Randy Hoyt

Moon Pics

I took pictures of the moon (most) every day during the lunar cycle July 2-July 30. I’ll soon be posting the whole gallery, and I’ll later be writing up something about the moon and its phases. This is the picture I took July 29 at 6:00 AM, as the waning crescent rose just ahead of the sun.

Jul 31

Moon Myths

I wrote this post in response to Myth Cafe’s July writing prompt: Moon Myths.

Crescent Moon – July 3, 2011

When I was in college, my wife and I spent one year following the lunar calendar fairly closely. We observed — in a limited way, of course — the holidays from the Hebrew Torah. (We went camping with friends for Sukkot, for example.) We would watch every month for the new crescent moon, sometimes from the top of a nearby parking garage. That year I first understood how the phases of the moon really work and got a handle on how the months, seasons, and years are all related. I technically learned all that in school, but it never really meant anything to me. In our modern technological world, it is easy to lose touch of the natural world around us.

The moon myths that I love are those that talk about the moon either in terms of wandering or in terms of chasing. The moon and sun both appear to travel around our planet from east to west in the sky, the sun going a little faster than the moon. In reality, of course, our planet is rotating. (The sun doesn’t move, but moon moves a little bit west to east each day.) This gives the appearance that the moon is traveling a little slower than the sun. If you watch the moon regularly at sunset after the new moon, you really do get the sense that the moon and the sun were traveling together but that the moon just couldn’t keep up or preferred to travel at his own leisurely pace. In Egyptian mythology, the moon god is named Khonsu, which means “Traveler” or “Wanderer,” and that makes really good sense to me.

When the moon goes from new to full, you can see it at sunset and then throughout the night until the moon sets. However, after the moon is full, you can see it at rise at night and watch it until sunrise. If you watch it from that point of view, you get the impression that the one of them is chasing the other … and gaining ground daily. I am pretty sure there are many myths from different cultures talking about the moon and the sun chasing each other, but the one I remember the most is the Inuit story. Malina and Anningan were sister and brother. Anningan forced himself on his sister one night; because it was night, she didn’t know who it was. When he came back the next night to force himself on her again, she had covered her hands with ash so that she could smear ash all over her attacker’s face and then be able to identify him. When she found out her was her brother, she ran away from the village. He chased after her, and they both ran so fast that the flew into the sky and became the sun and the moon. Anningan (the brother, the moon) still chases after Malina (the sister, the sun) to this day. (I believe the ashes on Anningan’s face represent the dark spots on the moon.)

In the Norse myth, the Sun and Moon do not chase each other. Instead, they are each chased by a wolf: Sköll chasing the sun, and Hati Hróðvitnisson chasing the moon. (The sun and moon are also brother and sister in Norse myths, the sister Sól the sun and the brother Máni the moon.) The wolves will consume the sun and the moon as part of Ragnarök.

“The Wolves Pursuing Sól and Máni” (1909) by J. C. Dollman.

Of all the moon myths that have left an impression on me, two come from modern works of fiction. First, I loved the story of the sun and the moon in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Silmarillion” legends. Tolkien must have had the same reaction to moon myths, preferring the wandering and the chasing, because he incorporated both of those:

Now Varda [goddess of the stars] purposed that the two vessels should journey […] and ever be aloft, but not together; each should pass from Valinor [the home of the gods] into the east and return, the one issuing from the west as the other turned from the east. Thus the first of the new days were reckoned after the manner of the Trees, from the mingling of the lights when Arien [the sun] and Tilion [the moon] passed in their courses, above the middle of the Earth. But Tilion was wayward and uncertain in speed, and held not to his appointed path; and he sought to come near to Arien, being drawn by her splendour, though the flame of Anar scorched him, and the island of the Moon was darkened.

— Quenta Silmarillion, XI: Of The Sun And Moon and The Hiding of Valinor

The other story comes from Avatar: The Last Airbender (the Nickelodeon cartoon series). I have only watched the first season of this series, but it is really good. The world is divided into four nations or tribes, corresponding to the four elements: fire, air, earth, and water. In each nation or tribe, there are powerful individuals who can “bend” (i.e., control or manipulate) the element of their tribe — “fire-benders”, “water-benders”, etc. We spend a lot of time with water-benders in the first season. In the climatic final battle in the last two episode, culminating in a battle between the Fire Nation and the Water Tribe, we learn that the water-benders are more powerful when there’s a full moon. The tribe’s princess explains it like this:

The legends say the moon was the first water-bender. Our ancestors saw how it pushed and pulled the tides and learned how to do it themselves.

After spending eighteen episodes in that world, this myth resonated with me and felt like exactly the kind of myth the Water Tribe would have.

Jul 23

Imaginary Worlds

I wrote this post in response to a personal writing challenge from Stephen Anderson.

We all live in imaginary worlds. This will seem to many to be a controversial assertion, so it probably makes sense to define the key term: “imaginary.” By chaining together the definitions of three different words (imaginary, imagination, and imagine) from a handy online dictionary, I have settled on the following definition:

Something is “imaginary” if it exists only in our faculty for making mental images of things.

When I was an undergraduate philosophy student, I was fascinated by the early Greek philosophers known as the “Presocratics.” The visions of the world presented by Heraclitus and Parmenides — the one, a world in a constant state of flux; the other, an immutable and immovable eternal present — both haunted my thinking and played a major role in how I understand the world today. The views of Democritus and the other Atomists provide the easiest starting point for my journey. They held that everything was made of atoms that were physically indivisible. Each atom was unchanging, indestructible, and eternal, but they were all constantly moving and constantly being re-arranged. The Atomists thought that popular opinion believed in many deceptive illusions. They had a saying that summarizes their position nicely:

By convention hot, by convention cold, but in reality atoms and void.

We often talk about “hotness” and “coldness” as if they are real things that exist as properties attached to objects. But as I wrestled through many various philosophical problems in different classes, I became convinced that a strict reductive materialism was the only logical solution to these problems. I thought about color in these terms for a long time. Scientists tell us that atoms are colorless: but then how can a large collection of colorless atoms suddenly starting having color? That’s illogical. The only logical conclusion seemed to me to say that color must not really exist. When light bounces off objects and is reflected to our eyes, our eyes perceive this light and send information about it to our brain; our brain then translates that information into a mental image of color. This may seem like a silly example — like some amateur philosopher being overly dramatic — but I wrestled with it for quite some time. The important turning point in this story came when I finally admitted the following: color was imaginary.

I felt like I had taken a step down the correct path, Parmenides’ Way of Truth. I even felt a little smug and elitist that I knew that color was just imaginary while so many mere mortals — even the mere mortals in my metaphysics class — thought color was a real thing. After color, I had to admit that many other things that seemed real were also imaginary. Traffic laws did not exist in the physical world; they were just arbitrary conventions that existed in our imaginations. (In some countries, after all, they all happily drove on the wrong side of the road!) Next up: sports accolades, stock prices, job titles, property rights, state boundaries, the value of American dollar — all imaginary. Even the value of an ounce of gold was imaginary; you couldn’t look under a microscope to find some intrinsic value there. Even physical things, like desks and chairs, were imaginary: they weren’t real objects that came into existence and then went out of existence, but they were arbitrary arrangements of atoms that we conventionally agreed to put our imaginary labels on. Finally, art and beauty had to go: we all know that no two people can agree exactly what constitutes “art” (a sure sign it is just an imaginary convention), and everyone knows that “beauty is in the eye” — or, more accurately, the imagination — “of the beholder.” The only thing that wasn’t imaginary was the physical matter underneath all our imaginary conventions.

But one thing still nagged at me. These imaginary things seemed to be affecting the real world. People would spend a lot of their time doing work other people wanted them to do in exchange for dollars with only imaginary value; they could give those to other people in exchange for real things like bread and milk. I knew of plenty of people who were about to quit their jobs and retire when their 401Ks lost half of their imaginary value; after that, they made drastically different decisions about how to arrange  their lives. People make enter into imaginary agreements and contracts, and breaking them results in real consequences: people have lost their houses when they couldn’t afford to pay their imaginary adjustable-rate mortgages, and they have ended up in jail for violating federal tax laws. (People without shelter get rained on by real rain atoms, and people in jail put different food atoms in their bodies than  people not in jail.) Wars have been fought over all kinds of imaginary things, to expand imaginary boundaries or to fulfill some conviction or to take possession of some object of imaginary value or in response to a dream; the death and destruction caused by these real wars have significantly changed the way that real atoms have been arranged.

I never lost my conviction that these things were imaginary, but I became fully convinced that they were also real. I stumbled on a quote from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that summarized my own conviction perfectly. Harry asked Dumbledore if what he had been experiencing had been real or inside his head, and Dumbledore replied,

Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

We do all live in imaginary worlds. The things we value, the things in which we find meaning and place our trust, the things we use to make our decisions, the labels and convention we use to help us understand the various arrangements of atoms around us — for the most part, they exist in our imaginations and not in the physical world. How can these imaginary things be real if they do not exist in the physical world? How do we distinguish between real imaginary things like those I have discussed and other imaginary things like unicorns or hippogriffs? I’ll leave those questions for another day. For now, I’ll conclude with this: these imaginary things are real in every way that matters.

Jul 12