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SCIENCE

The Patriarchy Hates

the Moon
They even tried to nuke it.

By Sam Kriss

Birds fly past a supermoon in Egypt. (Amr Dalsh

/ Reuters)

APRIL 5, 2017

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Like most unhappy young men, in my

teenage years I went to war with the moon.
Stumbling drunk out of boring parties late
at night, I’d feel the thing glaring at me
from its smug and lofty seat, indifferent and
implacable, a faint sneer etched into its face.
Looking into the moon means looking into
the vertiginous hugeness of history: It’s the
same lump of rock seen by kings and heroes
for all those thousands of years; they all
died, and you will too, but the moon carries
on. Wolves howl; I ranted. Are you looking
at me? Are you looking at me? The moon
doesn’t care; it’s just a mirror, and in its
surface we all look very small.

A DV E RT I S E M E N T

I wasn’t alone in my loathing of the moon.

In 1958, at the height of the Cold War,
both the United States and the Soviet
Union developed secret plans for an
unprovoked nuclear strike against it.

Both operations—probably because of the

cosmic sacrilege involved—were disguised
with unassuming alphanumeric codenames
instead of the usual mythological references
or bombastic national abstractions: Project
E-4 for the Soviet plan, Project A119 for
the American (along with the euphemistic
title “A study of lunar research flights”). In
each case the idea was to transport an
atomic weapon to the moon’s terminator,
the twilight-line along its surface where
lunar day meets night, and detonate it just
after sunset on Earth. First a flash would
spread across the dark lunar surface, briefly
lighting up the contours of its craters; then
an immense cloud of atomic fire and lunar
dust would rise. In the absence of an
atmosphere, there would be no mushroom
cloud. Instead the explosion would have
formed a slowly expanding sphere, catching
the light of the sun as it grew, and providing
an entertaining spectacle and a dire warning
clearly visible to friends and enemies on
Earth.

The nexus of the witch’s

unbearable powers was
held to lie somewhere …
between the body, the
menstrual cycle, and the
moon.

The two projects were carried out in such

secrecy that the American and Soviet teams
could plausibly have both selected the same
night for their detonations. Viewers on
Earth might have been treated to the grand
farce of two atomic fires burning on the
Moon while mission commands scrambled
to find out which one was theirs. It’s
possible to read all this in two ways. The
first, most commonly accepted explanation,
is that the paranoia and insanity of the Cold
War had reached such a pitch that sane men
(and they were overwhelmingly men) could
meet together and decide that it was
necessary to project this struggle onto the
surface of our planet’s oldest companion, to
desecrate its timelessness as a show of
political force. It’s a good story—fear and
hubris running wild, and the terrible
consequences that could have resulted—but
it’s not the only interpretation. Forget the
ideology, and what you have is a
simultaneous effort by the two superpowers
to do the exact same thing. They’d
cooperated before, in the war against Nazi
Germany; it’s possible that, a decade later,
they repeated this pact without even
knowing it, banding together to plot the
joint destruction of our oldest foe.

There’s a secret history of the moon, a long

tradition in which Earth’s largest satellite
has been viewed as an object of fear, hate,
and distrust. The Soviet-American nuclear
plot might be its grandest expression, but
the hidden war has been going for
millennia. Every society has constructed
some kind of astrological system for itself,
in which the sub-lunar world is influenced
by cosmic events—but in the case of the
moon, there’s the worry that it might
actually work. In the early modern witch-
hunts, an emerging capitalism’s great war
against its women, the nexus of the witch’s
unbearable powers was held to lie
somewhere in the web of connections
between the body, the menstrual cycle, and
the moon above us. The Malleus
Maleficarum, the great and hideous
Catholic treatise against witchcraft, insists
that demonic powers are “deeply affected by
certain phases of the Moon.” And in most
of Mediterranean traditions that congealed
into the ideologies of the west, lunar deities
tend to be female. (One bizarre charge
against Islam from some fundamentalist
Christians is that its god is actually a moon
god, as evidenced by the crescent moon
symbol, and therefore evil, a Satanic
opponent to the resolutely solar god of
Abraham and Moses.) And the
identification works both ways: The
qualities of the moon—its radiance, its
mutability, its sly influence and keening
distance—are imposed on a socially
constructed femininity. It’s no surprise that
a patriarchal society would come into
conflict with the great mother in the sky.

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The moon rules the night, and its gleam

only gives definition to the darkness. No
horror film can do without its brief shot of
an engorged moon floating predatory over
the horizon. Lunatic, of course, derives from
the Latin luna; the Romans believed that
madness takes place under some lunar spell,
and they weren’t alone. “It is the very error
of the moon,” Shakespeare’s Othello
declares. “She comes nearer earth than she
was wont, and makes men mad.” Under a
full moon the mad are inflamed, the
epileptics frenzied, the werewolves and
vampires summoned. The solar powers of
law and order are weakened.

Pliny the Elder even went so far as to

attempt a naturalistic explanation for the
lunar effect: because dew comes from the
moon, a full moon leads to an
overabundance of dew in the brain, leaving
it “unnaturally moist and choked with
phlegm.” And while most people no longer
believe in the humoral theory, the belief in
lunar madness still remains. Despite the
lack of conclusive evidence linking lunar
cycles with madness or criminality, police
departments in Britain and the United
States step up their street patrols during a
full moon, and while 43 percent of
Americans believe that the moon has some
effect on psychological wellbeing, that
number rises to 81 percent among mental-
health workers.

But like any moon, the moon-as-threat, or

the enemy moon assaulting the sky, takes on
different shapes. In February this year, the
video-games writer and Congressional
candidate Brianna Wu tweeted her concerns
over SpaceX announcing that it was
planning to launch a crewed mission to the
moon. “The moon,” she wrote, “is probably
the most tactically valuable military ground
for earth. Rocks dropped from there have
power of 100s of nuclear bombs.” This isn’t
exactly true—you can’t “drop” anything
from there, because it isn’t “up”; but it does
tap into a surprisingly widespread worry:
that something is about to attack us from
the moon.

We don’t have lunar goddesses or witchcraft

any more; when deep folk metaphysics
express themselves, they do so as conspiracy
theory. And any sufficiently vast conspiracy
theory will always end up dragging the
moon into its orbit. The most famous is the
idea that the moon landings were faked,
which is easy enough to sympathize with. If
humanity had really burst out from its
terrestrial prison and set its first footsteps
among the stars, then everything should be
different. If we can walk on the moon, we
should be free. But we’re not free; we’re all
still here, living the same miserable lives and
working the same tedious jobs while the
moon still gloats from its impossible and
distant fortress—therefore, it didn’t happen.
There are others, though. Ever since the
Second World War, for instance, people
have been certain that esotericists within the
Nazi order built secret bases on the dark
side of the moon, to sporadically disgorge
UFOs. The actual Nazi mystics, meanwhile,
were mostly uninterested in the moon; a
few of them didn’t even, strictly speaking,
believe in it, thinking that we actually live
inside a hollow Earth, a bubble of air set in
the rock. “An infinite universe,” Nazi
occultist Peter Bender wrote, “is a Jewish
abstraction. A finite, rounded universe is a
thoroughly Aryan conception.” Not that it
matters: The image of the swastika flag on
the moon is a powerful fantasy; even if you
don’t believe it happened, it’s been
screaming from book covers and film
posters for decades.

The secret war against the

moon is a war against
imperfection, contagion,
and disease.

But the grandest and strangest theories hold

that the moon is itself a weapon. This
notion was first put forward in 1970 by
Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov
of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, who
argued that the moon is actually hollow, an
artificial satellite put in our sky for reasons
we can neither understand nor trust.
Online, stories circulate about various
ancient or distant peoples who can
remember a time before the moon was
towed into orbit; seven-day creation myths
are meant to be a distant echo of the time
when humanity saw the heavens being
constructed right above them. The
hollowness of the moon is supposed to be
demonstrated by a episode from the 1969
Apollo 12 mission, in which the lunar
module was deliberately crashed onto its
surface after takeoff, and for half an hour
the moon “rang like a bell.” In the
cosmology of David Icke, the conspiracy
theorist best known for his insistence that
most world leaders and politicians are
shape-shifting alien lizards, the moon is a
vast artificial satellite put into orbit by alien
forces, and causing something called the
“Moon Matrix”: a powerful broadcast signal
that blocks out humanity’s interdimensional
capabilities and keeps us locked in the
world of our five senses.

Why are people so afraid of the moon? Why

will we declare it to be the seat of madness
and witchcraft, or an alien world swarming
with Nazis, or eventually resolve to nuke the
thing? It might help to look at the first lie
about the moon—Aristotle’s, in which the
great philosopher declared it to be a
perfectly smooth sphere, despite the fact
that it’s quite plainly not. A lie this big
usually means that there’s something being
repressed. Aristotle loved unities and self-
identities; he wanted to live in a rational,
mathematical, and immutable universe; he
believed that beyond the mess and
contingency of human existence there was a
perfect heavenly order to which we could
aspire. The only problem is the moon.
Other celestial bodies appear as perfect
points of light, but the moon is clearly just
an absurd ball of rock, as weary and
beleaguered and broken as we are, carrying
with it the scars of four billion years of
astronomical senselessness. Hovering in the
sky, it’s proof that we don’t really matter.
The secret war against the moon is a war
against imperfection, contagion, and
disease; it’s the war against a universe that
refuses to care about your ideas, and refuses
to be understood.

But the moon also changes, transforming

itself from a pointed sliver of light to a
blankly accusing circle to a brooding
absence and back again. Sometimes it glows
an angry red, and sometimes, when its
elliptical path brings it closest to the Earth,
it blots out the stable masculine light of the
Sun altogether. And all this transformative
power doesn’t belong to mystical fire or
abstract thought, but a perfectly ordinary
rock. The secret of the moon is that the
heavenly perfection we might mimic isn’t
stasis, but a series of constant revolutions
and transformations; its secret is that we
could all be witches and werewolves. This is
dangerous stuff for political power. No
wonder patriarchal orders turned the moon
into the symbol of everything they were
trying to repress; no wonder moon-hate
appealed to the Americans and the Soviets
of the 1950s, two revolutionary societies
that had ossified into a profound
conservatism, terrified of chaos and
paranoid about subversion. What else could
they do, with a giant subversive rising over
the horizon every night? Load up the
rockets, and prepare to win the State’s first
and oldest war once and for all.

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