Moon/dreaming, Goddesses & Extraction

This past weekend, celebrating Thanksgiving out by the bonfire, the sun retreating, leaving behind those darkening blues as it went - and yes, the Tragically Hip were right, the constellations do “reveal themselves one star at a time”. But as lovely as those stars were, I wasn’t waiting on Orion or the Big Dipper. I was waiting and watching for the moon.

Later, there she was, in her Last Quarter, half of her surface shrouded in darkness. But goodness, she was still very bright, her luminous beauty making it hard not to stare. Staring up into the night sky, this moon gazing, has existed as long as there have been human beings & creatures on earth – who could possibly resist that shimmering sphere, that push & pull of those lunar cycles?

That push and pull, those tumbling, turbulent tides – at one time, eons ago, the moon and the earth were tucked in a little closer together, the tidal grasping and releasing of water was more vigorous and intense; all of that tossing caused fish to become stranded in tidepools; over time, their fins struggling to find purchase until they slowly became limbs, and then we began our long journey towards walking on land, breathing air through lungs, settling on terra firma. The moon taking us from fish to human.

Since that shift in our evolution, since that shaping & birthing, it is not surprising that humans have always been somewhat moonstruck. Carefully watching the moon, keeping track of the cycles that guide us through the seasons. It is very possible that our Neolithic ancestors even mapped the moon’s surface, mistaking the dark lava-filled depressions on her surface to be water-bodies, giving us the romantic and dreamy Lunar Maria. Such a map resides at Knowth, a megalithic site in the Boyne Valley, Ireland. Constructed of rock some 5,000 years ago, the great mound has east and west-facing passages; the planetary cartographer Phillip Stooke suggests that were moonlight to reach the far end of the east passage (now blocked) it would illuminate a map of the moon carved into the stone.

These Neolithic sites were built along the River Boyne: Boyne from Bóinn, the goddess. Bóinn meaning White Cow - the Milky Way was called Bealach na Bó Finne, the Way of the White Cow, the ‘heavenly reflection’ of the River Boyne itself – perhaps too, the crescent moon as the horns of the cow – and then also, the site at Newgrange, Brú na Bóinne, possibly ‘womb of the moon’. 1

So when considering the moon, with its dreamy history, and its association with love & myth, it is impossible for me to imagine that one could feel anything but awe and reverence for her strange and powerful luminosity. Inconceivable to me that one could possibly not be moonstruck.

But I must have my head in the clouds, trapped in some impractical celestial swoon. Because right now there are forces that are not moonstruck at all, forces eyeing the moon, not for her beauty, or magic, or even the science. No, it is for the resources - the water, the helium-3, the rare earth elements –all of it leaving them giddy with the possibility of a lunar mining rush.

Mining the moon is allowed under the Artemis Accord (2020), a non-binding framework drafted under the Trump administration and signed by over 50 countries, including Canada. Artemis, of course, is the Greek goddess associated with the moon. Such a romantic handle for this extractive, colonizing venture.

As I seek the moon now in the evenings and the mornings, I wonder over our adherence to greed, over our squandering of the earth’s resources only to move on in our exploitations– first the moon, then Mars. Perhaps naming the mining agreement after Artemis - instead of a the watery, glimmering Bóinn - was a good move. Perhaps it will rouse her spirit. Because Artemis was also the goddess of the hunt - lived in the woods minding her own business until some hunter called Actaeon came along and spied on her while she was bathing. She turned him into a deer and his own dogs, thinking him a stag, tore him apart. Perhaps invoking Artemis will unleash a resistance to a gaze that is both foolhardy and greedy.