Thursday 15 December 2016

Moon And Stars

"Swindapa listened to the Silent Song, the song that the stars danced to with their mother the Moon. Sometimes it was hard to hear it, but then you must try less, not more, and it came."
-SM Stirling, On The Oceans Of Eternity (New York, 2000), Chapter Twenty-Six, p. 526.

So there is a story, or a story within the story, in which the stars are the daughters of the Moon. Who is their father? Or did they need a father? As with other mythical stories, we can comprehend the details if they are recounted to us. However, knowing what we now do about the relative sizes and distances of the stars and Moon, we can no longer buy into such a myth even as a metaphor.

I know that some neo-Pagans revere the Moon. Personally, I regard the Sun as the source of light and life and thus as the agent or instrument of knowledge. There are other suns but they are all one. Poul Anderson updates ancient myths in Tau Zero.

7 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Exactly! It's impossible for anyone with KNOWLEDGE of real astronomy to take the Moon as seriously as Swindapa and her people does. Even the smallest stars are vastly larger than a mere moon.

Sean

Paul Shackley said...

Sean,
But the Moon is also necessary for life on Earth.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

The EFFECTS of our Earth having such a large Moon did play a role in how life arose on Earth. But, the Moon itself is not a living person or being. And certainly not a goddess of the kind worshiped by Swindapa's people.

Merry Christmas! Sean

Jim Baerg said...

"But the Moon is also necessary for life on Earth."
It is unknown whether that is true.
In the next few decades we may find evidence for life on exoplanets and be able to see if it only occurs on exoplanets with large exomoons.

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

When I read that, I thought, because I had read it in a story by Larry Niven, that the gravitation of a large moon was necessary to pull most of the Terrestrial atmosphere away to prevent it from being like the thick atmosphere on Venus. I have since been told some other reason why the Moon is important but I will have to check what it was.

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

When I wrote that...

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Jim!

I can see Earth having or not having so large a Moon as the one we have drastically affecting how life would have evolved on it. But I would have to do some serious digging to find out what the scientists think.

Ad astra! Sean