Our Moon Quotes

“Just as it was for the Puebloans, just as it was for Enheduanna and Nabonidus, just as it was for the Greek philosophers and Johannes Kepler and Wernher von Braun and Michael Collins, the Moon can still be special and untouchable. It can remain a spectral reminder in the night. It can still be an omen worth celebrating. It can be joyous to witness, full and glittering on a freezing winter night, or a surprising crescent peeking through summer-leafed trees. It can sneak up on us; most Moons you will see throughout your life are gibbous, not quite there but not quite gone. The Moon is only full and bright for two or three days a month. If you’re lucky, you will see a few hundred of these in your life. Once in a while you might catch it hanging overhead as a scimitar at dusk. It might startle you, yellowish and half dark on the eastern horizon, if you awaken in the hours before dawn. It might sail ahead of the Sun hours before your alarm clock rings, and hang low in the west in the morning as you leave for work or school. It might fade into the background, like white noise, like the stars you may be lucky enough to see at night.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“We don’t need to build a human settlement on the Moon. We don’t need to do anything at all to the Moon. The Moon cannot speak for itself. We have to speak for it. And no one person, no single culture, can speak for everyone who shares the sky. The Moon belongs to everyone, which means it belongs to no one.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“There is another perspective to consider. That of the Moon itself. It is a place, and it exists nearby but not impassively. “It has cultural and historical agency,” as Messeri put it. The Moon does not have feelings, of course. But Spudis himself often spoke of its intrinsic value. A British astronomer named Vera Assis Fernandes has written that the Moon should be acknowledged as an entity deserving of respect.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Though much of the lunar exploration agenda of the early 2020s is focused on science, the fundamental questions astronomers seek to answer are just one avenue on the greater road of discovery. Science is only one way of coming to know the universe, but it has the most power, Lisa Messeri, an anthropologist at Yale University, told me. “This becomes a tricky argument. I am someone who believes in the science of climate change, and the science of vaccination. I am also someone who wonders what it means to take a Native American cosmology and treat it equally to our scientific cosmology, when it comes to the Moon.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“The Apollo missions were designed to use the Moon as a tool. It was an instrument of might, just as surely as it was for the stone circles of northern Scotland, the Nebra sky disk, and the temples dedicated to Sin. Americans walked up there to show they could do it, and in doing so, demonstrated what glory was possible through democratic republicanism and white Protestant Christianity, rather than Soviet communism and godlessness.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“By the early 2020s, only about 550 human beings had slipped the surly bonds of Earth and floated above it far enough to see its curvature, to see the eggshell-thin line of our life-giving atmosphere. Many report feeling an overwhelming sense of clarity and unity, a heart-swelling state of heightened awareness and togetherness that is common enough to have its own name: the “overview effect.” The term comes from aviation, and if you’ve ever flown in a plane you might have experienced a version of it. The sense of boundaries evaporating, of your own puniness when arrayed against the broader world; the unnerving shift in perspective as cars turn into tiny dots and metropolises melt until you notice only land and water. You realize we are all hanging on to the same rock, the only place any of us can turn in deadly turbulent waters. You realize it’s worth protecting. You realize its inhabitants are worth protecting.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“We don’t often pause to think about how strange the whole thing was, how strange to send a bunch of strapping young men to the Moon just because. How utterly odd that sentient pieces of Earth—because that’s all we are, really, bits of the planet remolded by time and sunlight—made a choice to send some of their brethren away from it. What a weird thing to do, just for the purpose of seeing what it was like, and saying that it had been done. Just to do it, because it’s hard, because we think we can, because we think someone we don’t like might do it before us.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Apollo was a planetary-scale boast, a giant risk with high reward, a daring gamble for a youthful nation. It was propaganda at its finest. Its astronauts were upstanding white Protestant men who had traditional families and wore casual pants and drank whiskey from highball glasses. They were red-blooded American heroes who cooked homemade pizzas and played baseball with their kids, then put on spacesuits and did the impossible. They were Manifest Destiny incarnate, bursting with promise and American masculinity, their legacy rising like the phallic rockets that launched them.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“After capturing the gibbous Earth, something went wrong with Zond 5’s camera, and the spacecraft wasn’t able to bring home photos of the Moon’s surface. But it did bring back the tortoises. They might have achieved some level of reptilian notoriety had they been given names, but the Soviets just referred to them, rather coldly, as “the experimental animals.” Though they were deprived of food and drink, they flew with all the trappings of a meal and the scent of home: seeds of peas, carrots, and tomatoes, wildflowers and pine; and some samples of humanity’s most important crops, wheat and barley, so scientists could study how the seeds fared in space. The Sumerian beer goddess Ninkasi would have been proud. They circled the Moon on September 18, 1968 c.e., and on September 21, their capsule splashed down in the Indian Ocean with incredible force. U.S. intelligence later reported that the capsule careened through the atmosphere with the speed and energy of a meteorite, a violent journey that would have killed a human. But the tortoises survived. Then they traveled back to Moscow, where scientists cut them open and examined every inch of their starved, desiccated bodies.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“The first creatures to assist in humanity’s collective disorientation were not humans but tortoises, packed alongside a bunch of seeds into a Russian spacecraft called Zond 5. Twelve days before their launch in September 1968, the tortoises were strapped in the rocket capsule and deprived of food and water, so scientists would be able to study any changes in their bodies without being confused by the activity of their metabolisms. The tortoises had no Earthly idea what was happening, but if they felt any sort of humanlike emotions, surely one of them was confusion. How strange, to be immobilized without anything to eat or drink for two weeks, to then be launched off the world. At least the humans who followed the tortoises knew where they were going, and had some idea of why.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“The rocks were so obviously not from around here. Most Earth rocks have a weariness, no matter where they are found. They are molded by beach waves and rain, smoothed by wind and time, covered in lichen, surrounded by trees or grass. The Moon rocks are nothing like Earth rocks. They are jagged, blocky, crystalline. Some are inky black and others are chalky, sparkling white. They look exactly like what they are, pieces of the shimmering Moon brought down to Earth.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“While the book is scientific in its tone and purpose, it also reveals that the Moon held deep spiritual significance for Kepler himself. He was able to hold two opposing ideas at the same time: the Neoplatonic view, that the Moon is a pit stop for souls,[*3] and a more modern view, that the Moon is a body with mass, and that it obeys the laws of planetary motion—the latter of which Kepler himself discovered. This duality is a sharp break from classical tradition, and it represents a new, modern way of thinking. For the first time, storytelling is used to advance modern scientific speculation.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Our moon exists for us on the Earth, not for the other globes. Those four little moons exist for Jupiter, not for us. Each planet in turn, together with its occupants, is served by its own satellites,” Kepler wrote to Galileo,[25] using the word “satellite” for what may be the first time. The word is rooted in the Latin satelles, meaning “attendant.” Other worlds were also served by their satellites. They were worlds accompanied by worlds. This is obvious now, but it was an extraordinary insight considering the time in which these people lived.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“In 1612, two years after Galileo stunned the world with Sidereus nuncius, Cigoli completed a fresco in the Basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome, the most important Marian shrine in Christendom. During Galileo’s lifetime, the large basilica had two new chapels added[*10] and Cigoli was hired to paint a scene from the Book of Revelation, which takes place during the Apocalypse. His subject was “a Woman clothed with the Sun, and the Moon under her feet,” standing opposite Saint Michael the Archangel. Cigoli painted as he was told. But the Moon at her feet was not the smooth orb of many early counterparts, who used the spotless Aristotelian Moon as a metaphor for the spotless Virgin Mary, mother of Christ. It was Galileo’s Moon, craggy, crater-pocked, indented, marred. Cigoli painted an astronomical Moon, not the Platonic ideal of a Moon. This fresco is still the subject of debate among scholars, but whatever Cigoli’s intent—acting contra Counter-Reformation Church politics, or just making a very well-placed hat tip to his art school friend—his Moon changed things.[24] Moons in art became real. Paintings might have remained religious in nature, but their depictions of the sky and Moon were vivid, believable, and terrestrial, taking their cue from modern astronomy.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“He correctly speculates on the nature of earthshine, which people had for centuries named “the ashen glow,” the phenomenon that lets you view the dusky figure of the dark sector of the Moon. This is visible when the Moon is a crescent. It happens because sunlight reflected from Earth’s surface is bright enough to partially light the Moon, too, like a mirror shining back at you. In a scientific echo of Enheduanna’s paean to the Moon 3,860 years earlier, “Your shining horns are…holy and lustrous,” Galileo wrote that “this light is seen most clearly when the horns are the thinnest.”[”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“The drawings are monumental not because they are good, and not just because they are first, but because of what they are. Harriot was the first person to record the Moon—or any astronomical object—through a telescope. He was also the first person to grapple with what that meant. The telescope had finally let humans slip the surly bonds of Earth[13] and see beyond it, beyond ourselves, even. What Harriot saw defied the imagination, even philosophy. For Harriot, there were no introspective ramblings on the Moon’s features, no fervent or religious embellishment of its chalky face. He did not even emulate Copernicus, his more recent forebear, and attempt to ascribe any scriptural beauty or heavenly order. Harriot was educated in the classics and he knew Plutarch’s De Facie, but even his distant Moon-watching kin could not prepare him for actually seeing literal terrestrial features on another world. It must have astounded him. At no point in human history had anyone ever seen the Moon magnified the way Harriot now could. To document it, perhaps to share it with others, Harriot rushed to record what he saw in the form of a picture. He must have known, even though he would never publish them, that his uncertain scribbles would be more valuable than any words he could jot down.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Start out when the Moon is new. Find the crescent hanging low in the sky at dusk, before it’s dark outside. The Moon will follow the Sun down, sinking on the western horizon before night fully falls. The next night, look again. The Moon is thicker now, and a little higher in the sky when you first spot it. Keep watching, and within a few days, the Moon is half illuminated—a pie sliced in two, with the visible side facing the early-evening Sun. The Moon is full when the Sun is setting, and in the following days, the Moon shrinks again. By last quarter, you can see it just ahead of the Sun in the early-morning sky, once again with its luminous half facing our nearest star. The Sun lights the Moon. It’s obvious, once you see the pattern often enough.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Many philosophers came up with various reasons why it would not fall down on us all, coming up with creative cosmologies that explained its distance from Earth. Explanations ranged from a circular, flat terra firma surrounded by a river, like a moat keeping the Moon from getting too close, to a flat Earth protected by a heavenly top layer, like a cake with frosting. Some believed that the celestial bodies were harmonic perfect spheres that could never come into contact, lest they pollute one another. From the holy patron of Mesopotamia to Aristotle, scholars had also imagined the Moon as a haven for the divine and a harbor for souls. Plato’s dialogues suggested that the Moon and Sun were places we might visit once departed, if we had lived a good life.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“It was a dramatic improvement for timekeeping, but it was a tragedy for our relationship to the Moon. For the first time in the history of our species, the Moon was separated from time. The days slowly slipped out of sync with the Moon’s cycles. The Ides were reduced to signify a numerical meaning, the fifteenth day of a month, rather than the mark of the full Moon.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Caesar likely had heard of a unified Moon-Sun calendar, called a lunisolar calendar, while consorting with Cleopatra. The traditional Egyptian calendar had 365 days, comprising twelve months of thirty days apiece, plus an extra five intercalary days. To keep in time with the solar year, the Egyptian calendar would include a sixth intercalary day, a leap day, every four years. The Roman statesman Pliny the Elder writes in his Natural History that Caesar worked with Sosigenes, an Alexandrian mathematician, to design his own new calendar and produce a new astronomical almanac. The new calendar divided the year into twelve months with thirty or thirty-one days, except February, which has twenty-eight. An intercalary “leap day” is added to February every four years. It’s essentially the same calendar we use now; it has received just one update in the two millennia since.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“In Aristotle’s cosmology, De Caelo, the heavens originated at the Moon, which he considered the boundary of the realm of perfection. To Aristotle, perfection did not mean the divine or a deity, the way Plato or religious people thought about it. Perfection to Aristotle meant the perfect ideal of something. Everything below the Moon was in the realm of change, corruption, and imperfection. The Moon and beyond were perfect. He explained away the Moon’s mottled appearance by arguing that it was contaminated by Earth.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“In losing Babylon, Nabonidus lost much more than his own kingship. He forfeited the divinity of nature. The Moon, the Sun, the sky, the waters were all exposed as weaklings, controlling just a few aspects of the natural world. When Cyrus took Babylon, he made another crucial decision: He freed the people of Judea, allowing them to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. In sparing the Jews, he spared their story and their God. The God of Abraham rose in popularity after the fall of Sin. This God sat above all natural forces and all heavenly bodies, orchestrating them like a great conductor. He built the natural world in just a week. And he acted alone. No separate, lesser gods helped him or even fought him.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“With Cyrus’s unqualified victory over Babylon, the power center of civilization moved eastward. The plains between the two rivers were now ruled by the Persians, a neighboring empire from the mountains. The final fall of the Moon God would not take place for another thousand years, until a messenger of God named Muhammad would destroy his likeness inside another temple, called the Kaaba. But the golden age of Mesopotamia was over. And the defeat of Belshazzar and Nabonidus signified a major cultural shift: the first major defeat of the nature gods.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“No archaeological record of him has ever been found, but according to multiple faith traditions, he grew up in Ur. If that is true, Abraham—born as Abram—would have grown up surrounded by people who at least paid lip service to the Moon God, including his father, Terah, and his wife/half sister, Sarai. Her name is the Akkadian version of Nanna/Sin’s wife, the goddess Ningal. Given this legacy, it makes sense that, according to Genesis, God renames them Abraham and Sarah[16] when he makes his new covenant. Their new monikers symbolically ditch Ur and the Moon, and add the new syllable “AH,” the first syllable of the name of the God of the Israelites in Genesis (YHWH).[*”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Enheduanna’s very name was the first step in this process. Her original name was probably Semitic in origin, but changed to a Sumerian form to placate the people she now aimed to unite. Enheduanna is a nom de plume: (EN) translates to “lady, High Priestess” combined with (HEDU), which means “ornament.” Followed by (AN), the sky god, and (NA), her name means “High Priestess of the ornament of the sky,” of the Moon.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“The earliest relics at Jericho date to an era before humans invented pottery, around 9500 b.c.e., a millennium and a half earlier than the pits of Aberdeenshire’s Warren Field. In antiquity, people came to Jericho for two reasons: a freshwater spring and the Moon. Jericho’s spring, now named Ein es-Sultan, was a popular gathering spot for the hunter-gatherer people called the Natufians. Beyond its life-giving waters, a spring is also a potent symbol for people fixated on human fertility, as we know many Neolithic people were. Like other early hunter-gatherer groups, the Natufians are known by the tiny stone tools they left behind. They are called lunates: small crescent-shaped stones used to cut grasses. Natufian hunter-gatherer groups visited the Jericho spring in warm seasons. Around 9600 b.c.e., a period of droughts and cold called the Younger Dryas finally ended, and the Natufians stayed put in Jericho. The oldest city on Earth grew up around these water seekers. Befitting the spring’s connection to fertility rituals, Jericho became a pilgrimage site for worshippers of the Moon. Scholars have a few theories for the origin of the city’s name—some say it derives from a word meaning “fragrant,” describing its abundant flowers—but the Palestinian government’s tourism office describes Jericho as “the City of the Moon.” Jericho was an early center of worship for a Canaanite god named Yarikh, a god represented by the Moon. People traveled to the city to visit a temple to his honor. This may also explain the origins of other proto-cities of the third millennium b.c.e. The temple probably came first, and a city stirred to life in the buildings erected around it.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“For hunters and gatherers, the Moon was literally a guide, allowing people to see at night and to plan their lives. When people got good at growing food and taming animals and built the world’s first cities, they continued using the Moon for practical reasons. It shone upon the fields and the city streets. You could watch your grains and your sheep, and you could walk down the road at night to your home or shop. This obvious benefit eventually evolved into a more spiritual connection to the sky and its forces. Maybe the holy Moon was a vestigial reminder of the first farmers’ hunter-gatherer heritage; maybe the original stories morphed into myths, and the Moon’s light became evidence of beneficence or intentional aid.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“The stela is just a whisper of the long history, beginning more than five thousand years ago, that humanity has shared with the Moon God, once the most popular deity in the ancient Near East. Though the Moon God has long since faded into history, his influences surround us to this day. The various traditions of his followers—animal sacrifice, devotions, temples where people would gather to worship him, totems featuring his image—would appear in all the organized religion that followed. During part of the Sumerian era, the Moon God was worshipped along with his wife, Ningal, “the Great Lady” and goddess of reeds, and their son, the Sun, making him the chief god of the first known holy trinity. The Moon God was one of the first gods in human history, if not the very first. For a long time, he was the most important deity of all, and worship of the Moon God laid the groundwork for all the other faith traditions that followed.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“For example, the spring equinox of the ideal year takes place on the fifteenth day of the month called Nisannu. This is the first month of the Old Babylonian year, like our modern January 1, but Nisannu was comparable to March or April. If a star or constellation is first visible when expected, then nothing needs to change. But if the star arrives a month later than called for on the ideal calendar template, then that year should be a leap year. “If the Fish [the constellation Pisces] and the Old Man [the constellation Perseus] become visible on the 15th of Adarru, the year is normal. If the Fish and the Old Man become visible on the 15th of Nisannu, this year is a leap year,” the text reads, in one example.[3] The MUL.APIN’s second scheme for calibrating the calendar, and the more relevant for the Nebra sky disk, tracks when the Moon is in conjunction with the Pleiades. On the ideal calendar, this should happen on the first day of Nisannu.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Down the hall from the Neanderthals rests the bones of a nine-thousand-year-old priestess known as the Shamaness of Bad Dürrenberg. Workers excavating a canal in Saxony-Anhalt discovered her grave in 1934. The woman, between thirty and forty years old, was buried sitting upright, with a six-month-old infant resting between her legs. Their grave was also filled with jewelry; red ochre; the bones of deer, turtles, cranes, and beavers; and mussel shells. Given the care—and the hoard—with which she and the infant were interred, the woman was probably important. Analysis of her skeleton showed that she had two malformed vertebrae in her neck, which could have restricted blood flow in her head and caused involuntary eye movements. She might have appeared to experience trances, or other mysterious behaviors that could have seemed”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are