Timothy Harley

“ Should the planet happen to be at the height of her splendour when the ceremony is performed, their future life will be a scene of festivity, and all its paths strewed over with rosebuds of delight. But when her tapering horns are turned towards the north, passion becomes frost-bound, and seldom thaws till the genial season again approaches. From the moon they not only draw prognostications of the weather, but according to their creed also discover future events. ”

“ We owe an immense debt of gratitude and honour to the many enterprising and cultivated men who have gone into all parts of the earth and among all peoples to investigate human history and habit, mythology and religion, and thus enrich the stores of our national literature. With such a host of travellers gathering up the fragments, nothing of value is likely to be lost. We have to thank intelligent explorers for all we know of the mythical frog or toad in the moon: an addition to our information which is not unworthy of thoughtful notice. ”

“ Let no man therefore ridicule a myth as puerile if it be an aid to belief in that commonweal of humanity for which the Founder of the purest religion was a witness and a martyr. We have sought out the man in the moon mainly because it was one out of many scattered stories which, as Max Müller nobly says, "though they may be pronounced childish and tedious by some critics, seem to me to glitter with the brightest dew of nature's own poetry, and to contain those very touches that make us feel akin, not only with Homer or Shakespeare, but even with Lapps, and Finns, and Kaffirs." ”

“ These heavenly orbs are found to be in motion, to be far away, to be the glory of day and night: what wonder if ideas of these images are formed in the religious mind, if the worshipper imagines the sun and moon to be reflections of the God of light, and pays homage to the creature which renders the Creator visible? Thus in the childhood of man religion grows, and with the multiplication of intellect and sensation, endless diversity of language, conception and faith is the result. Another result, of course, is the endless diversity of deities. ”

“ Of the Germans, Grimm says:--"In a lighted candle, if a piece of the wick gets half detached and makes it burn away too fast, they say 'a wolf (as well as a thief) is in the candle'; this too is like the wolf devouring the sun or moon. Eclipses of sun or moon have been a terror to many heathen nations; the incipient and increasing obscuration of the luminous orb marks for them the moment when the gaping jaws of the wolf threaten to devour it, and they think by loud cries to bring it succour." ”

“ Our religion, like our language, is a garden not only for indigenous vegetation, but also for acclimatisation, in which we improve under cultivation exotic plants whose roots are drawn from every soil on the earth. And, as Paul preached in Athens the God whom the Greeks worshipped in ignorance, so our missionaries carry back to less enlightened peoples the fruit of that life-giving tree whose germs exist among themselves, undeveloped and often unknown. No religion has fallen from heaven, like the fabled image of Athene, in full-grown beauty. ”

“ Where Phoebus sprang, sprang Phoebe also--the bright and beautiful moon. To a people addicted to the idolatry of perfect form and comeliness, no object could be more attractive than the queen of the night. When Socrates was accused of innovating upon the Greek religion, and of ridiculing the Athenian deities, he replied on his trial, "You strange man, Melêtus, are you seriously affirming that I do not think Helios and Selene to be gods, as the rest of mankind think?" ”

“ Respecting China, a modern traveller speaks in not very complimentary language. "If there is on the earth a nation absorbed by the affairs of this world and who trouble themselves little about what passes among the heavenly bodies, it is assuredly the Chinese. The most erudite among them just know of the existence of astronomy, or, as they call it, tienwen--'celestial literature.' But they are ignorant of the simplest principles of the science, and those who regard an eclipse as a natural phenomenon, instead of a dragon who is seeking to devour the sun and moon, are enlightened indeed." ”

“ In the nineteenth century as well as in the dark ages, in London as well as in the ends of the earth, men of all colours and clans are found turning their faces heavenward to read their duty and destiny in the oracular face of the moon. Many consult their almanacks more than their Bibles, and follow the lunar phases as their sole interpretation of the will of God.
Among those who worship the moon as a personal deity, whether beneficent or malign, its influences are of course welcomed or dreaded as the manifestations of supreme power. ”

“ Humboldt thinks that Schroeter's assumptions of a lunar atmosphere and lunar twilight are refuted, and adds: "If, then, the moon is without any gaseous envelope, the entire absence of any diffused light must cause the heavenly bodies, as seen from thence, to appear projected against a sky almost black in the day-time. No undulation of air can there convey sound, song, or speech. The moon, to our imagination, which loves to soar into regions inaccessible to full research, is a desert where silence reigns unbroken." ”

“ In Sweden great influence is ascribed to the moon, not only in regulating the weather, but as affecting all the affairs of man's daily life. The lower orders, and many of the better sort, will not fell a tree for agricultural purposes in the wane of that orb, lest it should shrink and decay; nor will the housewife then slaughter for her family, lest the meat should shrivel and melt away in the pot. The moon is the domestic deity, whom the household must fear: the Fortuna who presides over the daily doings of sublunary mortals. ”

“ The moon, on the contrary, whose mildness of lustre enticed attention, whose phases were an embodiment of change, whose strange spots seemed shadowy pictures of things and beings terrestrial, whose appearance amid the darkness of night was so welcome, and who came to men susceptible, from the influences of quiet and gloom, of superstitious imaginings, from the very beginning grew into a familiar spirit of kindred form with their own, and though regarded as the subordinate and wife of the sun, was reverenced as the superior and husband of the earth. ”

“ There is much reason for regarding the moon as a source of evil, yet not that she herself is so, but only the circumstances which attend her. With us it happens that a bright moonlight night is always a cold one. The absence of cloud allows the earth to radiate its heat into space, and the air gradually cools, until the moisture it contained is precipitated in the form of dew, and lies like a thick blanket on the ground to prevent a further cooling. ”

“ In discoursing of the starry heavens, he says of the planets: "Of these inferior worlds, the moon is one; and to us, far the most interesting. How many important purposes which are known does this beautiful attendant of our earth continually accomplish! How many more, in all probability, which are hitherto unknown, and which hereafter may be extensively disclosed to more enlightened, virtuous, and happy generations of men! At the same time, it is most rationally concluded that intelligent beings in great multitudes inhabit her lucid regions, being far better and happier than ourselves." ”

“ Catlin undoubtedly was right, as the Apostle Paul was right, when he acknowledged that the Athenians worshipped the true God, albeit in ignorance. At the same time, though idolatry is in numberless instances nothing more than the use of media and mediators, in seeking the One, Invisible, Absolute Spirit, it is so naturally abused by sensuous beings who rest in the concrete, that no image worshipper is free from the propensity to worship the creature more than the Creator, and to forget the Essence in familiarity with the form. The perfection of worship, we conceive, is pure theism ”

“ The Chinese imagine them to be caused by great dragons trying to devour the sun and moon, and beat drums and brass kettles to make the monsters give up their prey. Some of the tribes of American Indians speak of the moon as hunted by huge dogs, catching and tearing her till her soft light is reddened and put out by the blood flowing from her wounds. To this day in India the native beats his gong, as the moon passes across the sun's face, and it is not so very long ago that in Europe both eclipses and rushing comets were thought to show that troubles were near. ”

“ In modern times the moon is no less the deity of insalutary disaster. Of Mexico, Brinton says: "Very different is another aspect of the moon-goddess, and well might the Mexicans paint her with two colours. The beneficent dispenser of harvests and offspring, she nevertheless has a portentous and terrific phase. She is also the goddess of the night, the dampness, and the cold; she engenders the miasmatic poisons that rack our bones; she conceals in her mantle the foe who takes us unawares; she rules those vague shapes which fright us in the dim light ”

“ The earth, the globular body thus covered with life, is not the only globe in the universe. There are, circling about our own sun, six others, so far as we can judge, perfectly analogous in their nature: besides our moon and other bodies analogous to it. No one can resist the temptation to conjecture, that these globes, some of them much larger than our own, are not dead and barren:--that they are, like ours, occupied with organization, life, intelligence. ”

“ In concluding this chapter we think that it will be granted that gender in the personification of inanimate objects was the result of sex in the animate subject: that primitive men saw the moon as a most conspicuous object, whose spots at periods had the semblance of a man's face, whose waxing and waning increased their wonder: whose coming and going amid the still and solemn night added to the mystery: until from being viewed as a man, it was feared, especially when apparently angry in a mist or an eclipse, and so reverenced and worshipped as the heaven-man, the monthly god. ”

“ And yet, with all this multiplicity in religious literature and dogma, subject and object, a unity co-exists which the student of the science notes with profound interest. All nations of men are of one blood; and all forms of God embody the one Eternal Spirit. To this unity mythology tends. As one writer says: "We must ever bear in mind that the course of mythology is from many gods toward one, that it is a synthesis, not an analysis, and that in this process the tendency is to blend in one the traits and stories of originally separate divinities." ”

“ Here the man in the moon and we must part. Hitherto some may have supposed their thoughts occupied with a mere creature of imagination, or gratuitous creation of an old-world mythology. Perhaps the man in the moon is nothing more: perhaps he is very much more. Possibly we have information of every being in the universe; and possibly there are beings in every existing world of which we know nothing whatever. ”

“ Whatever the moon's phase may be, let blood be shed! We are reminded here of that sanguifluous theology, which even Christians of a certain temperament seem to enjoy, while they sing of fountains filled with blood: as though a God of love could take delight in the effusion of precious life. ”

“ Not being practical astronomers ourselves, we have to follow the counsel of that unknown authority who bids us believe the expert. But expertness being the fruit of experience, we may be puzzled to tell who have attained that rank. We will inquire, however, with due docility, of the oracles of scientific research. It is agreed on all sides that to render the moon habitable by beings at all akin with our own kind, there must be within or upon that body an atmosphere, water, changing seasons, and the alternations of day and night. ”

“ He has been the scapegoat upon whom we have laid the responsibility of all our mortal woe: and now we learn that to his infernal influence we are indebted for our ignorance and superstition. Henceforth, when we are at our wit's end, we may apostrophize the difficulty, and exclaim, "O thou invisible spirit, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil!" We hesitate to spoil this serviceable illusion: for as we have known some good people, of a sort, who would be distressed to find that there was no hell to burn up the opponents of their orthodoxy ”

“ Why, he has been known to take the shine out of old Sol himself; though from his partiality to us it always makes him look black in the face when we, Alexander-like, stand between him and that luminary. We, too, are the only people by whom he ever allows himself to be eclipsed. Illustrious man in the moon I he has lifted our thoughts from earth to heaven, and we are reluctant to leave him. But the best of friends must part; especially as other lunar inhabitants await attention. ”

“ We "had rather be a dog, and bay the moon, than such a Roman" as is not at least distantly acquainted with that brilliant character in high life who careers so conspicuously amid the constellations which constitute the upper ten thousand of super-mundane society. And now some inquisitive individual may be impatient to interrupt our eloquence with the question, "What are you going to make of the man in the moon?" ”