Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The moon, the watching witching moon
    The moon, the watching witching moon
    The moon, the watching witching moon
    Ebook174 pages1 hour

    The moon, the watching witching moon

    By David Campbell Callender

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    How did the moon begin? no one knows for sure ( but there are some good guesses). Why does the moon control the tides? Why so important to our lives and art, our unconscious and numbering systems? And is it true that wolves come out to roam in the full of the moon, and animals and humans go “lunar”?
    Read all about it here, the first integrated account of the moon’s art and science, in a beautifully read entrancing work by the Irish naturalist David Campbell Callender speaking through the voice of his granddaughter, Ruth Finnegan.

    And then, the watching witching moon is just - so beautiful.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu.com
    Release dateOct 14, 2022
    ISBN9781471047268
    The moon, the watching witching moon

    Related to The moon, the watching witching moon

    Related ebooks

    Astronomy & Space Sciences For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Book Reviews

      Apr 30, 2020

      Book Reviews
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Soul’s Blueprint

      Oct 28, 2020

      The Soul’s Blueprint
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Summer Eclipses

      Apr 2, 2020

      The Summer Eclipses
      8 min read

    • Article

      Your Action Guide

      May 27, 2021

      Jupiter is retrograde in Aquarius. Saturn is retrograde in Aquarius. Neptune is retrograde in Pisces. Pluto is retrograde in Capricorn. f 1:12 p.m. Moon sextile Neptune. Effort and creativity will improve your status. a 4:48 p.m. Mercury opposite Sat

      4 min read

    • Article

      Chaos Makes the Multiverse Unnecessary

      Jun 22, 2017

      Scientists look around the universe and see amazing structure. There are objects and processes of fantastic complexity. Every action in our universe follows exact laws of nature that are perfectly expressed in a mathematical language. These laws of n

      17 min read

    • Article

      Book Reviews

      Dec 1, 2020

      Book Reviews
      3 min read

    • Article

      The New ASTROLOGY

      Aug 18, 2022

      The New ASTROLOGY
      3 min read

    • Article

      Book Reviews

      Mar 24, 2022

      Book Reviews
      3 min read

    • Article

      Cosmology’s Century: An Inside History of Our Modern Understanding of the Universe

      Oct 8, 2020

      James Peebles details the journey through the last 100 years of astronomy and cosmology that have left us pondering the universe’s biggest questions. Peebles offers a unique insight and perspective into how the cosmos has evolved over the last 13.8 b

      1 min read

    • Article

      Stars Of Wonder

      Jul 4, 2021

      Stars Of Wonder
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Past & Future Of Star Names

      Apr 20, 2023

      The Past & Future Of Star Names
      11 min read

    • Article

      Triple Goddess

      Sep 1, 2020

      Triple Goddess
      4 min read

    • Article

      The New ASTROLOGY

      Sep 23, 2021

      The New ASTROLOGY
      3 min read

    • Article

      Book Reviews

      May 23, 2019

      Book Reviews
      3 min read

    • Article

      The New ASTROLOGY

      Feb 6, 2020

      The New ASTROLOGY
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Sun’s Eternal Journey

      Aug 18, 2022

      The Sun’s Eternal Journey
      9 min read

    • Article

      Sagittarius 2023

      Nov 23, 2022

      January: Venus conjoins Pluto in Capricorn on the 1st in the house of your cash flow (the 2nd), making you lean toward extravagance. Mars stations direct in Gemini on the 12th, sparking a talkfest with your significant other that takes you in another

      3 min read

    • Article

      Book Reviews

      Oct 1, 2020

      Book Reviews
      3 min read

    • Article

      The New ASTROLOGY

      Apr 2, 2020

      The New ASTROLOGY
      3 min read

    • Article

      Astrology for The New Age

      Jun 24, 2021

      If you are reading this, noble ones, you must have a) survived the pandemic so far, b) survived (if you live west of the 100th meridian, as does your merry columnist) the summer forest fires that are all too frequent in the American West as a result

      8 min read

    • Article

      The New ASTROLOGY

      May 23, 2019

      The New ASTROLOGY
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The moon, the watching witching moon

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The moon, the watching witching moon - David Campbell Callender

      The moon, the watching witching moon

      David Campbell Callender

      THE MOON

      2022

      CALLENDER NATURE

      ISBN 978-1-4710-4726-8

      Callender Press ebook

      Old Bletchley

      www.callenderpress.co.uk

      God made two great lights--the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night (Biblical Book of Genesis)

      "If you shoot for the stars and hit the moon, it's okay. But you've got to shoot for something.

      Many people don't ever shoot"  (Confucius)

      If you want the moon, do not hide from the night. If you want a rose, do not run from the thorns. If you want love, do not hide from yourself (Rumi)

      CONTENTS

      Remembering

      The  fascination of the moon

      The moon’s physical nature and her human impact

      Where did the moon come from?

      Human lunar intrusions

      The moon’s art and inspiration

      The proverb-creating moon

      Her romance and mythology

      Oh wild, mad, witching  moon

      Our spiritual, unconscious, healing moon

      Farewell and hail, oh great moon

      Appendices

        Further science for those who want

        More moon sayings

        More poems and tales

      Acknowledgements and references

      Questions for thought and action

      You might also like

      Hearing Others’ Voices

      Join us

      Read next?

      Remembering

      I remember when I was a child climbing over the rocks, no road then, up to our place in Donegal. No street lights there, no road, no electricity.

      The light of the moon was our saving. We could see where we would go, where to place our hands on the rocks, and hold..

      Under the full moon, all the little rabbits would come out of their burrows and play in the sand and the grass. The ants scuttled around and even the birds, not just the night birds, the owls, but the other birds would raise their heads from their nests and look out, and the little chicks open their beaks for food (the worms were hiding under the ground, they didn't like the early birds or the moonlight that brought them out in the early dawn).

      Ever since then, like my mother before me and her mother"s mother too I always know the phases of the moon (there is no need for city dwellers to know, they live by other, contaminating, lights)

      I knew the beautiful crescent,

      a line in the sky, enchanted, entrancing, almost too slim to see.

      And then the magically growing crescent, night by night, and again and again, increasing its presence and inspiration. And the half moon growing and grown into the full and the great  spring and ebb tides that the moon draws across our world. Then slowly fainting, fading, the light going out over Africa, over the Pacific, over the islands, drawing the earth under the darkness and all people iwithin its light and dark.

      Yes, that moon-dark when the witches roam. But my mother said they are abroad all the time, within us, in the dark, sudden and slow, of the moon. We need to watch for them.

      Where did she come from? Carved somehow from the Pacific Ocean ( they seemed to march)? Captured as she past?

      I had no idea - but I had to wonder, 

      To me the moon feels both close, so she is she and personal, and far distant -  a neuter and with a capital letter, an object, for us to revere, scientists to study, far off in the sky. So please dear reader forgive my inconsistencies in gender and spellings. They reflect the fluid ambiguity of the moon,

      And all the time whether we are aware of it or not, the ever-recycling moon, serene in the sky, is watching and entrancing us.

      The nature, fascination and human impact  of the moon

      Made of green cheese? Home of the Man-In-The- ? ? Fiddled into existence  by a leaping cow?

      Well maybe not - though with a mysterious object  like moon, who knows? But certainly it has always intrigued human beings.

      Here for example is one of the earliest depictions (a map?) we have of the moon, the Neolithic carving in Knowth, Ireland with its close resemblance to a naked-eye view of the moon.

      There are many others too, both images and speculations, throughout history, for the moon, as she does still, has always fascinated.

      Studying the moon’s cycles was in fact already a key interest of ancient astronomy. In the 5th century BC, Babylonian astronomers had recorded the 18-year Saros cycle of lunar eclipses,and Indian astronomers had described the Moon's monthly elongation.

      The Chinese astronomer Shi Shen (4th century BC) gave instructions for predicting solar and lunar eclipses. The physical form of the Moon and the cause of moonlight we’re also studied. Thus the ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras (5th century BC) reasoned that the sun and moon were giant spherical rocks, and that the moon reflected the light of the sun. The Han Dynasty Chinese equated the moon with qi energy, but they too recognised that the moon’s light was merely a reflection of the sun while Jing Fangt (78–37 BC) noted the sphericity of the moon.

      In Aristotle's (384–322 BC) description of the universe, the moon marked the boundary between the spheres of the mutable elements (earth, water, air and fire), and the imperishable stars of aether, an influential philosophy that would dominate for centuries. However, in the 2nd century BC Seleucus of Seleucia correctly concluded that tides were due to the attraction of the moon, and that their height depended on the Moon's position relative to the sun In the same century, Aristarchus computed the size and distance of the moon from earth, improved by Ptolemy (90–168 AD): his values of a mean distance of 59 times earth radius and a diameter of 0.292 Earth diameters were close to the correct values of about 60 and 0.273 respectively. Archimedes (287–212 BC) even designed a planetarium that could calculate the motions of the Moon and other objects in the Solar System.

      During the Middle Ages, before the invention of the telescope, the moon was increasingly recognised as a sphere, though many believed that it was perfectly smooth.

      .

      Galileo's sketches of the Moon (Sidereus Nuncius)

      In 1609, Galileo Galilei made one of the first telescopic drawings of the Moon in his book Sidereus Nuncius and noted that far from being smooth it had mountains and craters.

      Map of the Moon by Johannes Hevelius from his Selenographia, 1647

      The Moon in Robert Hooke's Micrographia, 1665

      And then there came Hooke’s map - the first representation of a limited area on the Moon's surface (the crater known as Hipparchus). Through this early use of the telescope Hooke was able to give an admirable, realistic, depiction in a realistic manner, going beyond the limits of earlier cartography.

      More detailed telescopic mapping followed. By the 17th century, Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Francesco Maria Grimaldi were developing the system of naming lunar features we use today. The more exact 1834–36 Mappa Selenographica of Wilhelm Beer and Johann Heinrich Mädler, and their associated 1837 book Der Mond, the first trigonometrically accurate study of lunar features, included the heights of more than a thousand mountains, and, remarkably, introduced the study of the moon at accuracies possible in earthly geography.

      Lunar craters, first noted by Galileo, were thought to be volcanic until  Richard Proctor’s 1870s idea that they were formed by collisions, a proposal that soon gathered support from both late nineteenth-century  experimentation and from comparative studies from 1920 to the 1940s. This led into led the development of lunar stratigraphy, which by the 1950s was becoming a new and growing branch of astrogeology.

      So after all these necessarily foundational - and impressive -  studies  by early astronomers it can be seen that our detailed knowledge of the moon, made possible

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1