Blue
Moon
Lunacy
 hen Is The Next
"Blue Moon?"
Well, if you live in the
Americas, Europe, Africa, India or western Russia, you might hear
that there is a “Blue Moon” in July of this year. (Note: written in 2004) If you live in
Hong Kong, Japan, Australia or eastern Russia, you might hear
there is a Blue Moon in August. Confused? Trying to define “Blue
Moon” is confusing at the best of times, as I discovered while
researching this article!
The current popular
definition of a Blue Moon is “the second Full Moon in the same
calendar month.” But just figuring out when any Full Moon takes
place can be tricky business. Time zones must be taken into
account, which could change the day and even the month that it
falls on. My Canadian calendar for 2004 says there is a Full Moon
on July 31 at 2:04 PM, Eastern Daylight Time, but a calendar sold
in Tokyo, for instance, would show it on August 1 at 3:05 AM. We
know there are also Full Moons on July 2 and August 29 (or 30, in
the far east time zones), so depending on where you live the
second Moon will either be on July 31 or August 30. Does this
really mean the “Blue Moon” is different for different parts of
the world? Well, yes and no.
The deeper problem is that
the popular definition of “Blue Moon”—the second Full Moon in a
calendar month—is based on misinterpreted information that was
published in a Sky and Telescope magazine article in 1946!
Ironically, it was a 1999 article in the same magazine that
discovered and corrected the mistake, but by that time the media,
Internet, and even the Trivial Pursuit game, had proliferated the
incorrect definition and now most of the world understands an
incorrect, if persistent, definition of “Blue Moon.”
So Just What Is A "Blue Moon?"
An older traditional
meaning of “Blue Moon” goes back to the 19th century and means the
third Full Moon in a season which has four Full Moons. So what,
you say? Well, each season consists of 3 months, typically with
one Full Moon per month, so having four Full Moons land in a
3-month season is something that happens, quite literally, only
once in a Blue Moon. The Maine Farmers’ Almanac (which was
incorrectly referenced in the now-infamous 1946 article)
reportedly marked this third of four Full Moons in blue, in honour
of an even older use of the term.
What—another definition??
Yup. The earliest reference to anything about a “blue Moon” comes
from a rhyme going back to 1528: “If they say the Moon is blue, We
must believe that it is true.” Saying the Moon was blue was like
saying the Moon was made of green cheese—in other words, it was an
unquestioned impossibility.
Or is it impossible??
There is yet another explanation of “Blue Moon” which refers to
the actual colour of the Moon to the naked eye. Now: I’ve seen
brilliant white Moons and warm yellowish Moons, orange and blood
red Moons during lunar eclipses, I’ve even seen Moons of assorted
colours, shapes and sizes dancing the bonfire at WiccanFest* in
various states of (un)dress, but I’ve never seen a blue Moon.
However, there are times throughout history when the Moon actually
had a bluish tinge, after forest fires or volcanic eruptions,
caused by refracted light in Earth’s atmosphere. (By the way, the
Moon could be in any visible lunar phase for this to happen, not
just a Full Moon.)
The actual phrase “once in
a blue Moon” apparently dates back to the mid-19th century. By
this time it was reasonably well known that occasionally the Moon
really did appear blue under certain atmospheric conditions, so
the phrase took on the revised meaning of “once in a while,”
rather than “never” or “gimme a break!”
Odd Moon Out
But wait a second—how did
we get from a silly cultural expression to the third Full Moon out
of four being marked in the Maine Farmers’ Almanac? And more to
the point, why would anyone care how many Full Moons there are in
a season?
Before you go concluding
that this is yet another Pagan influence lingering in secular
culture, you should know that the main reason for identifying the
seasonal Full Moons was to calculate Christian holidays. Easter is
deemed to be the Sunday after the first Full Moon following the
vernal (spring) equinox (called the Paschal or “Passover” Moon in
the Jewish calendar—Jesus being Jewish, and the timing of Easter
being linked to Passover). Since many Christian holidays are timed
in relation to Easter, it became extremely important to be able to
determine an accurate date for it.
Full Moons are given
special names and meanings in many cultural traditions, as any
good Pagan knows. (So yes, Virginia, there does seem to be a Pagan
connection after all, albeit an indirect one.) Full Moons are
spaced 29.5 days apart, so there is typically one per month—12
months, 12 Moon names, 12 Full Moons. So far so good. The problem
comes when we occasionally get 13 Full Moons in the span of a year
(which happens about every 2-3 years). With only 12 Moon
designations, what to do with the 13th Moon? The Maine Farmers’
Almanac claimed this caused the early Christian monks such
distress when calculating their calendars that it is the reason
why the number 13 became cursed as being unlucky. At some point
this extra Moon became known as the “Blue Moon,” which was deemed
to be the third Full Moon in a season that had an
extra—fourth—Full Moon.
The Well-Seasoned Moon
But wait a minute—the
third Full Moon? Why not the fourth, which would seem logical as
the “extra” Moon in a season normally populated by three? For this
we must go back to the Easter-related Christian holidays. The
period of Lent, which begins precisely 46 days before Easter, must
contain the Lenten Moon which is considered to be the last Full
Moon of the winter season which ends at the vernal equinox.
Ahhh, now we start to see
the need to count the number of Moons per season! Since the last
Moon of a season can be special (e.g., Lenten Moon) and the first
Moon can be special (e.g., Paschal Moon), the “extra” position
falls to the second or third Moon in a season that happens to
contain four. Why the third is designated as the “extra” rather
than the second remains a mystery—no one seems to know where the
Maine Farmers’ Almanac got their “Blue Moon” rule from. One
website I found speculates that Full Moons were simply counted as
the “first,” “second” and “last” of a season, so that the extra
defaulted to the third.
So now all that’s left is
to figure out the beginning and end of the seasons, which is
straightforward—right? Well, again, not exactly. Seasons are
defined by the solstices (times of maximum or minimum daylight, in
June and December) and the equinoxes (times of equal day and
night, in March and September). But anyone born near the cusp
between two zodiac signs knows that the position of the Sun varies
slightly from year to year. The Sun actually reaches the vernal
equinox position anywhere from the evening of March 19 to the
early morning of March 22, depending on the year and which time
zone you happen to be in at the time.
And then there’s whether
you calculate the equinox by the Sun’s actual position or by
averaging its position (like the Maine Almanac did), or just using
a fixed date (like the Roman Catholic Church does). Just as time
zones can complicate the date of Blue Moons rendered by the
“monthly” method, your method of calculating the equinoxes and
solstices can change which season winds up saddled with the 13th
Full Moon. You can start to sympathise with those poor Christian
monks!
And we won’t even go into
the Gregorian versus Julian calendar, resulting in different
Easter dates between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox
Churches! Suffice it to say that the Roman Catholic Church decided
in 325 CE that the vernal equinox, for its purpose, was deemed to
reside henceforth on March 21, rain or shine, regardless of what
the Sun happened to be doing at the time. Amen.
Blue Moon? You Choose!
So at the end of the day
(or month...or season) just when is the next Blue Moon, and how
often does it happen? By the current popular definition (two Moons
in a month) a Blue Moon happens about every 2½ years, and by the
older definition (third Moon in a season of four) it is about the
same frequency, but the formulae yield totally different dates and
even different years. The next Blue Moon by the “monthly”
definition is July 31, 2004...or August 30 if you happen to be reading
this while basking on a beach in the Fiji Islands. By the older
“seasonal” calculation, there hasn’t been a Blue Moon since 2002
(in either August or November, depending on how you partition your
seasons) and there won’t be one again until August 2005.
And does a Blue Moon have
any astrological meaning? Nope, none that I’ve ever heard of. On
the other hand, I suppose we could look at the possible
significance of two Full Moons in the same sign, 29.5 days
apart—or even two New Moons in the same sign, which happened in
Aries back in March and April of this year, and which has happened
only 37 times in the last 100 years... Nope nope nope, not gonna
go there. You’ll have to go back and look it up in The Low-Down on the
Far-Out (Spring Equinox 2004). That’s my story and I’m sticking to
it.
© 2004,
Wendy Guy. All
rights reserved. Originally published in the Summer 2004 issue of Cauldron and
Quill Magazine.
*
WiccanFest is an annual Pagan spring celebration festival in Ontario,
Canada.
Bibliography:
(Opens in a new window. URLs current as of
July 2004. Unlinked URLs indicate web pages that are no longer available.)
http://www.obliquity.com/astro/bluemoon.html
(great general site about Blue Moons)
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bluemoon1.html
http://www.inconstantMoon.com/cyc_blue.htm
http://www.griffithobs.org/ipsbluemoon.html
(good folklore information on Blue Moons)
http://skyandtelescope.com/
http://www.projectpluto.com/bluemoon.htm
(quotes the Almanac, listing names of
Moons per season)
http://members.aol.com/ivycleartoes/moons.html
(suggests counting of first, second and last Moons)
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