The Hunter’s Moon is full at 7:26am today. This is the last full moon of my calendar. In two weeks the annual lunar cycle begins anew with the Winter Sleep Moon. This is a time of reconciliation and reckoning. It is time to say goodbye to the growing season and to turn to the resting season, to shift from action to contemplation — which includes reflecting on what has happened and planning for the future. It is time to remember the ancestors and to consider our descendants, of whatever nature. It is time to breathe in the whiff of mortality on the cold wind and shudder, telling ghost stories to redirect our fear.
Folklore says that the harvest is done with this moon cycle. You might still be safe taking roots and hardy herbs from your kitchen garden, but the orchards, fields and especially the foraged foods that have not yet been gathered must be forsaken now, left to the Land. The Pooka, or sometimes the Devil, spits on the hedgerows on Hallowe’en. The grain that is not harvested is blighted by the Cailleach. And if you don’t go in for the uncanny, for nearly all temperate climates in the Northern Hemisphere, it is a rare year that does not see frost by the time the Hunter’s Moon goes dark. Which is much the same as blight from the Hag of Beare or spit from the Trickster.
This is also Sukkot, which began last night at sundown and lasts for nine days. Sukkot is the Hebrew harvest festival and the only holiday in the Jewish calendar that does not commemorate an historical event. It is a watery festival, traditionally thought to be the day that their deity determines how much rain will fall in the coming year. It is very similar to the archaic Roman holiday of Neptunalia in both theme and ritual.
I am writing the evening before the Full Moon. My furnace is running. Snow caps the higher peaks around my town. Down on the lower slopes and into the river valleys, it has been drizzling for the last two days, with intermittent periods of northwest wind that whips the rain into icy needles. The birches are mostly bare. The maples and oaks are rapidly losing their leaves of carmine and russet, gold and orange. My cedars are shedding their interior needles all over the back walk. And I dug out the snow shovels this week. Tonight… it is supposed to drop into the lower 20s (°F). If the drizzle does not stop — and it doesn’t seem inclined to do so — I may wake to a white morning for the Full Hunter’s Moon. But whether there is a blanket of snow or not, it will be cold, a fitting end to the lunar year.
Fog (Winifred Mumbles)
A Full Moon Tale for the Hunter’s Moon
It’s late in the fall. Time for taking stock and remembering what stalks in the night. John Barleycorn is cut down. Kore is wearing her underworld crown. The White Woman walks abroad, setting traps for unwary travelers. Skin-walkers grin from the rocks, pushing out creaking arms with too many joints. Mara and alp, kobold and kelpie, boggart and nixie and fae, all are feeding on fears while the Norns spin fate and cut threads and old Perchta and Frau Holle gather the little lost souls into their webs.
Old Man Jack is waking and soon there will be killing frost.
But the worst: there’s fog over the valley. So impenetrable that the cottonwoods of the bosque are no more than dim silhouettes in a still lake of shadow. No canyon breezes to riffle the surface and clear away the confusion. No vistas of solid, stolid certitude sweeping off to the land of sunset. Fog is blindness. Enveloping ambiguity. Cold fingers of fear feeding our inner demons.
I’m guessing it was foggy in rusty times. All that wet and heat and rage and terror. No light to dispel the darkness and open up a way out. Fear as conduct and custom, it was. Fear and despair and fog.
With occasional small candles of desperate hope scrambling for higher ground as the clinging, cloying mist sucked all into its maw.
Desert dwellers deeply distrust the fog, feel confined and oddly vertiginous wherever we can’t see distance. We require foreknowledge on our road. Wherever it leads, we want a path cleared of obstruction for days, weeks, months, sometimes years. Fear and fog settle into the rifts, fostering footsteps of hesitancy and indecision. We don’t know where to direct our feet and so we don’t move at all, frozen in purblind doubt. Merely because we can’t know what is ahead.
Things to avoid: obfuscation
Sheep don’t like corners because in those dead ends they can’t see the way out. Possibly, this is a desert dwelling trait, human and ruminant, alike. But the ovine station has a strict rule against occlusion. Climb to the highest crag and bed down on sheer precipice rather than submit to the unseen. Comes not only from the imprint of infancy, a learned condition imbibed with mother’s milk. — All will be well with the world when you can see for empirical eternities. — No, raise a ewe fully within the barn’s four walls and she will still find her way to the hayloft window eventually. Probably jump. Can’t find peace when you can’t know what to expect. And nothing is settled and clear, even when you don’t know anything different and don’t understand that there is a world beyond blocked sight.
Of course, when you’re a sheep, you have bone certainty that everything wants to eat you.
Sheep in confinement are the skittish and suicidal creations of human ignorance. Suspect the sheep were particularly set on death in rusty times. Books from that time do hint at a near constant state of neurotic ovine agitation. Idiots. Why did they think churros grew all that wool? Not for humans to spin and weave into saddle blankets and rugs. Or not only for that, even after millennia of breeding. It’s so they don’t have to seek shelter from the cold. They carry their snug walls around as surely as a turtle’s carapace is its castle. Lying unsheltered leaves eyes open to the threats of the world. The proper way of being in sheep philosophy.
Fog is right out in sheep-being.
I wonder what demons stalk the fever dreams of sheep. We, humans, have our wood hags and the sinister song of the lorelei. For the churros, I’d guess there are sharp claws and grasping jaws, gaping mouths of bloody teeth in serried rows, defying geometry in their prodigiousness. I suppose that’s just like our own horrors. Because our natal memories are haunted by the same helpless fear in the face of predation. Populated by the same predators, I’d say. Feline and canine and ursine and reptilian. All our flaunting of weaponry is a screen on an inherent disquiet in the soul, the innate impressions of prey. But sheep fears are fresher and include knives and bullets, all vectors of death that spring from the unseen. Possibly walls rank high among sheep terrors. Walls without doors and windows, but permeable, nevertheless, to mortality.
So… fog. And likely forest.
Aren’t many woodland ungulates. Pretty much just deer. None of the others are stupid enough to live where hunters have cover, where you can’t see what stalks you until it’s exploding out of the brush. Even humans were wise enough to leave the forests. It’s not that we lost prehensile tails and decided to make do with rocks and sticks; it’s that we aren’t very fast. By the time the leopard was visible, it was too late for our piddling limbs to carry us away from danger. Deer manage. Barely. Only live in great numbers where humans kill off the other predators and use fire and flood to make open park-lands of the dark holt.
But nobody lives in the swamp. Unless you can fly, fog is deadly to the hunted. It’s telling that most of our scary stories come packaged in murk and mist. Can’t fear what you can see. But can’t find peace in blindness.
All the more so for the desert dweller. We need our horizons just to ease away the heartburn and palpitations of anxiety. I don’t trust fog. Even when it pools in the valley, leaving foresight and blue skies above the river. What’s it hiding down there? What abominations lurk in the gloaming? Who and what is using that cloak to creep closer and when will it arrive?
Imagine that was the permanent state of rusty living. All those close towers, bending with foreboding over the city dwellers. All that smoke, swallowing up discernment. They got it so turned around that they believed fear to be good and necessary. Fear was their chain on the feckless and the flighty and the refractory. Fear was the pacifying gun in the hands of police. Fear was the benevolent cage that controlled and kept unruly masses in check. Fear glued rusty society together in a sticky, inescapable morass of inviolable fog.
Sheep were probably well and truly overwrought, whether on four legs or two.
There were wizards in that time. They stood at the boundaries of reason and fired glistening incantations of embodied will and aspiration into the ether. I’m sure it was very beautiful as the barricades to unknown unknowns came down in sparkling fury. But the indomitable fog soaked into the fortifications, found chinks and loopholes, snaked into their eyes and ears and sank into their bones. And they turned on each other when they could no longer see the real enemy. Which was very likely the same thing, given their profligate want. But want in the hands of a child is far less to be feared than the want of a discarnate corporate body of men. Those were the real monsters hidden in the mist.
Though it was the blood of children that darkened doorsteps and playgrounds.
And that stain has never been expunged.
Desert dwellers and sheep could see it coming. Kept the innocent in the center of the ring when predators cast long shadows on the horizon. Hence we’re still here with our wise wariness. The views of urbanites were less clear and too much encumbered with fancy and nightmare. They could not find the way out, particularly when the fog rolled in on the rising tide.
Give me an expansive plain upon which to brood. Give me a broad horizon to follow, to lead my feet forward until it is time for rest. Give me open perspectives and bright prospects.
I am naked enough that I like my walls to keep out the cold. But build those walls with plenty of doors, ways to come in, ways to get out. Even so, give me substantial locks to serve as soothing sedative when my eyes must be closed.
And build far above the river valleys no matter the labor in hauling water. As true native to the desert, I prefer the work so that fog never finds its way to my homestead.
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 