We're doomed! We're all doomed! The prospects for my family look bleak indeed, since we moved house over the weekend - and totally ignored the moon. According to tradition, it is very unlucky to "flit", as they liked to put it in the old days, during the waning phases of the moon. In fact a prosperous change of habitation requires the concurrence of three distinct circumstances: "that the moon be waxing, that the tide be flowing, and that the wind blow on the back of the person who removes".
Whatever about the winds and tides - which, it must be said, in our case also received very scant attention - the full moon, I see in retrospect, was on June 10th, and the new moon will be on June 24th, so the moon at present is very definitely on the wane. God help us all! But of course, the influence of the moon need not always be malign. It is appropriate perhaps to recall today, Bloomsday, that James Joyce in Ulysses describes how "Gerty's crowning glory was her wealth of wonderful hair; she had cut it that very morning on account of the new moon".
The reference was to a popular belief in olden times that one should only cut one's hair during the waxing moon, and that to do so on the exact date of the new moon - on the turn, so to speak - was a virtual guarantee of its luxuriant growth. But the new moon can have an evil influence as well. In parts of Cornwall they used to say "No moon, no man", reflecting the somewhat macabre but prevalent notion that if a child was born in the interval between an old moon and the first appearance of the new, the child would not survive to adulthood.
And there has always been a suspicion that the moon affects our sanity: in that eventful last scene of Othello, for example, as the tragedy of errors is unveiled, Shakespeare has the distracted Moor detect its baleful influence:
It is the very error of the moon; She comes more near earth than she was wont
And makes men mad.
The moon, indeed, is a body full of mystery. There is a legend that it is a repository of all worldly folly - that it contains a treasure-house of wasted effort, misspent wealth and talents misapplied, of fruitless tears and unfulfilled desires. As Alexander Pope describes it,
There broken vows and death
bed alms are found
And lovers' hearts with ends
of ribband bound;
The courtier's promises and
sick man's prayers,
The smiles of harlots and the
tears of heirs.