Published 50 years after the first Moon landing, Ben Moore’s lunar biography, The Moon: Past, Present & Future (2019), is part of a broader body of work “focused on understanding the origin and evolution of the Universe and how stars, planets and galaxies form.”
The author and professor of astrophysics at the University of Zurich’s Centre for Theoretical Astrophysics and Cosmology is also a musician who works with the sounds of space. DW spoke with Moore to learn more about the mythology of the Moon a half-century after that first giant leap.
Why are people so fascinated by the Moon?
I think one of the main things is that it’s a beautiful sight in the night sky to look out at. It’s the most obvious visible thing you can see with your eye. Because it’s so near, you can see features on the Moon with your eye like the grey patches which are actually ancient lava fields that are made of solidified basalt rock, and those are the features that different cultures have associated things with. The Chinese associated those features with a rabbit or hare in the Moon; in the Germanic cultures, it was often a child or a man in the Moon.
Why have people interpreted the Moon and seen things on its face?
It goes back thousands of years before humanity understood more about the Moon. It was a sort of mythical thing and associated with the gods and with folklore that has come down through the generations. In the Germanic cultures, for example, the boy or the face of the man in the Moon was sometimes associated with a man that had been found thieving and was banished to the Moon to live there for eternity.
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So it could be that by telling these stories, people were teaching or learning lessons?
Yes. The emerging cultures were trying to make sense of the world around them without the knowledge that we have today. They would make up stories and I think that’s how they tried to make sense of the cosmos. And you know, for example, that the first advanced civilisation was the Sumerians who invented writing. They invented the wheel. This was 5,000 years ago and the Moon was the most important god for the Sumerians. They had dedicated astronomers who did nothing but watch the Moon and try and work out patterns in the Moon and when the eclipses would occur.
They associated the eclipses with events that were going to happen on Earth, such as wars or famines. The astronomers would have to tell the ruling king when these were going to occur – during these events the king would sometimes put in place a fake temporary king who would suffer any bad consequences.
Are there examples of those superstitions continuing in contemporary culture?
It was the sort of beginnings of astrology that came from the Sumerians – not the astrology that we have today about the planetary alignments affecting humans based on their birthdate. The Sumerian astrology was more about the omens and myths associated with the eclipses and the appearance of the Moon.
Moving ahead a few thousand years, the Romans actually took these myths even further and Ptolemy [Editor’s note: Claudius] developed his modern astrology based on the continuation of that. We still have that today. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make any scientific sense whatsoever and there’s no evidence astrology works at all. But it still remains with us, a remnant of the first cultures associating the Moon with affecting life on Earth.
Your recently published book, The Moon: Past, Present & Future, is presented as a biography of the Moon. Why?
My book is the entire story of the Moon – the history, the present-day knowledge and the future of our Moon. So it’s really the life story of our Moon from its origins to the end of its time. What are its effects on the Earth, and life on Earth as well, which are quite fascinating.