Did you have trouble sleeping last night? Were your dogs howling louder than expected? ”Did you come down with a case of lycanthropy and spend the night prowling through cemeteries searching for freshly-buried corpses?”
Then you may have been experiencing the impacts of the Full Wolf Moon. The Earth’s only natural satellite, the moon, follows a 29.5-day cycle suggesting that except for the shorter February, each month of the year is assured to observe a full moon at some point.
This was noticed too soon in human development and so the phases of the moon turned out to be the foundation for the first calendars. Each full moon in the lunar phase was designated a name which then became the names of the months in these calendars.
The emergence of the Julian and Gregorian calendars witnessed lunar calendars’ declining use, but the full moons still maintained their given names and have since embraced new ones.
January’s Full Wolf Moon was so given a name by Native American people. According to the Farmers’ Almanac, “Amid the cold and deep snows of midwinter, the wolf packs howled hungrily outside Indian villages. Thus, the name for January’s full moon.”
There persists a great deal of myth and superstition associated with a full moon. Some of the most common beliefs include: the increase in female fertility, a decline in the quality of sleep, thinning of blood etc.
”And of course, there’s the belief that a full moon can turn an individual into a lycanthrope, or werewolf, and that a full moon can trigger madness in those susceptible. The word “lunatic” is in fact derived from the Latin word “lunaticus”, or “moonstruck.”
In spite of that, no rational scientific research has ever found a significance of the full moon on life on Earth.
”So whether you feel some strange effects of the bright circle in the night sky or think its all hogwash, one thing is certain: a full moon does make for some great photographs.”
