When we look at the moon, we say we can see the face of a man in the moon. The Incas see a fox. It got there by weaving a long rope and asking birds to fly one end to the moon so the fox could climb up there. The Maori in New Zealand say it is a woman carrying a filled gourd of water who cursed the moon at night when she tripped over a tree root in the dark while the moon was hidden behind a cloud. Angered at the abuse, the moon swooped down and carried off woman, gourd, and tree where they can still be seen. In Scandinavia, it is Jack and Jill along with their bucket of spilled water. The children's nursery rhyme is derived from that. In Polynesia, it is a woman who always wanted to live in the sky. She saw a rainbow formed by the light of the moon and used it to walk there where she can be seen beating her tapa board to make cloth. The Chinese see a three-legged toad who was originally a woman who drank her husband's immortality potion. The angry husband retaliated by turning her into the toad. The lesson? Don't drink your spouse's immortality potion.

There are many other stories in connection with the moon. The Greek moon Goddess, Artemis, is associated with Diana of the Romans. Artemis/Diana was also the virgin Goddess of the hunt who was once so angered at being accidentally seen by a man while she was bathing that she turned him into stag to be torn to pieces by his own hounds.

Shakespeare makes a reference to Queen Elizabeth I, the virgin queen, in connection with Diana's power in A Midsummer Night's Dream when Oberon tells Puck:

"... I saw ...

Flying between the cold moon and the earth

Cupid, all armed. A certain aim he took

At a fair vestal thronѐd by the west,

And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow

As it should pierce a hundred-thousand hearts.

But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft

Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon,

And the imperial vot'ress passѐd on,

In maiden meditation, fancy-free."

Cyrano de Bergerac was not just a character in the eponymous play by Edmund Rostand, he was a real person (1619 - 1655) who wrote fabulous stories like the Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon in which he, Cyrano, gets his information first hand from a visit there.

Another traveler to the moon (fictional this time) was Baron Munchausen. His trip there was dramatized in the 1988 movie with the same name.

Jules Verne wrote an 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon, in which travelers enclosed in a bullet-shaped vehicle are shot to the moon out of a giant canon. Georges Méliès, the famous French director, dramatized Verne's vision in his 1902 film, A Trip to the Moon.

Japanese Moon Mythology

The creator God in Japanese mythology is Izanagi. Once while purifying himself in a hot spring, he gave birth to kami (gods) from his eyes. Amaterasu came from his left eye and Tsukuyomi from his right eye. The two, brother and sister, married and were made rulers of the heavens by Izanagi. Uke Mochi, goddess of food, invited Amaterasu to a feast, but she couldn't go and sent Tsukuyomi in her stead. He was disgusted by the way that Uke Mochi prepared the feast; spitting fish, rice, and deer from her mouth before pulling food out of her other orifices; so Tsukuyomi killed her. Horrified, Amaterasu labeled Tsukuyomi an evil kami, and banished him. Thus night was separated from day with Amaterasu representing the sun and Tsukuyomi representing the moon, forever chasing but never catching his wife.

Tsukuyomi, depicted below in very old artwork, is sometimes called Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto.

Another story is about Tsuki no Usagi (literally moon rabbit). It originates from Buddhist tradition in which the Old Man from the moon comes to Earth disguised as a beggar and asks fox (kitsune), monkey (saru), and rabbit (usagi) for food. Monkey brought fruit from a tree, and fox brought fish from a stream. Rabbit, having nothing to offer, asked the beggar to start a fire. Once it was going, rabbit jumped into the fire, offering himself as a meal. The Old Man from the moon judged that rabbit had offered the most and took him back to the moon to live with him. You can see rabbit on the face of the moon pounding rice to make tsukimi dango (rice dumplings).

Tsukimi (literally moon viewing) is a Japanese celebration with roots going back to the Heian period (794 - 1185). Occurring in mid-August, it is a form of harvest festival in which parties are held for people to settle back and enjoy the sight of the moon with company. Matsuo Bashō (1644 - 1694) wrote a haiku about the occasion.

Tsukimi is also an occasion for special foods and displays. The tsukimi dango mentioned above is one of the foods, along with taro, edamame, chestnuts, and others. Displays as prayer offerings for abundant harvests are set out. The displays can vary quite a bit, but they most often feature tsukimi dando arranged pyramidally.

As in the picture above, pampas grass is a favorite added decoration, but any available flowers from personal gardens are fine, too. I've also seen photos of displays that include rabbit (usually the stuffed kind) pounding his rice.

Moon Phase Names

The moon's appearance changes as it orbits the Earth, taking on phases depending on its position vis-à-vis the Earth and sun. There are names associated with each phase.

The full moon has it own set of names; in fact, there are a host of them. Among them are names adapted from the names Native Americans used. The calendar of moon names for 2021 is shown below.

The moon's orbit is slightly elliptical and not quite on the same plane as that used by the Earth as it orbits the sun. On rare occasions, the moon is directly between the Earth and the sun, causing a solar eclipse. A lunar eclipse occurs with the Earth is directly between the sun and the moon. Because of its elliptical orbit, the moon is sometimes closer to the Earth than at other times. When a full moon occurs at the same time as its closest approach to the Earth, its perigee, it is called a Super moon.

The picture above exaggerates the size of a super moon, but it conveys the point. Many believe that the moon appears larger when it is close to the horizon as opposed to when it is high in the sky. An atmospheric lensing effect was thought to be the cause. That long-time controversy has recently been settled by a series of very careful measurements. The moon's larger appearance close to the horizon is merely an optical illusion.

The Paschal full moon is the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Other moon names are blue moon and blood moon. Can you think of others?

Lunar Exploration

The moon rotates on its axis once for every orbit around the Earth, always keeping the same face toward us. That is called being tidally locked. We had to send a rocket around the other side of the moon before we knew what the back side looked like. This is the face of the moon always seen from the Earth.

It is an airless, barren waste of so-called seas, craters, and mountains. Galileo (1564 - 1642) was the first person to train a telescope at the moon and discover that ideas about it before that were wrong. Ever since, scientists have closely observed our nearest neighbor in the solar system to learn its secrets. A high point was reached with the Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 70s that delivered astronauts to the moon's surface and brought back rock samples.

That isn't the only thing they brought back. They brought a little perspective back, too, as shown in the photograph below.

It has been nearly 50 years since the last Apollo moon mission. We may be back soon, however. NASA is working on a new heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rockets ever built. After several years of delays, its first flight is scheduled to come this December. One objective is to return men to the moon's surface by sometime in 2024 using SLS and the new Orion crew module. The plan is to build a permanent base camp on the moon's surface for scientific research and exploration and to construct a small version of the International Space Station (ISS) in lunar orbit. NASA is working cooperatively with ESA (European Space Agency) and Japan's NADSA (National Space Development Agency) on the project.

Just to show that NASA hasn't forgotten the moon's romantic associations, the return-to-the-moon project is named Artemis after the Greek Goddess of the moon.

Japanese Artwork

Japanese artists have not been slow in recognizing the attraction of the moon. The problem is choosing which among them to use.

First up below is Crows and the Moon, an ukiyo-e print. It is attributed to either Ogata Kōrin (1658 - 1716) or one of his followers in the Rinpa School of art. It was printed sometime in the Edo Period (1603 - 1868).

The moon was an extremely popular subject throughout the Edo Period, and one of the most popular ukiyo-e landscape artists was Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 - 1858). There are two of his moon prints here. The first is Moon Seen Through Leaves (1832) from his series Twenty-Eight Views of the Moon.

The next print of Hiroshige's is River Landscape with Rising Moon (1840).

Yoshitoshi Taiso (1839 - 1892) is noted for his ukiyo-e series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon. His 1886 Moon through a Crumbling Window is number 30 in the series. It shows the meditating Daruma as he sat for nine years while the walls crumbled around him. The moon represents emptiness, a Zen concept.

Ogata Gekkō (1859 – 1920) was self-taught in art and was one of the first Japanese artists to gain international recognition, winning numerous national and international prizes. He specialized in woodblock prints like the Full Moon and Autumn Flowers by a Stream (1895) below.