New Cold War and the woman in the moon
• The moon rules our months and looms large in mythology and science fiction
In the science-fiction series The Expanse, a future Martian colony gets very upset when one of its two moons, Deimos, gets shot to pieces by the UN on Earth. “They’ve messed with our skies,” yells one soldier, but later one learns Mars won’t retaliate just yet because it was so small, it was just a dot in the sky. That doesn’t pacify the antsy fighters: it’s the idea that counts. How can one live without a moon?
Keeping up with the Joneses is one of the many themes in the rivalry between Mars, Earth and the Belters, colonial castoffs on the asteroids in the show; if one has a moon, the other must too, and two are one too many. But it goes deeper than that, to their enduring identity crisis. Who among us are the truest humans, what with different bone structure due to different gravitational fields? It helps that they all speak either Amazon English or a kind of pidgin, but yearning for a moon and a blue sky is essential.
The Expanse is make believe, where you can hear the gigantic frames of space stations moan and creak despite the absence of air to carry the sound, and magnetic shoes keep everybody level with the camera in the studio. But 55 years after the first moon landings, we have taken another step towards our sci-fi future with a spate of moon landings over the past year or so by US, Chinese, Russian, Indian and Japanese craft, and three attempts by private companies.
Some were more successful than others, or as AP wrote in February: “The moon is littered with wreckage from failed moon landings.” Indeed, part of human identity is to leave a mess behind everywhere we go.
The sun is our power source, but other than giving us night and day, and weakening through the year to mark the seasons (in most climes), it has played a far lesser role in forming the human psyche and social traditions.
The calendar with its months and weeks is ruled by the moon. We have just entered Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, which starts with the first sighting of the crescent moon and ends with the next, and is devoted to fasting, community and reflection.
It is also a mark of Muslim astronomy, which along with Muslim mathematical studies for centuries led the way before the Renaissance, when Europeans were able to use these and other fruits of Islam to finally cast off the suffocating grip of religion and myth and begin the age of science and engineering, which eventually took us to other parts of the planetary system.
For tens of millennia before the emergence of the religions of the book, most of Europe was ruled by societies beholden to magic and paganistic rituals. In Greece, the crucible of modern European thought, these were matrilineal communities, in which a Goddess Mother held sway in accordance with celestial rhythms.
Women had to rule the roost because they menstruated in cycles the length of which coincided more or less with the phases of the moon, proof of their heavenly filiations. For several millennia before humans began measuring the skies, the year was divided by 28, the average menstrual cycle, into 13 months. How that gave us the belief in 13 as an unlucky number, is a story of its own, according to Robert Graves in his two mammoth volumes, The Greek Myths.
THE MOON WAS LINKED TO MANY AN ODD HABIT … CRAZY PEOPLE WERE CALLED LUNATICS, AFTER LUNA, LATIN FOR MOON
The Goddess Mother was represented by a queen on earth. Men, being the stronger sex, went to war and hunted, ploughed and fought as they wished, and were kept sweet by being allowed to nominate a king to sit beside the queen or act on her behalf wearing false breasts and holding her lunar sceptre. The caveat was that he had to be sacrificed every year, to be replaced by a new one. That was on the extra day that had to be added to 13 lunations (orbits around Earth) times 28 days, or 364 days.
Lifetimes were short those days, between 20 and 30 years for most men, so that was not such a bad deal when you could live like a god with everything and everyone at your disposal. Still, over the centuries, resistance from the men led to their sacrifice being replaced by that of a boy, who sat beside him on the throne when he deputised to the queen. Still later, the boy became an animal, often a goat.
Men also discovered that it was they who impregnated women, and not vapours or cascading water when they went walking naked in forests or bathing in streams. They began sleeping with the queen to father her children and so keep themselves alive a little longer. Again the moon was the key to providing the cosmological rationalisations — according to Graves, their reign was stretched to a “Great Year” when the lunar year and solar year coincided, every 100 lunations — seven years and eight months before he was thrown off a cliff or pricked in the heel with a poison-dipped thorn.
The world’s proto-scientists discovered ever more complexities apart from the difference between the sidereal (27.3 days) and the synodic month (29.5 days). A closer approximation was found for the Great Year, which now conveniently for the king stretched to 329 lunations, and became a Greater Year, or 19 years. By that time his son would have grown to be a warrior to defend him against the wild women who in some parts used to tear the sacrificial king or boy to pieces after having drunk copious amphorae of wine, or eaten certain mushrooms, which later came to be called ambrosia, the food of the gods.
Graves says among European peasants the tradition of 13 months in a year survived well into the Middle Ages after the Julian calendar was adopted. It was one of the lesser reasons why Robin Hood rose up against the current dispensation, according to a broad interpretation of a ditty about him: “How many merry months be in a year?/There are 13, I say”. In the later Tudor ages a censor had to edit that to: “There are but 12.”
As the Renaissance came and the Age of Enlightenment started, such moon-derived politics appeared to have finally subsided. Yet the belief remained ubiquitous that the moon had a strong pull on our psyches. It was linked to many an odd habit or behaviour; crazy people were called lunatics, after luna, Latin for moon. Even quite recently, some Spanish researchers wrote solemn papers to debunk beliefs among ordinary people that more car accidents happened during the full moon.
That the moon is ideal fare for politics after all those millennia of sacrifice and scientific subterfuge suddenly re-emerged as modern truth during the Cold War. The Russians shot a dog into space, the Americans had to do something. And so long before John Steenhuisen, a moonshot pact was forged between an Irish upstart trading on his good looks as a politician, John F
Kennedy, and the likes of the more ogre-like Werner von Braun, the rocket scientist and Nazi supporter lured to the US after he had bombed London with his V2 rockets.
Soon after his announcement that a moon landing would be made before the end of the decade, Kennedy was killed by the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, generally regarded as a lunatic, in a deed conceivably motivated by a complex of detritus from the US political subconscious, which gave it some semblance to those sacrifices of the lucky king chosen by the queen in a nascent type of democracy, to stretch things somewhat.
Enter Norman Mailer, the wunderkind of US literature, who after 20 years of outrageous fame was trying to keep himself together in a battle with drink, drugs and ego, your typical American celebrity. Asked by Life magazine to write about the Apollo programme before the first moon landing on July 20 1969, he made it about himself and his latest divorce as well.
This reinforced New Journalism and a broader trend for US nonfiction, of mixing ultraprivate issues of ostensibly little consequence with the grand narratives of history. One of the persistent criticisms of the 2024 winner of the Oscar for best picture, Oppenheimer, was how peripheral the history was of his battle with a personal not-quite nemesis, a petty politician called Lewis Strauss (played by Oscar-winner Robert
Downey Jr). But such a narrative has echoes from far back, the time of the Greek myths and bumbling heroes like Odysseus.
Mailer’s entry was a kind of resurgence of the epic in another, even more atavistic way. By then he had gained notoriety as a misogynist with his “relentless machismo” and for stabbing a wife with a knife. All these troubles were spilt out on the pages of Life and the book compilation that followed, titled Of a Fire on the Moon. It is tempting to see in his constant inveigling against the power of women, despite being a “leftist” on all other issues, a return of the battle of the sexes between the European king scheming to stay alive against the demands of ritual 15,000 years ago.
Fire on the Moon was a bestseller for years, despite containing pages and pages of simply awful and dull writing. Equally brilliant passages make up for those, but what gives it its heft is Mailer’s grasp of the eternal issues beyond the urgencies of the Cold War, which the US won in no small measure due to the Apollo moon landings.
To his credit, he immersed himself in the details. When critics sneered that he didn’t know what he was talking about, he could point out that he had actually acquired a degree in aeronautical engineering before he wrote his first bestseller at the age of 25. There was much to report on the humongous endeavour: 4.7% of the US federal budget was being spent on the programme, and 400,000 people worked on it or for the 50,000 contractors involved.
A gigantic feat of engineering, even if it was just because of the comparatively primitive technology involved. The stateof-the-art computer on Apollo 11 only had 2KB of memory, and was as big as a shoebox. Since there was no global communications network yet, let alone an internet, data tapes from radar stations had to be brought to Nasa headquarters in Houston by courier.
Still, Mailer grew appalled by what he saw. So emotionally disengaged and rationally impeccable were the engineering processes that he felt humanity had lost touch with the very thing all the activity was about. “In that longago of prairie spaces when the wind was the message of America, Indians had lived in greater intimacy with the moon than any European,” he wrote.
It was the time when humans started to name things with acronyms, so beloved of the anonymity seeking yet brand managing corporations of today.
“All signs to the Vehicle Assembly Building said VAB,” Mailer wrote scathingly. “VAB
— it could be the name of a drink or a deodorant, or it could be suds for the washer. But it was not a name for this warehouse of the gods. The great churches of a religious age had names: the Alhambra, Santa Sophia, Mont Saint-Michel, Chartres, Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame. Now: VAB.”
Every time he went past banks of computers with their reels, he felt he had “just walked through an amphitheatre where some species of higher tapeworm was quietly ingesting the vitals of God”. The designs were done with no thought for aesthetics, and he especially hated the lunar landing module: “It had been designed from the inside, and so was about as ugly as a human body that had shaped itself around the excessive development of a few special organs. Conceive of a man whose only function in life was to win pie-eating contests — what a stomach would he develop, large as a steamer trunk.”
The engineers, since not even pocket calculators existed yet, kept slide rules in their breast pockets, and were bland and colourless; white was the universal colour and all was imbued with “unequalled banality and apocalyptic dignity. Woe to any astronaut or wife who uttered in public any sentiment which would fail to bore.”
The worst for Mailer was Neil Armstrong’s delivery of the famous words “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, who did it in “the quiet voice of the best boy in town, the one who pulls you drowning from the sea and walks a reward off”before . you can offer
And he put his finger on the issue that takes the reader right back to the powerful force the moon was and the meanings it had for those prairie “Indians” and the European ancestors: “An engineer’s idea of beauty was system perfection. Beauty was obviously the absence of magic.”
That he was missing the war of the sexes that lay at the basis of those magical worlds of the past puts another spin on his dismay. He lamented: “Yes, we might have to go out into space until the mystery of new discovery would force us to regard the world once again as poets, behold it as savages who knew that if the universe was a lock, its key was metaphor rather than measurement.”
Indeed, it was with measurement that the white male’s long journey started over thousands of years towards the near complete ascendancy he had reached by July 1969 in the most powerful country with its planet-threatening nuclear arsenal — with determining the true timespans of lunations in order to loosen the grip of the female goddess-queen, the true time of gestation between male insemination and female birth.
His paradoxical misogynism made Mailer also miss how few and far between the women on the programme were. When Vanity Fair 50 years later wanted to write about them, it had to scrutinise old photographs and launch a national search to track down the single one who was present in Firing Room 1, the nucleus of the programme: JoAnn Morgan, an instrumentation controller.
Mailer ended his project of metaphors, some would say too many of them, in a state of fear and foreboding. As Mark Noble put it in a review on Goodreads, he “considers that the draw of the moon may be an evil attraction and one we are not meant to make. He sees a future controlled by banal corporations, military-industrial complex behemoths with technology and efficiency supreme but void of soul, the ultimate evil unleashed on the universe.
“Even more than the technology, Mailer feared the technocrats in charge,” Noble continues. “Today we see a fundamental conservative right that would have scared Mailer to death. We have allowed the growth of the huge militaryindustrial complex … sending equipment, troops and rains of fire over every Middle Eastern Muslim tribe that goads our anger.”
And now, as new hostilities start with new proxy wars, or in tech-speak, Cold War 2.0, a new race for the moon completes the picture. At least we can say that people like Elon Musk are not colourless technocrats, on the contrary, when he utters a sentiment in public he tends to create a scandal. And we now have women astronauts.
Still, you have to wonder about humanity’s future now that the moon is just a gigantic rock and not a goddess any more. Will the prophecy of another Jules Verne prevail? In 1865 he wrote about “les Yankees” in his fantasy, From the Earth to the Moon: “They had no other ambition than to take possession of this new continent of the sky, and to plant upon the summit of its highest elevation the Star-Spangled Banner of the United States of America.”
To be fair, businesspeople from other nations are involved too. Then again, we are all Americans now, aren’t we? How else would everybody get to speak American English in The Expanse?
THAT THE MOON IS IDEAL FARE FOR POLITICS … SUDDENLY RE-EMERGED AS MODERN TRUTH DURING THE COLD WAR