Substance, Melancholy & the Blue Moon

Seems that there has been a kind of plague going around. Melancholy, self doubt, and depression have been running rampant. I have found myself to be (in the last week) down, nervous, restless and practically neurotic. I haven't been able to write anything significant - anything with any substance to it whatsoever. Today, however, I feel relieved. I get the impression that lots of us are feeling relief, spirits uplifting and relaxing a bit.

The Blue Moon
On Saturday, July 31 we had what is referred to as a Blue Moon. Technically, this is simply the second full moon in one calendar month. Since the moon is on a 29 1/2 day cycle, this happens roughly once per year.

I have become much more aware, in recent years, as to how the moon affects us.

Lunacy
University of Miami, psychologist Arnold Lieber and his colleagues decided to test the old belief of full-moon “lunacy” which most scientists had written off as an old wives’ tale. The researchers collected data on homicide in Dade County (Miami) over a period of 15 years — 1,887 murders, to be exact. When they matched the incidence of homicide with the phases of the moon, they found, much to their surprise, that the two rose and fell together, almost infallibly, for the entire 15 years! As the full or the new moon approached, the murder rate rose sharply; it distinctly declined during the first and last quarters of the moon.

To find out whether this was just a statistical fluke, the researchers repeated the experiment using murder data from Cuyahoga County in Ohio (Cleveland). Again, the statistics showed that more murders do indeed occur at the full and new moons.
He and his colleagues shouldn’t have been so surprised. An earlier report by the American Institute of Medical Climatology to the Philadelphia Police Department entitled “The Effect of the Full Moon on Human Behavior” found similar results. That report showed that the full moon marks a monthly peak in various kinds of psychotically oriented crimes such as murder, arson, dangerous driving, and kleptomania. People do seem to get a little bit crazier about that time of the month.

That’s something most police and hospital workers have known for a long time. Indeed, back in eighteenth-century England, a murderer could plead “lunacy” if the crime was committed during the full moon and get a lighter sentence as a result. Scientists, however, like to have a hard physical model to explain their discoveries, and so far there isn’t a fully accepted one. Since we know that the moon controls the tides of the oceans, Dr. Lieber speculates that perhaps the human body, which, like the surface of the earth, is composed of almost 80 percent water, experiences some kind of “biological tides” that affect the emotions. When a person is already on psychologically shaky ground, such a biological tide can push him or her over the edge.

But can planetary cycles directly affect individual human events? If the answer is yes, then cycle research begins to look pretty much like astrology, a subject most scientists aren’t too fond of.

Those Crazy Astrologers
An Atomic Energy Commission-funded project at Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, came up with a report entitled “Intriguing Accident Patterns Plotted against a Background of Natural Environmental Features”, which correlated on-the-job accidents of government employees over a period of 20 years with various natural cycles. This preliminary report (the researchers suggested further study was in order) found that accidents peak with the sunspot cycle and — even more intriguing and “astrological” — that people were more likely to have accidents during the phase of the moon the same as or opposite to that under which they were born.

Some really hard and startling evidence might have come out of this research had it been allowed to continue. But alas, that was not to be. Shortly after its completion, the report fell into the hands of Time magazine, which did a spoof on it in its January 10, 1972, issue, under the heading “Moonstruck Scientists”, complete with an old woodcut of maidens dancing in a frenzy under the rays of the full moon.

That was all the Congress needed to kill the project and suppress the report. When I wrote to the Atomic Energy Commission and Sandia in 1972, they stated the report was not for distribution and that no taxpayer could not see it.

Blue Moon in Aquarius - the Water Bearer
Water, in occult studies, refers to emotions, and the water sign Moons are the most emotional of all. With Moon in Cancer or Scorpio, a considerable amount of energy is invested in discovering, experiencing, and digesting emotions. Paradoxically, Moon in Pisces, which is potentially the most emotional, constantly attempts to escape from unpleasant feelings, leading in some cases to an addictive personality or to living in a fantasy world.

Water sign Moons are also very influential in responsivness to other people's feelings. This could explain all of the hurt feelings, comment flaming and stepping on each others' toes that has been going on.

The primary difficulty with water sign Moons is people getting so hung up in their emotions that they lose some effectiveness in dealing with the outside world. With emotions, as with most other things in life, we all need to strike a balance. This moon in Aquarius made us feel restless, and with a full moon at full power, the high-tide swelling emotions and feelings of restlessness, in some, became quite overwhelming.

So, we can all breathe a sign of relief as it has passed. Get ready for the end of this month, though...August 29 is our next full moon. It will be, my friends, in Pisces.