.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
It bewitched me, out on my Garran street in my dressing gown at 5am on that Saturday morning (coincidentally the day of the Super Saturday polls) to think of the bloodied moon as a kind of cosmic Dog’s Breakfast.
Whatever explanation of the blood moon one chooses, all of the mythical, magical folkloric ones (every human civilisation and tribe has had beliefs about lunar eclipses) seem more plausible than the plain scientific, astronomical one.
“It’s caused,” one of my dressing-gowned neighbours (and a notorious bore) offered to those of us gathered together on the frosty street, “when the moon passes directly behind Earth and into Earth’s shadow.”
“Yeah. Right,” the rest of us sniggered amongst ourselves, automatically dismissing this fake info, this factoid. We preferred our pet mythological explanations.
That Saturday evening I thought it disappointing that no panellist of ABC TV’s marathon Super Saturday coverage of the unfolding by-elections gave the moon any credit for what was happening. Emeritus psephologist Antony Green, all dry facts, figures, mathematics and algebra, was especially disappointing.
Blood moon myth and folklore has always thought the moon’s sudden ruddiness a portent of something big.
If party politics seems especially small and wriggly and trivial in these times it may be because news of small goings-on on Earth (for example in the electorates of Braddon, Longman, Mayo, Fremantle and Perth) is increasingly eclipsed by news of discoveries and great goings-on in the universe.
While the election campaigns ahead of Super Saturday were under way, the majestic planet Mars was having a mind-bogglingly eventful and newsy July. There have been fabulous dust storms there and astrophotographers’ pictures of them have been spellbinding.
Then, the Red Planet itself bustled and tangoed closer and closer to us until, in the last trivial days of the Super Saturday campaignings, it was a big, ruby red presence in our heavens. On Tuesday of this week, while political Earthlings gibbered on about what the Longman result meant, grown-up Earthlings were much more excited by the fact that early on Tuesday morning Mars made its closest approach to Earth (a trifling 57.6 million kilometres) since 2003. It will be 269 years before Mars comes any closer to us than this, by which time today’s party political actors and their parties will be forgotten and fossilised.
There has never been such an abundance of this space wondernews. The Curiosity Rover on Mars, blessed with 17 cameras, is even taking and sending home selfies and Earthbound mankind, bewitched, gets to see them on the Internet and evening news.
Just this morning (I am handcrafting this column on a Tuesday) I have via the online Discover magazine, been marvelling at pictures captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft of a region of the sun giving a display of flares and towering magnetic field lines. The field lines are gigantically long, many times the length of the diameter of our dear little Earth.
And perhaps the greatest joy of following modern achievements of space science is the reminder these achievements give us of what our species is capable of, at its best. There is surely no one working at NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory who would hire one of mankind’s Donald Trumps, Boris Johnsons, Nigel Farranges and Eric Abetzs to so much as walk their dog or mow their lawn.
Yes, our species at its worst is contemptible. But at its best can devise a Curiosity Rover and then whoosh it away to Mars, hit the Martian bullseye (usually 225 million km away!) and keep up a learned conversation with it across that unimaginable distance. At our best, as Shakespeare, struggling inarticulately for the words to express his admiration for us, put it, “What a piece of work is a [human]. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty … How like a god.”
As, growing up at last, I wean myself off the childish interest in political news and current affairs, I give lots of the credit to space science. To be a mature Earthling is to spend as little time as possible bogged down here on Earth, in Trump and Putin’s unhappy Helsinki, in the giggling swamp of Boris Johnson’s ambitions, in the Super Saturday electorates.
Senator Eric Abetz’s and PM Turnbull’s bringing up, while campaigning in Braddon, a local candidate’s ancient (1994) conviction for some misdemeanour in an attempt to discredit that candidate, was already small and nasty. But coming as it did at exactly the same time as the breathtaking news of the discovery of a lake (perhaps of water!) on Mars, the Braddon news item was dwarfed and flushed away down the lavatory of Life by the profound grandeur of the Big Picture news about Mars.
And it’s not that the gods took no interest in Super Saturday. One sees their divine intervention (thank you Skoll and Hati, if it was you) in the thwarting of the dynastic ambitions of the Downer family. The delightfully poor result in Mayo for the Liberal’s Georgina Downer, the fiercely conservative daughter of the appalling Alexander, is inexplicable unless one gives the gods (and the enigmatic, god-like moon) some credit for it.
