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| Moon sticker on my mini laptop, which is also the header photo in my Moon Magick group. |
This was originally going to be a post in my Moon Magick group on Facebook (which you can request to join and I will, eventually, check the requests lol), but it quickly turned into FAR too long of a post for Facebook. It is, however, a fairly normal length (for me) long blog post. So here we are!
Earlier this year in the Moon Magick group, I shared two tables with the Full and New Moons for 2019. The original tables were generated from moontracks.com and the Full Moon one also includes some of the most commonly known "Full Moon names". As you see on the tables below, I have to adjust some of the times because my area uses Daylight Saving Time. The moontracks generator creates a table for any time zone you set it to (mine is Eastern time), but it doesn't adjust for DST, so I do that myself, looking up the dates it begins and ends and adjusting the Moon times between them. The changes I made are in blue.
I should also note that I started working on this post back in December 2018, to get ready for the new year. The moontracks generator begins from the time you're using it. If you look at it today, the day I'm posting this, it begins with the Moon in April. The New Moon table also didn't include the last New Moon of 2019, again I think because I generated the tables in December and it only goes so far. So I added in the info for the Dec. 26 2019 New Moon myself.
So what you see above are the original tables with my changes for Daylight Saving Time, and adding the last 2019 New Moon which wasn't on the generated table at the time I generated them.
I then combine those separate Full Moon and New Moon tables from moontracks into one, chronological list for the calendar year. I also add in the dates and times of the solstices and equinoxes, which I look up usually on timeanddate.com, so that I can clearly see the separate seasons. The combined table that results is shown here, below, for 2019:
Because I generated my tables in December of 2018, it included the Full Moon on Dec. 22, 2018. But as you can see from the inclusion of the solstices and equinoxes, that Full Moon was actually the first one of our Winter season (in the northern hemisphere, or of Summer in the southern hemisphere) this year, so I'm very glad it was included, and you'll hear more about that as this post goes on! Similarly, the last New Moon of 2019 will occur after the next Winter Solstice, making it the first New Moon of next winter, part of the next year as far as the seasons go.
This next image is basically the exact same image as the combined table above, with one difference: Here, I've added a different way of looking at the Full Moon names, as compared to that original table, that is actually based on the seasons.
**Please note that seasons mentioned here throughout this post are as they apply to the northern hemisphere, as that is where these Moon names originated! The seasons are different south of the equator, so I imagine these Moon names also don't fit at all in other geographic locations.**
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The Blue Moon
I talk about Blue Moons a lot, because the most popular and commonly known definition used today, is not actually what a Blue Moon was supposed to be, but rather it was a mistake someone published decades ago and everyone began passing around. It is known that it was a mistake, but people kept quoting that mistake and spreading it around like a bad meme on social media, and you know there's not much luck correcting such things at that point! Still, you can read about the original definition of the Blue Moon, and how the mistake came to be known as a "second definition" here. I personally utilize the original definition in my practice. It's okay to make mistakes, but I think when we find out we've made an error, we should try to correct it. Still, this is the tendency of human beings... When we are told we've made an error, instead of correcting that error and admitting we were wrong, we turn that error into a "second definition", so that we were not wrong at all! "Alternative facts", am I right? LOL, anyway, moving on...
2019 has a true Blue Moon, a seasonally based one -- the 3rd Full Moon in a season with 4 Full Moons. This is why seeing where the solstices and equinoxes fall is helpful. Seasons usually have 3 Full Moons each, but as you can see in the tables above, this Spring will have 4 Full Moons (between the vernal equinox and summer solstice). The 3rd of those 4 was traditionally called the "Blue Moon" in order to ensure that all the others kept their names in relation to the solstices and equinoxes.
However, this year is a little strange because we also think of a year with 4 Moons in a season as "a year with 13 Moons"... but 2019 still only has 12. This is probably why in the original table from moontracks, they all have the normal 12 names that people commonly associate with the 12 calendar months... 12 Moons, 12 months, 12 names... There doesn't seem to BE an "extra" moon at all, so how could there be a Blue Moon if there aren't 13 Moons in 2019?
This is because the Moons are generally grouped by seasons, not calendar months.
We don't say "there is one Full Moon per calendar month", because we know that isn't so. Sometimes a month has two Full Moons, and sometimes February doesn't have a Full Moon. Instead we say there are usually three Full Moons in a season. Well, the seasons don't perfectly align with the man-made calendar year, and the Moon's lunation cycle is not a perfect "calendar month". The time from one Full Moon to the next usually spans multiple calendar months, and changes slightly in relation to the seasons--and calendar months--every year. We know that the dates of the solstices and equinoxes can vary, as well, and there is no season that ends or begins on the day we call January 1st.
(Some calendar systems begin with the spring equinox as their new year, but the Gregorian calendar, which is currently used as the secular, or civic calendar in many countries, does not do this.)
As mentioned earlier, the first Full Moon of winter this time around was actually in December 2018, the day after the solstice. If we look at "this year" as being the time from solstice to solstice, not Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, we see that there are 13 Full Moons this year.
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Naming the Moons
- Winter -
I looked up a few different sources on Moon names to see what solstice/equinox/etc. they're supposed to align with, and here is what I learned:
The Wolf Moon (typically associated with January) is also known as the "Moon after Yule."
The Cold Moon (typically associated with December) is also known as the "Moon before Yule."
If Yule begins at the Winter Solstice, then the Full Moon on Dec. 22, 2018 which occurred the day AFTER the solstice, was the Moon After Yule, also known by some as the Wolf Moon. Yule is another name of the Solstice, or Jul is a multi-week-long festival, so if they're going by the first Full Moon after the extended period of Jul/Yuletide is completely done, THEN yeah, the Jan. 21 Moon would be it. But typically the Moon names were based on the seasons, and the solstices and equinoxes are the indicators of those beginning and ending.
This tells me that for this year, the Wolf Moon was the Full Moon back in December, not the Full Moon in January this year, as many people assumed because we simply think "First one of the year = January". Some years the first Full Moon following Yule does actually occur in January. I think we might even be able to say that most of the time it does, which is why the names became associated with the calendar months. But, sometimes it doesn't perfectly align with the man-made calendar. And why should it? Humans do not control the celestial bodies or the cycles of the Moon. Humans did, however, create the various calendars we've used to try and track time passing throughout our history. We used to base calendar calculations off the sun and moon, and some systems still do to this day, but our secular calendar diverted from that centuries ago.
I also learned that the Worm Moon is supposed to be the "last Full Moon of winter."
In the original moontracks chart they have it as March 20, but that Moon takes place after the equinox (on the same day but after the moment of equinox, which of course we can tell only because of astronomical and astrological calculations, not by looking up at the sky, but that's what almanacs were for!), making it technically the first Full Moon of what we call Spring. The last Full Moon of the winter season, before the equinox, was the one on February 19th.
The Snow Moon is also known as the Midwinter Moon, which makes perfect sense as it would be the second out of three Moons in winter. The first Winter moon is the Wolf, the third or last Moon of Winter is the Worm, making the Snow Moon the middle one between those two.
Again, people think of the Wolf, Snow, and Worm Moon as simply the first, second, and third "of the year", and they think of the calendar year which leads to "January, February, March." In that case Worm Moon would always just be in March. Third month, third Moon, right? But that pesky Full Moon back in December being AFTER the solstice this winter really throws this year off of being perfectly and simply in sync with the months of the calendar year.
- Spring - The Moon and Easter
The Pink Moon is the "first Full Moon after the Equinox", the first moon of Spring, and is often also called the Paschal Moon because it's the one that is supposed to determine the date of Easter. Easter is generally thought to be the first Sunday following the first Full Moon falling on or after the Vernal Equinox. (I checked to make sure whether the rule was that it had to be on a separate day, or if the Full Moon on the same day counted, and sources say that it is supposed to include a Full Moon falling "on or after" the equinox.)
The Full Moon on the date of the equinox this year occurred a few hours after the Equinox "moment", so it was after the equinox. Based on this, Easter should have been the following Sunday, March 24. But it isn't. Ultimately, scheduling religious holidays is up to the Church. There is a very lengthy page about how Easter is determined (called the Computus) on Wikipedia, which explains that although we still think of Easter as "the first Sunday after the first Full Moon following the Vernal Equinox", the Church actually doesn't base it off of the ACTUAL equinox. They just picked a date, and always go from there. The Computus article says the ecclesiastical Full Moon date is the 20th of March, and this Time and Date article explains that the ecclesiastical equinox date is the 21st of March, and how that explains when Easter was this year, since it seems so disconnected from how we usually think of it. If it were truly still based on the Full Moon on or after the equinox, Easter would have been in late March this year, but it wasn't.
Because Easter was in April, and the Pink Moon is also thought of as the Paschal Moon (the one related to Easter), this is another reason people would simply attach the Pink Moon name to the April Full Moon this year, even though seasonally, the April Moon was not the "first Full Moon after the equinox" or "the first Full Moon of spring" at all. So in my table above, the Flower Moon would be the Paschal Moon this year because it's the one on which they based Easter, but the Pink Moon (March 20) is the first one on or after the vernal equinox, the first Full Moon of spring.
The other two spring Moons, in this system of common names, are the Flower and Strawberry Moons.
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A Side Note: Two Libra Moons
{ Another interesting thing in 2019 is that we had TWO Full Moons in Libra right in a row--the one on March 20, and the one on April 19--because they both fell when the Sun was in Aries. A Full Moon occurs when the Sun and Moon are on opposite sides of Earth, so the Full Moon is always in the sign opposite the Sun in the zodiac. A New Moon occurs when they're on the same side of Earth, so the New Moons are always in the same sign as the Sun at the time. I haven't looked into how often we get two Full Moon of the same sign in a row, but I certainly find it interesting regardless! }
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- Summer / Autumn -
The three Moons of summer in this basic system are the Buck, Sturgeon, and Harvest Moons. There are no other well known nicknames I could find that link all three of them obviously with solstices or equinoxes, like the "Moon before/after Yule" ones, but if we are sticking just to the idea that there are typically three Moons per season, we would think of the Buck as the first of Summer (after the solstice which marks the start of the season), the Sturgeon as the mid-season Moon (similar to the Snow also being called "Midwinter"), and the Harvest Moon would be the last Full Moon of Summer.
The Harvest Moon, however, is the only one that does have another specific characteristic: It is supposed to be the Full Moon closest to the autumnal equinox. Not just "before the equinox" but "closest to"... which means it could differ from year to year. This really changes things! This is the only Moon name that has something like this, which means it could be the name of the last Full Moon of summer, or it could be the first Full Moon of autumn, depending on how the cycles fall that year! Usually the Harvest Moon is in September, as it is in 2019, but sometimes it's in October if that Full Moon falls closer to the equinox date. Goodness, we had to go and make it more complicated!
The three Full Moon names of autumn in this basic system would be the Hunter's Moon, Beaver Moon, and Cold Moon.
In the way that people match Moon names to the calendar months today, the Hunter's Moon is considered the Full Moon in October. But sometimes the Harvest Moon falls in October, so then what? Apparently, if the October Full Moon happens to be closest to the equinox, then people call it BOTH the Harvest Moon and Hunter's Moon. It gets two names. And when that happens, the September one becomes the Corn Moon, because otherwise it wouldn't have a name suddenly.
Other than this circumstance, there is no Corn Moon in this particular system of Moon names (Various Native American and other groups use totally different names for the Full Moons, and there are multiple names having to do with Corn throughout the whole year, but among these "most common names" that most people end up talking about, there is no Corn Moon usually.)
So people today just double up names and substitute in a totally different name if needed... in order to maintain the Hunter's Moon ALWAYS being in the calendar month of October, instead of saying it's the first Moon of autumn/first after the autumn equinox, or even the Moon following the Harvest Moon.
Up until this point, the Moons are only based on their relation to the seasons. Or, I mean, people attach them to the months, as we've also been seeing here. But even then, the Harvest Moon would always be the one in September if we only go by the months. And it would always be the last one of summer/before the autumn equinox, if we go by just the order of the Moons in each season. But having one Moon name that depends on which one is CLOSEST to the equinox really throws all this off. Then we've got double names and extra names needing to be pulled in off the bench. Of course the harvest would be based on the seasons, and the planting. That is different in every area of the world. Sometimes it being in late September would make sense, sometimes early October. But overall, we're seeing that the names people give to the Moons really depend on who you ask, and how you determine them--seasons, calendar months, or some occasional exceptions to either rule.
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Calendar Based / Northern Hemisphere-centric
Full Moons are typically thought to have been named in relation to their place in the seasons, and that's why a 13th Moon would disrupt the naming sequence, and had to be given a nickname -- the "Blue Moon". Three Moons per season, with three names... a season with 4 Moons would throw that off. That sounds fairly simple and has always made sense to me, personally.
But here we are in 2019, with a true seasonal Blue Moon, and it doesn't even get called the Blue Moon by most people because there are only 12 Moons between the calendar dates 1/1/2019 and 12/31/2019. There doesn't seem to be an "extra" Moon, so there is no need for its name because there are already 12 moon names, "one for each month" and people just plug the names into the calendar like that's it. People aren't necessarily thinking about the fact that the first Full Moon of the winter season was actually in December 2018 after the solstice, or that the Blue Moon is actually something other than "the second Full Moon in a month" (that mistake that got adopted as an alternate definition, see the link I shared earlier in this post).
Calendars are created by humanity, and have in fact changed many times throughout human history (also see the link earlier in this post to read more about calendars). The Moon names are supposed to be about the cycles of Nature, planting, wildlife, the changing of the seasons around us and what we observe. That's why there are also different names for different peoples around the world--this "basic system" as I've called it for the sake of ease, these names many of us have seen shared everywhere online, are not universal. They are only based on specific areas of the world, and names given to the Moons by specific groups of people. They are not the only names out there, and they don't all make sense for every geographic area.
As I mentioned way at the start of this post, these names are from the northern hemisphere. The autumn harvest here may occur in September or October with what some people call the Harvest Moon, but in the southern hemisphere the autumn harvest happens in like, March or April. So it really makes little sense to attach seasonal observation based names to calendar months, because the seasons are very different in different places on Earth while the man-made calendar we follow remains the same in every country that uses it. Imagine talking about the Harvest Moon in March or April in the northern hemisphere. Doesn't make sense, does it? We're only just planting seeds at that point, not harvesting! And when we have the "Flower Moon" as flowers bloom here, other places are experiencing the decline of vegetation and preparing for winter. These names are northern hemisphere centered to begin with, and they don't even always make sense here, depending on where you live.
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Moon Names by Season: Review
For a quick review of these commonly used names, and really I think an easier way of looking at all this, here are the names of the Full Moons grouped by their season in the northern hemisphere:
Winter - from Winter Solstice to Vernal Equinox - Wolf, Snow, and Worm Moons. Wolf is "the Moon after Yule", starting off the winter season. Worm is the "last moon of winter", and Snow is the remaining one in the middle, aka "Midwinter Moon".
Spring - from Vernal Equinox to Summer Solstice - Pink, Flower, and Strawberry Moons. Pink being the "first Full Moon after the equinox".
Summer - Summer Solstice to Autumn Equinox - Buck, Sturgeon, and Harvest Moons (though the Harvest Moon is the one "closest to the autumn equinox" and it doesn't specify BEFORE, so it could be the first Moon of Autumn if it falls after but still closer to the equinox, like it did in 2018).
Autumn - Autumn equinox to Winter Solstice - Hunter's, Beaver, and Cold Moons (Cold Moon also known as the "Moon Before Yule", the last one of autumn, before Winter begins).
Each season typically has three Full Moons, and those are the names as they are based on the seasons, not the calendar months. Many years they line up with the same months, yes, but every so often, like this year, they do not.
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(In 2018 there were two Full Moons in January, and in March, and moontracks did some other strange things with the names they provided. They called the second Full Moon of January the Old Moon. This is an alternate name for "the January Full Moon", but there was no real reason for using it in 2018, other than because there were two Full Moons in the same month and if you think the names are monthly, rather than seasonal, then you might be confused as to what to do with two Full Moons in the same month. Otherwise, there was absolutely no reason to do that. 2018 had 13 Full Moons within the calendar year, although the last one in December was after the Solstice, so solstice to solstice there were only 12 Moons. There were also only 3 Full Moons in each season, no seasonal Blue Moon, no reason to add or subtract or change any names. So really... people do strange things with these names that make sense to them, perhaps, but are not universal names/reasons to use them.)
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The only changes to this line-up are when there are 4 Full Moons in one season, the 3rd one is called the Blue Moon. The rest of the Moons around it therefore remain in their original place relative to the closest solstice or equinox (except for that darned Harvest Moon** but I'll get back to that in a second). For example in 2019, Spring has 4 Full Moons and the third one is the Blue, meaning the Strawberry Moon remains the one before Summer Solstice, as usual.
Another little extra thing I found was that if the Beaver Moon is also "the last Full Moon before Winter Solstice", then it is also called the Mourning Moon. But this must depend on the monthly version of naming, because otherwise the "last Full Moon before Winter Solstice" is the "Moon before Yule", which is the Cold Moon. So the Beaver Moon would never "also be" the one before Solstice, unless you only go by the calendar months, and not the seasons. This is basically saying "If the November Full Moon is the last one before the solstice", which was the case in 2018, since the December Full Moon last year was after winter solstice. But then it wasn't the Beaver Moon... It was the Cold Moon, just in November. ;)
**As for that Harvest Moon being the only one with a specification of being CLOSEST to an equinox, rather than simply before, after, or in the middle of the season, I think to make things easiest, the Harvest Moon should just be the last Moon of Summer/the one before the Equinox. Especially since some people celebrate the first harvest at Lammas/Lughnasadh on August 1st, even if the Full Moon in question falls at the beginning of September and feels far away from the autumn equinox, it's still already harvest season! But, I'm not the one who created these Moon names lol. So that's just me saying, it would be a lot easier to just have 3 names for each season, and the Blue Moon is when an extra one happens in a season, and that's it.
And you know what? No one ever said we all have to follow THESE twelve names anyway. The Moon names are different all over the world, and between different groups of people in the same area. If we take time to come up with our own names, based on our own lives and observations of what's going on in our world at the time, some of them might be the same, but they could also be very different. They would be personal to us and our path/practice, not meant to be universally followed by everyone, just as truthfully, these 12 names don't apply to everyone universally, either.
So that's my LONG thought process about the Moon names and how no one truly bases them off the seasons anymore... But I think we should, and actually I think we should use names that truly fit our own lives, climates, geographic regions, etc. But perhaps that will be another post!
Thanks for reading! You're the best!
Blessings~
-C-
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Resources:
Other than the links provided throughout the text of this blog, here are some other sites I looked at when doing my basic little bit of research.
From Time And Date, listing what most people think of as the "Moon names", sort of the standardized list of names taken from multiple sources, that you'll see most people refer to:
https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/moon/full-moon-names.html
A page listing many different Native American tribes and their individual ways of naming the Moons: http://www.wwu.edu/planetarium/a101/indianmoons.shtml
More about Lunisolar calendars, which are based off a combination of both the Solar and Lunar cycles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunisolar_calendar
Farmer's Almanac - This page actually assigns the name Corn Moon to the month of September, allowing the last Moon of summer to ALWAYS be the Corn Moon, and the Harvest Moon is then able to be a secondary name for whichever Moon is closest to the equinox, be it the Corn Moon or the Hunter's Moon: https://www.almanac.com/content/full-moon-names
There are many more pages with many more lists of names, thoughts, and opinions. These are just some that supplemented my thought process here.
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