The Daily: 5 November 2025

The Hunter’s Moon rises full today at 4:17pm. The time of rising and setting varies by latitude. Those further north will see moonrise a little bit later, further south a bit earlier, but still somewhere around 4-5pm local time. However, the Moon will turn full at the same moment all around the globe, but at different local times. It will be full here in Vermont at 8:19am. In Rome, it will be full at 2:19pm. In Tokyo, it will be full at 10:19pm. Notice all those nineteen minutes past the hour… Those are all the same moment in the Moon’s cycle around the Earth. We see it at different local times on Earth because Earth-time is dependent on longitude and where one stands relative to the rotation of the planet. But it’s all one to the Moon. Earth time doesn’t mean much anywhere else in the universe. Not even on our own satellite. Doesn’t that make you think!

Now, the fun part about moonrise in my part of the world is that it happens very near the Moon’s perigee, 5:30pm my time. Perigee happens at some variation of the half on the hour everywhere else on Earth — later east of here, earlier west of here until you reach yesterday and tomorrow. Perigee is the closest point in this circling dance between Earth and Moon and Sun. The Moon is in perigee once a month, sometimes twice, around the time of fullness, with both the Earth and Sun pulling on it toward the Earth. But this month it is the closest it will come to Earth in 2025. At 5:30pm the Moon will be some 363,300km from Earth. For comparison, apogee, the furthest point between Earth and Moon, is 405,500km, or some three Earth diameters further away than it stands today. So, it’s a significant distance closer.

This is fun in Vermont because moonrise is both within a half day of full (a difference most of us can’t see in the face of the Moon) and within about an hour and a half from this perigee position. So tonight’s Hunter’s Moon will rise large and bright. If you could have a normal moonrise next to this one, it would look noticeably bigger.

Unfortunately, we don’t get a comparison moonrise, so you might not notice the difference between tonight’s fullness and normal fullness. Though moonrise is always beautiful. But perhaps just knowing that it’s as close as it can be this year will change your perception enough to see an enormous full Moon as it rises over the eastern horizon. Maybe it will even look a little silver now that autumn is waning and winter is getting underway.

Consider this my spell for today.

You’re welcome… Now, go out and enjoy the moonrise!

Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

The Fifth of November

Today is Bonfire Night in England. This festival of fireworks and bonfires commemorates the defusing of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a plan hatched by misguided Catholic insurrectionists to relieve the gross maltreatment put upon them by the vehemently Protestant King James I regime by blowing up the House of Lords on Parliament’s Opening Day.

If it had been successful, the king and most of the leadership would have been grievously injured or killed. It would have created a power vacuum of epic proportions. In addition to being the originators and arbitrators of law, the king and lords together also owned roughly half of the land in England. In contemporary terms, 1% of the population owned half of the wealth. Killing nearly a hundred of them would have created an uproar in the courts as inheritance and ownership were teased out. And of course, regicide would have left a child on the throne, one who might be more lenient on Catholics. In fact, the full plot would have removed James’ heir, Henry, as well as James, and instead placed James’ nine-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, on the throne.

All things would likely have ground to a halt for quite a long time.

But that was not to be.

Ironically, the plot was revealed by a Catholic lord, William Parker, 5th Lord Monteagle. One of seventeen sitting Catholics in the House of Lords in 1605, he received an anonymous letter urging him to stay away from the opening session. Perhaps some of the conspirators were concerned about blowing up the most powerful Catholic voices in England? However, the leader of the plot, Robert Catesby, had no such compunctions, claiming that he’d rather the Catholic nobility die than the plan fail, and he would not authorize any warning to the Catholic lords for fear of betrayal. In the event, his fears proved founded. (Well, of course! What actual Catholic would countenance mass murder!) As soon as Monteagle received the warning, he brought the letter directly to his peers and the plot was uncovered. A search was immediately carried out, turning up one hapless plotter, Guy Fawkes, perched among thirty-six barrels of explosives and fuses — enough to reduce the entire House of Parliament to rubble.

Bonfire Night has been known by other names. It was Popes’ Night in New England. It’s commonly called Fireworks Night these days. But most people in history knew it as Guy Fawkes Night.

Guy, or Guido as he styled himself, fought for the Catholic Spaniards against the Dutch Protestants. He seems to have had some knowledge of sapping. He definitely had experience as a military officer, rising to captaincy in Spain. And he nursed a particular grievance against Protestants. So, he was charged with the essential core of the plot, orchestrating the explosion. He was guarding the explosives — and likely prepping the charges as he was supposed to light them that day — when the search party broke into the undercroft where he was hiding on November 5th. 

After days of horrifying torture, the plot was pulled from him. Thirteen conspirators had come within hours of toppling the crown and dozens of the aristocracy and gentry of England. Several of the insurrectionists, Catesby among them, were killed in a gunfight as they made their last stand. Of the survivors, eight were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Guy Fawkes and three others were taken to the scaffold on 31 January 1606. Fawkes, however, managed to die quickly. Once the rope was set upon him, it seems he jumped and broke his neck. His dead body was still dismembered, the pieces delivered about the kingdom to serve as warning.

This is a story that does not have any good guys. Using such violence is abhorrent, but it must be said that Catholics suffered violent abuse every day. Their lives were being systematically erased. The plotters may have been psychotic zealots, but they had cause, perhaps had been molded into desperate murderers when all other paths to following their own faith and culture were ripped from them.

Of course, if they’d been successful, they would have been remembered as revolutionary heroes, despite their vile means. All war is vile, and they were fighting a guerrilla war. 

But they did not win. And they were reviled for centuries.

Bonfire Night, the commemoration of that November night in the basement under Parliament, was for many decades a celebration of violence toward “papists”. Guy was burned in effigy along with the pope, cardinals, bishops, priests — and witches. (Because why waste a good bonfire…) The Puritans brought Popes’ Night to the colonies and fires were lit in Boston and New York every November 5th. Even Northern Ireland, a majority Catholic region, was forced to witness the burning of popes.

Over time, this display of hatred has gentled into a family night of fireworks and fun-fairs. But there is still enough of a taint that sympathy has swayed somewhat toward the thwarted would-be murderers. These days, more people identify with Guy than with James and the lords — and especially not the mobs who burned Catholic symbols every Fifth of November.

Remember…

In the 2005 movie V for Vendetta, Guy was invoked into the character of V, an anarchist freedom-fighter — or terrorist, depending on your allegiances — fomenting insurrection in a dystopian Britain. V’s tactics are just as deplorable as the Gunpowder Plot, but the story evokes empathy with this sewer rat gnawing at the foundations of fascism. By the end, everyone is wearing the smirking mask of Guy Fawkes. Because in this version of the story, the plot is successful. 

And the Fifth of November is remembered inverted…

And now for a Full Moon Tale for this Hunter’s Moon…

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.

And it’s also Wednesday. So here’s this…

The Wednesday Word

for 5 November 2025

wild

What does wild mean to you? Think about it. If you’d like, send me a quick poem or story… or just a few thoughts. If you really have something to say, maybe enter my Wednesday Word contest on AllPoetry.

And now here are the thoughts that arise in me when I think on wildness…

and he took his broken heart
    off to open skies
clouds so close
    he could taste the charge
horizon so distant
    he could see eternity
mountains so high
    he could climb to the glittering stars

let me feel the wind
    flowing like ecstasy
let me smell the earth
    satiated with summer rains
let me run
    racing the sun
    outpacing time
let me grow roots
    and join the chorus
    lifting my voice in primal howl
         fierce joy

let me be
    woven into the web of the wild
let me be
     at peace
let me be
    untrammeled
let me be
    free

©Elizabeth Anker 2025