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Predicting
the Weather
by the Moon

Ken Ring

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I can remember at the age of three riding my tricycle and noticing the Moon moving with me. I stopped, and it did, too. Then I saw the Moon racing across the sky, behind scattered clouds. My three year-old brain couldn't work out why it was speeding and getting nowhere.

The first word my infant son Keri uttered was 'Moo', because he couldn't say 'Moon'. It's conceivable that he said it only to shut me up, because I would constantly point to it and repeat the word, assuming he was interested.

During the ten years between 1970 and 1980, we as a family lived in a mobile home, making our way slowly around the North Island of New Zealand. Our lifestyle became one of subsistence because we were continually in remote parts of the country, far from towns and shops. We found people living off the land for survival. There was the drover, the swaggie, the poor farmer, the hippy (which we were taken for), and the gypsy. The culture of the traveller is today romanticised by the house-truckers, but in those days there were no monthly craft fairs, no network of cell-phones, and one had to contend with isolation, but the richness of the characters we came across made up for that. A never-ending line of elderly folk shared with us their knowledge about fishing, medicines from native plants, and food available from the wild.

The set fishing net was out every day. We camped on the coast, especially off-season when all the holidaymakers and their noisy boats had gone home. I ran my net twice a day, because many fish can see the net in moonlight and won't go into it. Nor can they reverse away, because fish don't swim backwards, especially against a current. So they would often stay poised a foot or so from the mesh, waiting for the tide to turn. Wading into the sea I might see half a dozen fish in the net already and two or three waiting. By splashing the water behind them, I could get them to dive into the net and become entangled. I would do this day in and day out, all year around.

This would often get me out of bed at two or three in the morning, wading into the tide, even in the middle of winter. It could be cold, certainly, but the cold didn't occur to me. After all, I had a job to do. I would afterwards get back into a lovely warm bed with freezing feet, which did not impress my wife.

It was in our interest to find out from the locals what fish were running, coming up rivers to spawn at a particular time of year, and where the good spots were. Often we would get misinformation, but you could generally detect this because the narrator would tell you one thing and then do another when he thought you weren't watching.

I had to refer to tide tables, because I always set the net at low tide. I also had to refer to planting guides.

Why planting guides? It was all to do with the drovers. They moved on horseback, unshaven, silent figures in oilskins, towing packhorses behind, and surrounded by ever-moving yelping dogs. These hardy souls 'drove' cattle from out-of-the-way places to the major sale-yards and abattoirs. You would see them coming miles away, hundreds of animals moving slowly, stopping to graze, holding up motorised traffic and leaving messy roads as they went through villages and small towns. The bigger towns had special bypass roads for them, signposted 'Stock Route'.

The drovers 'planted out'. They carried little germinating seedlings with them in springtime, which they put in the ground so that when they came by that way again, they could reap a harvest. Although they had no land of their own, they chose areas that were hidden from view: the back of a disused rubbish dump, the downside bank of a newly formed bridge approach, or the top area on both sides of where a new road cut through a former hill.

In this way, here and there the drovers established little growing patches. All were out of sight from the main road and were unknowingly fertilised by local farmers. The drovers grew things that took care of themselves: pumpkins, butternuts, potatoes, beans.

Once we learned what they were doing – and it was in their interest to tell us so that we didn't pinch theirs – we started doing it ourselves. We therefore had to know when to plant.

My wife and I acquired old planting calendars from second-hand bookshops. Then we started noticing that the Maori fishing timetable and the planting calendar often seemed to match. Both were based on the perigee-apogee cycles of the Moon. It turned out that you fished and planted mainly on the apogee, whatever that was.

I wanted to discover the reasoning behind these calendars. It seemed to me that planting and fishing depended on the climate, which meant weather, so whatever caused heavy seas, strong winds and rain must be very patterned. Was there a link, and, if so, could a system of prediction be devised that covered a whole year? What did the old sages know, and how did they get their information?

I knew I had to start collecting records. I had already studied the cloud patterns and could roughly 'read' the sky. It is easier in the country – your eye travels along the line of the hills and then upwards, a restful and natural thing to want to do, whereas in the city the houses on the skyline seem to scramble the visual transition and discourage the eye from looking up. Perhaps it's just that in the town we don't have to look up because we prefer to pay forecasters to do it for us.

I obtained cloud information from a book in the library. Much of it seemed to work. But I wanted to know more. So I invested in all manner of weather-reading equipment: barometer, temperature gauge, wind velocity gauge, weathervane, rain gauge, and hygrometer (for measuring humidity).

In a diary I kept a daily record of air pressure, wind speed, air temperature, humidity, Moon phases, and the weather that was just above me. I figured that if there was a universal system it would work above me as well as anywhere else. After all, gravity works on everything at once, so why shouldn't it also apply to the wind, the Moon, and the tides? Newton didn't have to go all over the world dropping apples.

I had to have a scale of weather conditions, and I could not avoid a subjective one. I decided on 13 different weather states and allotted them each a number value:

1.  Clear day, fine weather, blue sky, no wind
2.  Relatively clear day, slight cloud, occasional breeze
3.  Quite thick cloud, a bit blowy, blue sky poking through
4.  Overcast, no blue patches
5.  Cold conditions, windy, slight drizzle (not real rain)
6.  Rain, very intermittent
7.  Unpleasant continual drizzle, not much wind
8.  Rain plus wind
9.  Wind howling, intensity varying, not so much rain
10.  Lashing wind and rain
11.  Non-stop wind and rain
12.  Severe storm, buckets of water, can't go outside
13.  Electrical hurricane.

On my scale, rain kicked in at number 6.

I kept this diary discipline for four whole years, every day my first task in the morning and last task before bed, and I 'averaged' what the day could be described as. This I entered with the other data. At the end of the first year I graphed it out, my weather values up the vertical axis, plotted against all other variables along parallel horizontal axes.

It came as a big surprise to me that the only factors coinciding with a weather value reading exceeding 6 were the full and perigee phases of the Moon. All other factors seemed to have no consistent relevance. Sometimes it rained when it was cold, sometimes when it was warm. Wind speed and humidity similarly showed no pattern.

By the end of the second year I could see the pattern repeating and began to predict weather for myself and my close friends. I had made up a perigee stick like the ones the Maori elders used and was using it until I realised you could simply refer to a nautical almanac to find out when the next perigee was coming. Of course, you can always see when the full Moon is there.

The basic rules were:

• If it was full Moon, guaranteed rain or change
• Same if it was perigee, with gusty winds as well
• If perigee and full Moon occurred on the same day, a double lot of bad weather
• If perigee and full Moon occurred a few days apart, the bad weather hung over those days.

That was basically it at that time. After four years I had identified a real pattern purely from my own observation, but I knew that it must be only the tip of the iceberg. Clearly a small piece of a pattern wouldn't sit in the middle of a random process: it all had to be patterned. I made up my mind to investigate what the perigee really meant in physical terms, and to find out all I could about the Moon's phases. Because I had identified the full Moon and perigee first, I surmised that those two factors controlled the pattern. It turned out that even back then I wasn't far from the nub of the situation.

No one, except my wife Jude, believed me. A group of us were all set to travel to Nambassa, the rock music festival. I noticed from the almanac that the full Moon and the perigee were due to coincide just before the festival and so I said don't go, it will pour down. But they all went anyway without me. And as I thought would happen, a torrential downpour meant that most campers got thoroughly washed out on the last day of the event.

The Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race was held, I think, the next year.

It had maximum media coverage in this country, as many of our finest and most experienced yachtsmen and women were taking part. A violent storm at sea turned what started as an exciting race into a catastrophe. Six boats went down, including one named the Spirit of Enterprise, the pride of the New Zealand fleet. I looked up the tables. Sure enough, full Moon on the same day as the perigee, a few days before the race.

I was sure I had found out something that maybe others ought to know about. So I took my data into the observatory in Auckland to see if it was known to climatologists, and if so why yacht races were held at such daft times of the year. I was told, politely, that my work wasn't scientific enough, and the information was not new. They weren't interested, not even in seeing my collected data.

Then I rang the TV news weather office. Their response? 'We know all that stuff.' I said, 'If you know it, why don't you tell the people?' 'Oh,' they said, 'we're not here to educate.' I disagreed. 'You are so! If I knew of some danger and I didn't tell, I could be locked up!'

I reasoned that public information gatherers like media have an ongoing responsibility to pass on vital information, especially to yachtsmen if they know the weather is going to get bad. But I am sure they are not unkind people: the truth is that they just don't know. Only a handful of researchers and long-range forecasters bother to investigate the lunar link to the weather. Perhaps this is because everyone who is supposed to know these things, the meteorologists, say the Moon doesn't affect the weather, so that's that. Because no one questions it there seems little need in most people's minds to investigate the matter.

So whenever I went into libraries or bookshops, there was only one subject on my mind. But I found very little written on the subject. There are lots of books about weather, but when I turned to their indexes for the word 'Moon', I generally found either no reference at all, or passing descriptions of spring and neap tides. Only here and there was there any suggestion that the Moon influenced weather, let alone controlled it. On TV and radio and in newspaper forecasts the Moon was, as to this day, never mentioned. What was going on?

Occasionally I got a break. I stumbled on a book called Guide to the Moon, by Patrick Moore. In those pages I read for the first time about atmospheric tides. Then I was given a Time-Life publication simply called Weather, which also described the patterned behaviour of the atmosphere. One could read between the lines and see that a whole alternative theory was in there, somewhere, and that much of what the Moon was actually responsible for was being ignored. How did the tide of the atmosphere relate to the tide of the sea? I had already noticed that the weather changed with the changes in the sea tide, so knew there was some connection.

Once, I went to the library and looked up all the weather-related disasters in New Zealand's history that I could think of, and matched them against the Moon phases nearest those dates, to see if any pattern emerged. Amazingly, almost all the weather-related disasters happened in the same week of either the full Moon/new Moon and/or coinciding with the perigee. One particular book, a government publication called Floods of New Zealand, made it very easy for me by listing all the country's floods and heavy rainfalls between 1917 and 1953. Out of some 700 events, I found that 80 per cent were Moon-cycle related. Another 15 per cent were too, only I didn't know it then because they were at apogee points, which I was not then considering.

I then felt I had enough to present to the print media. I approached the New Zealand Herald and they printed a full-page article (by chief reporter, Philip English), based on what I supplied. I was very appreciative, and in the days following I was contacted by people who either currently used the Moon phases themselves or could tell me what their grandparents did, in terms of weather prediction, fishing and planting. So I wrote out the perigees for the next year and put Philip a little more in the picture. He was enthusiastic and started noticing them for himself. It was his suggestion that I write this book.

By this time I had acquired access to the Internet. So I put out a call to climate centres around the world, places with names like the Alaska Climate Research Center. My question was always the same. Can anyone tell me of any links between the Moon and the weather? Replies ranged from 'Absolutely, yes,' to 'There may be a link but it hasn't been established,' to 'Sorry no link at all.' But I knew there was a link. I had proved it time and again with my own records. I could scarcely believe that the scientific community were that much in the dark, and even divided over it. Yet who was I? Even my own local observatory had denied it. But by now I was surfing the Internet like crazy and discovering many and varied conference papers by NASA scientists and other alternative meteorologists and forecasters like Richard Holle, confirming and adding to what I had been seeking, thinking and saying for all those years. Clearly, in some scientific circles a controversy raged on the matter, but it hadn't reached the shores of my country, and to this day still hasn't been the subject of any media discussion or public debate.

In 1998 they held another Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race. They held it again at the time of the perigee. Sixty-seven of the boats turned around and limped back. Some were lost without trace. Six lives were lost. I contacted the New Zealand Herald again and Philip ran another story on my lunar theories. Then, out of the blue, I got a call from Harry Alcock.

Harry said he had been following my articles and had been meaning to write to me for two years. Had I heard of him? I said no. Not surprising, he responded. He had written a book, The Lunar Effect, ten years before, and had been forecasting for farmers on a subscription basis for about 30 years. A former umbrella manufacturer, he had needed to know what the weather was going to be in the weeks following, so he wouldn't waste money on advertising if the week was going to be rain-free. He had therefore embarked on a personal quest for weather knowledge, using trial and error, and studying old texts, until he came up with a reliable system. Meteorologists had given him a hard time, stopping his book's publicity with a quick response of their own; and when he syndicated to newspapers they bullied those papers and questioned his credibility. Harry told me I was on the right track but that there was much more he could probably tell me.

Harry was now 80 and nominally retired from forecasting. He sent me his book (which I highly recommend). I couldn't wait to meet him and travelled down-country to visit within days. His wealth of knowledge on the subject is tremendous. Before he rang me, he had written a letter to the editor of the same newspaper:

Your article on Ken Ring (January 18) and his reference to the Moon influencing the weather is correct. It would also seem that depressions will predominate near the dates he mentions, when the Moon is at perigee and also close to the full Moon, up to November anyway. The depressions will all be either over New Zealand or about the south of the country...

Meeting Harry was a godsend. To this day I remain very grateful to the Alcocks for lending me books, articles, and their carefully saved newspaper clippings dating back many decades. (For ordering Harry Alcock's book, The Lunar Effect, write to Milton Press, P0 Box 60197, Titirangi, Auckland, New Zealand.)

Those are roughly the events leading up to this point, where I am fulfilling a dream started 30 years ago, that I might some day come up with a workable system for foretelling weather.

It is a long time since I was three years of age, yet the Moon still holds the same fascination for me. It has inspired poets, lovers and dreamers for thousands of years. And now this book.

Discovering Predictable Patterns

The Sumerians are known to have developed writing around 3200 BC, and it is conceivable that their recordings of trade and events also encompassed celestial and climatic data for use in agriculture. In 3500 BC the Egyptian communities, depending on the Nile for their prosperity, used the movements of the stars as a guide to the annual rise and fall of the river as well as the extent of its periodic flooding. In ancient writings we find references to the Moon and, in the same texts, guides to seasonal changes.

In 335 BC the Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his book On The Heavens, noted that the Earth had to be a round sphere rather than a round plate because eclipses of the Moon were caused by the Earth coming between the Sun and the Moon. Before him, in 450 BC, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae reasoned that because the Earth's shadow on the Moon is curved, the Earth itself must be spherical. If the Earth had been a flat disc, the shadow would have been elongated and elliptical.

The Athenian 'Tower Of The Four Winds' dates back to the first century BC. An early observatory, it displays on its eight faces carved figures representing the eight winds recognised by Aristotle three centuries earlier. Aristotle had divided winds into two classes, polar and equatorial, and described with amazing accuracy the weather and the month likely to occur for each.

The most industrious compiler of classical weather lore was Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus. His Book of Signs, written about 300 BC, described more than 200 portents of rain, wind and fair weather, and a few that were alleged to reveal what the weather would be like for the coming year or more. As well as introducing cloud folklore ('in the morning mountains, in the evening fountains') he described signs to be found in the behaviour of sheep, the way a lamp burns during a storm (probably due to atmospheric changes), and the crawling of centipedes towards a wall.

He was the first to note that a halo around the Moon signified rain coming. He also claimed that flies bite excessively before a storm. Research shows this to be incorrect – unless they had different flies 2000 years ago. Nevertheless, his book was a major reference work for forecasting for the next 2000 years.

The Roman poet Virgil (70-19 BC), in his agricultural treatise The Georgics, said:

The father himself laid down what the Moon's phases should mean, the cue for the south winds dropping.

He also wrote:

Nor will you be taken in by the trick of a cloudless night
When first at the new Moon her radiance is returning
If she should clasp a dark mist within her unclear crescent
Heavy rain is in store for farmer and fisherman.

Almanac is an Arabic word that means 'calendar of the skies'. When Columbus sailed west 500 years ago – around an Earth he thought was shaped like a modem rugby ball – he, like other sailing captains of his time, had in his possession an early German nautical almanac. Along with the almanac's calendar of movements of the planets, stars and Moon, were instructions about the weather, such as the Moon's halo preceding rain or snow, high tides meaning storms at sea, and Northern lights heralding cold weather.

Only priests, astrologers and men of authority had access to these ancient texts – the accumulated wisdom of millennia of Persian, Greek, Islamic and European science – until books became more freely available during the fifteenth century, after Gutenberg's invention of movable type for printing.

The almanacs also listed future lunar eclipses. When a Jamaican chief threatened to withhold the food supply to Columbus's hungry and mutinous crew in 1504, the resourceful navigator threatened to remove the Moon permanently. It was the early evening of 1 March and an imminent total lunar eclipse, a fact known only to Columbus. As the Moon started to disappear, the frightened chief, overawed by the mariner's apparent mighty powers, relented. The Moon then reappeared within the hour. They had no further trouble with their food supplies.

Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams all kept daily weather records in order to understand (and predict?) the weather.

Since biblical days it has been known that particular months bring particular winds.

Out of the south cometh the whirlwind. - Book of Job

When ye see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass. - St Luke

And as Bartolomaeus Anglicus, thirteenth-century scholar, observed: The North winde... purgeth and cleanseth raine, and driveth away clowdes and mistes, and bringeth in cleerness and faire weather; and againward, for the South winde is hot and moyst, it doth the contrary deedes: for it maketh the aire thicke and troubly, and breedeth darknesse.

Around AD 200 the Greek mathematician, astronomer and geographer Ptolemy, resident in Alexandria, re-examined the old idea that the Earth was stationary and that everything else revolved around it. He concluded that the idea was flawed because, if true, at times the Moon would have to appear twice as big as at other times. That it did not was worrisome to Ptolemy.

Ptolemy also described what has come to be known as the 'Moon illusion', in which the Moon hanging low over the horizon looks much bigger than when it is high in the sky. Actually it is the same size. This is not an optical effect but a psychological one.

Simple observation over very long periods was the way old forecasters worked. It was not necessary to understand the mathematics of the orbits. The ancient Egyptians, Chinese and Mayan observers did seem to know about the longer Moon cycles and passed the knowledge on. In this way they were able to plot and plan over several lifetimes for solstices, equinoxes and eclipses. For instance, it was known that eclipses repeat on a cycle of exactly 6585.3 days. We can guess that the cycles that were the most useful were those visible and immediately relevant to daily life. The Mayan tzolkin, or 260-day cycle, the most important time unit in the Mayan calendar, was probably the nine-Moon (265.7-day) interval between human conception and birth.

Traditional Names for the Full Moon in the Northern Hemisphere      

When mathematics became involved, it was only partially helpful. Ptolemy and the Greeks knew that the Moon moves around the Earth, but their faith in the purity of numbers, and therefore in the conviction that orbits all had to be circular, which symbolised perfection (thinking that a deity would not have created otherwise), prevented them from realising the true picture of Moon movement. It led to intellectual stagnation on the subject for 1300 years.

Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish astronomer, published a book in 1543 claiming that the Earth rotates on its axis and, with the other planets in the solar system, revolves around the Sun. This was the birth of modem astronomy, yet even he was stuck on the notion of perfectly circular orbits.

It was left to Johannes Kepler, whose first law, published in 1609, stated that the planets and Moon move around the Sun in ellipses. His second law, published in the same year, stated that the speed of a planet around the Sun depends on its distance. In other words, the nearer the faster. Mercury, which is 57.9 million km (36 million miles) from the Sun, moves much more quickly than Earth at 149.6 million km (93 million miles). Mercury's day is about 25 days long and its year 88 days.

The Moon, too, changes its speed as it comes nearer to Earth and slows as it moves away, all in the space of a month, with sometimes devastating climatic results to the inhabitants of Earth.

The first known map of the Moon was drawn in about 1600 by William Gilbert, physician to Queen Elizabeth I and pioneer investigator of magnetism. From 1609 onwards, Galileo, using telescopes which he built himself, made a whole series of dramatic discoveries of Moon features and orbits.

Suddenly, telescope making was the rage. In 1641 Johann Hevelius, a city councillor of Danzig (in Poland) built an observatory on the roof of his house and gave names to everything on the Moon he could think of. About half a dozen of his names are still in use. He also printed maps of the Moon, using ink on a copperplate. After his death his maps survived, but the plate got melted down and made into a teapot.

Around this time, as serious scientific observation began, Moon worship started to decline in the Western world, due almost entirely to suppression by the Catholic Church.

Fertility and growth had always been a mystery to early thinkers and writers – hence the Moon, also mysterious, was always thought to be the king of mystery and magic. The catalogue of its lunar powers developed by the Egyptians had been spread by the Greeks and then by the Romans throughout the Western world. When the Roman Empire declined, the ancient writings were saved by Arab scholars, and the Arabs then became the principal sources of magic during the European Renaissance (and hence for modern witchcraft).

The ability of witches to control the fate of other individuals was believed and feared by ordinary people. They and their Moon-based knowledge were rooted out in vicious inquisitions and they were rounded up and tortured, burned or drowned. Moon worship went underground, as did much old wisdom about the powers of human thought and emotion, climate predicting, and planting knowledge.

Much of this remains suppressed today, although two traditions persist. One is concerned with the time of birth. A child born upon a full Moon, it is said, will be strong; and long life will come to those born when the Moon is one day old; however, the dark of the Moon is the most unlucky time for birth. The other tradition is success in harvesting.

Diana... Diana... Diana
I am summoning
Forty-five spirits from the west!
I am summoning forty-five spirits from the east!
Rains, rains, rains,
Give from your wide skies, burst water upon us!
Behold our wine in your chalice,
Accept our offerings to you!
Send the dark clouds over us,
Surround our fields with stormy rains,
You who wield the thunderbolts,
We call upon thee!
Blessed be! Blessings be!
- From The Dianic Tradition and the Rites of Life by Zsuzsanna Budapest

Planting by the Moon

Generations of farmers have always planted by the Moon. Because rainfall, temperature and light affect the germination of seeds it was important to know how the Moon affected weather. When the Moon passed in front of a particular constellation, cultivation, sowing and planting were enhanced.

For instance, when the Moon passed in front of the sky region of Leo, not only was the formation of fruit and seed furthered, but the quality of the seeds was enhanced. The four formative trends appear in sequence – root, flower, leaf, fruit/seed – and these trends are repeated three times in the course of 27 days. The duration in which each impulse is active varies in length between one and a half and four days. The inner quality, though, was considered to be individual to each constellation, which puts the Moon as the reflector of the ever-changing quality of the Sun throughout the course of the year.

Almost all cultures we know of throughout ancient history have devised farming 'clocks' around the month, so that crops were planted and harvested at particular phases.

Observations of the Maori

For the Maori in pre-European New Zealand, the month was a purely lunar one, commencing with the new Moon – or rather, with the Whiro night, when it is not visible. The named nights of the Moon's age therefore always presented in the same aspect and served as a reliable calendar. Maori farmers began planting kumara (sweet potato) on the nights called Oue, Ari, Rakaunui, Rakaumatohi, Takirau and Orongonui , which were the 4th, 11th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 28th nights of the lunar month. No planting was done during full Moon nor on Korekore days (21st, 22nd, and 23rd nights), for it was believed that very poor crops would result. Although absolute uniformity was rare among the various tribes of the Maori people, due to scattering and diversity, most planted close to these dates. The planting months were in spring: September, October and November.

Kumara was planted at the time when the Moon is due north at sunset or twilight, and the planting may be continued for three days. Some tribes planted the tubers only during spring tides, that is for a period of three days at that period.

An exception seems to have been for gourds, which were grown not for food but for storage of seeds or water. Because they required rapid vigorous growth, gourds were generally planed on the full Moon. This practice seems widespread. A publication of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu states that the giant Hawaiian gourd, Cucurbita maxima, was cultivated in pre-European Hawaii in this exact lunar period. It seems to have been common practice throughout the Pacific.

Fishing was similarly tied to lunar events. Certain winds were known to blow at certain times of the month. To the eastern Maori, four days after new Moon came the 'Winds of Tamatea', which turned to blow from the east, bringing wind and a rougher sea – at least, on the East Coast. Fishermen did not venture out to sea during this period.

Some Moon phases were said to bring more fish. Although there was no written language, the Maori had a rich artistic culture and fishermen kept tallies using an intricate system of symbols.

Beside is a list of the Tuhoe tribe's names of the 'nights of the Moon' as the Maori put it (for they spoke of 'nights' where we use the term 'days'), together with their value as fishing nights for the fish called Kokupu.

The typical Maori fisherman's calendar looked like a series of dots, dashes, crosses and L shapes. Perhaps it was all that remained of what might once have been an almanac compiled in other lands, from information accrued over thousands of years. There is physical evidence that the Maori may have replaced (by extermination) the much earlier inhabitants in New Zealand, who it seems dominated the Pacific at one time with their standing-stone culture. Until very recent times in New Zealand these shadowy forebears were referred to as the real tangata whenua (ancestral claimants to the land). In oral tradition they were Uru-kehu, Turehu, Patupaianehe, 'the fairy folk', 'Children of the Mist', 'Enlightened Ones' and according to legend, were a race fair skinned and red haired. There is growing speculation now that these ancient inhabitants would have used the latitudes of the South Pacific for Venus transit mapping as they reportedly did in their countries of origin much farther to the north.

Tuhoe lunar fishing calendar

There are many standing stone structures still in New Zealand that mathematically match ratios found at Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids at Giza. It may be that an ancient internationally far-flung civilisation, probably pre-Celtic but definitely Middle Eastern/European, at one time extensively occupied most Pacific islands from New Zealand to Easter Island. Virtually commuting to and from Europe in their large ocean-going craft, they would have made extensive use of the Bering Strait and North-west Passage, through which it is almost a straight line from the British Isles to New Zealand's North Island.

If that were so, the Maori may have inherited their lunar fishing and planting calendar from those earlier peoples. Many of the names of Maori gods, like Rangi, Rongo and Maui, are also those of Egyptian and Babylonian deities. The beginning of the Maori New Year was the European/Middle Eastern June new Moon coinciding with the appearance of the Pleiades, located in Taurus. Today this cluster is popularly known as the Seven Sisters but in ancient Greek mythology it was the Seven Daughters of Atlas. The Maori called it Te Matariki.

Oral traditions among peoples of the South Pacific have transmitted data by word of mouth down through the generations. The almanacs would have become story-oriented, working oral texts under the command of tohungas, (priest-astronomers) who were in charge of the Moon perigee sticks which played such a large role in Maori agriculture and fishing.

But in the north, books started appearing. The Greek poet Hesiod's monthly calendar of Works and Days was written seven centuries before Christ was born. This was a written calendar timed to the Moon phases for the whole year, and describing weather, planting and social information. It included advice on when to geld horses, when to hunt birds and when the north wind would blow.

At the time when the Pleiades, the daughters of Atlas, are rising
begin your harvest, and plough again when they are setting.
The Pleiades are hidden for forty nights and forty days,
and then, as the turn of the year reaches that point
they show again, at the time you first sharpen your iron.

But if the desire for stormy seagoing seizes upon you
why, when the Pleiades, running to escape from Orion's
grim bulk, duck themselves under the misty face of the water,
at that time the blasts of the winds are blowing
from every direction
then is no time to keep your ships on the wine-blue water.

Other passages in Hesiod's Works suggest that the disappearance of these particular stars around the full Moons and perigees (when the Moon is closest to the Earth) of October and November was associated with the deterioration of the weather, with consequent danger particularly to sailors. The second halves of those months were the worst.

October: Do not sail. November: Haul ship on land.

There is even a right time and a wrong time in Hesiod to have sex:

Then is when the goats are at their fattest, when the wine tastes best, women are most lascivious, but the men's strength fails them most, it shrivels them, knees and heads alike.

This corresponded to early July in our calendar, when women are most desirous but men are in their most dried-up condition!

For the opposite case, consider the daytime of about 12 September:

the feel of a man's body changes
and he goes much lighter.

Closer to our period, in 1688, an author wrote:

the double conjunction of Venus and the Moon produces extreme lubricity, brings venereal disease, and causes women of quality to become enamoured of menservants.

Moon Madness and Ill Winds

On 24 June 1994 a tremendous thunderstorm over London filled the hospitals' accident and emergency departments. Ten times as many people as would normally be seen for breathing problems were registered in the 30 hours after the storm, and almost half those affected had never suffered asthma before. Many hospitals ran out of inhalers and drugs, and staff were stretched to the limit.

On top of this there were more than 50 ground strikes of lightning just prior to the deluge. Interestingly, 24 June was the day of the June full Moon. It was also two days after the perigee.

A lot of data has been collected connecting weather and human activities – from the increase of domestic disputes and violence around the full and perigee Moon, to the frequency of the borrowing of non-fiction books, in public libraries. No one has explained why these astronomical facts should be relevant.

Although the full Moon alone has been said to account for increased incidents of epilepsy, heart attacks and crime, mostly these reports are dismissed as folklore because medical science would wish that modern thinking has gone beyond the primitive belief that the Moon can make you sick.

Consider the word lunacy. As recently as 1842 in Britain, the Lunacy Act declared that a lunatic was someone who was 'rational during the first two phases of the Moon and afflicted with a period of fatuity in the period following the full Moon'. Madness caused by the Moon has been cited as defence in murder trials, as well as an explanation for drunkenness and theft. Crowd behaviour is said to magnify, for the good or the bad.

Whether or not you wish to believe the claims, it is true that the superintendents of mental hospitals used to put extra staff on when a full Moon was expected and even gave inmates a precautionary whipping. Yet there is evidence of more admissions at full Moon. Patients already admitted may be more disturbed then than at other times. The Philadelphia Police Department reported that cases of fire-raising, kleptomania, homicidal alcoholism and other crimes against the person increased in number as the Moon waxed and then decreased as it waned.

Dr Frank A. Brown of Northwestern University took oysters from Long Island Sound on the east coast of the USA and moved them a thousand miles inland to Evanston, Illinois. In darkened, pressurised tanks, the oysters continued to open and close their valves to the rhythm of the tides at Long Island. After two weeks they gradually changed their rhythm to that of the tides at Evanston if that city had been on a coast. Although shielded from the light of the Moon, the oysters were clearly governed by its movement relative to the Earth at that location, indicating that their body clocks were affected by changes in terrestrial magnetism for which the Moon was responsible. If oysters were affected in this way, it is conceivable that humans would be too. Many have always thought so.

There is an old Cornish saying, 'No Moon, no man.' A baby born when no moon was visible would not live to be adult. In north-west Germany the Moon was regarded as a midwife, because births were believed to be more frequent when the tide was rising, just as many coastal inhabitants believed deaths occurred on the outgoing water. Are these merely old wives tales?

Studies verify some of this. In a study of more than 11,000 births over a period of six years at the Methodist Hospital of Southern California in Los Angeles, it was found that six babies were born when the Moon was waxing (before full Moon) to every five born when it was waning (after full Moon). Similar results were obtained in Freiburg, Bavaria, by Dr W. Buehler after studying 33,000 births, with the added refinement that boys tended to be born on the wax and girls on the wane.

Does the Moon affect other bodily processes? Dr Edson Andrews, a Florida ear-nose-and-throat surgeon, found 82 per cent of his patients bled and needed urgent operations around the time of the full Moon. Dr F. Peterson found that in his Chicago practice, tuberculosis sufferers were more likely to die just after the full Moon and least likely on the eleventh previous day, probably because of Moon-induced changes in the acidity or alkalinity of the blood. This is of interest in my family because the mother of my children, terminally ill with cancer, died on 14 July 1995, two days after the full Moon in perigee.

Perhaps the effects are due to a gravitational pull of bodily fluids, or perhaps there is, as Dr Leonard J. Ravitz suggests, a link between lunar phase and changes in the electrical field that surrounds the human body.

Returning to the menstrual enigma, in the 1920s a Swedish chemist, Svante Arrhenius, kept records of 11,807 menstrual periods, compared them with the phases of the Moon and found they were more likely to start when the Moon was waxing than at other times. This places ovulation 14 days earlier, around or just after new Moon, which supports a scenario of primitive Homo sapiens mating during the dark Moon time.

But unfortunately for the case, there must be many thousands of women who could produce contradictory results.

Nevertheless, the pre-menstrual syndrome is by now well established. Of the women surveyed in Britain's Holloway Prison 63 per cent committed crimes during their pre-menstrual or menstrual period. In girls' schools a similar pattern emerges for menstruating pupils: absenteeism, clumsiness, rebellion and low exam performance.

Even wind directions seem to affect us. The sirocco is an oppressive hot dry southerly wind blowing from the Sahara towards the north coast of Africa. By the time it crosses the Mediterranean to Europe it has become cooler and eventually moist. It is renowned for causing sluggishness and mental debility.

In south-east Australia the Southerly Buster is a sudden cold southerly wind. It follows a warm northerly and can make the temperature drop 20°C (36°F) in a matter of hours; it induces miserableness and depression.

In the normally tropical Central American highlands, when the cold norther hits, many Indians contract fatal pneumonia – just as many in North America get head colds in early spring. And in Canterbury New Zealand, the cold breezes from the south can cease as the warm north wind from the tropics takes over. Visitors are warned: a nor'wester will make you lethargic.

A nameless east wind that blows over London only in the months of November and March was once linked by an eighteenth-century British court physician to regicide. Voltaire quotes the doctor, an acquaintance, as saying the wind caused:

...black melancholy to spread over the nation. Dozens of dispirited Londoners hanged themselves, animals became unruly, people grew dim and desperate. Because of that east wind, said the doctor, Charles I was beheaded and James II deposed.

Schoolteachers will complain that schoolchildren 'play up' more in dry weather than in humid conditions. When a wind is blowing they become more unsettled and cannot queue properly in line; and students seem to do better in exams when the Moon is in perigee, full or new, and/or if gusty weather is occurring outside the exam room. Just why this is so seems to be linked to the Moon's often-recorded influence in battles.

Plutarch observed that a big battle is often followed by rain, and the notion that warfare somehow causes rain has surfaced during every war. It was still flourishing in the muddy trenches of World War I. The idea is that the sweat of soldiers produces rising rain-stimulating vapours... or that the waters are shaken from the clouds by the noise of cannon. But perhaps it is simply that men fight more when their adrenalin systems are stimulated by the lunar cycle, and the same gravitational effect that the Moon exerts to produce a storm or weather change will also produce a type of micro-storm within a person's head. (There would be a use, too, for a sympathetic climatic backdrop to the drama and excitement of an imminent battle.)

There are several examples of this. In January 1777, during the early days of the American Revolution, George Washington found himself trapped fighting against the British garrisoned at Princeton. On 2 January the wind changed to the north-west and the roads began to freeze. Washington immediately took the offensive. He slipped out of the trap, marched his inspired army 12 miles to the outskirts of Princeton in the dead of night, and caught the British by surprise. It was a new Moon.

The weather on 6 June 1944 was marginal, with choppy seas and overcast skies. It was the Allied invasion of Normandy. The Germans, doubting an invasion in such inclement conditions, were caught completely off guard. It was the week of the Moon's perigee and the day of the full Moon. Perhaps another coincidence?

No one can deny that aspects of the environment are predictable. Day follows night, summer follows winter, most of us sleep when it's dark, eat at midday and watch the weather report about 7pm. Random events are for the most part whimsically quaint, as when the phone rings and it turns out to be the person you were thinking about. Oh, you exclaim, I must be psychic. But there is also a likelihood that, unknown to you both, some parallel pattern exists between your life and your friend's life.

The trade winds blow steadily between latitudes 10° and 30° – from the north-east in the northern hemisphere and from the south-east in the southern hemisphere. Of importance to merchant sailing ships dependent on wind power (hence called 'winds that blow trade' by eighteenth-century navigators), the trade winds shift direction in a predictable way according to the seasonal shift in the high-pressure belts.

They made the traffic in black slaves possible from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. Taking advantage of the prevailing winds, ships voyaged from Europe to Africa's Guinea Coast with goods to be exchanged for human cargo. Loaded with slaves the ships sailed across the Atlantic to the West Indies and thence Charleston, South Carolina, there to barter the slaves for sugar, rum or cotton. Then they would follow the American coast northwards and return to Europe on the more northern prevailing westerlies to complete the trip.

Early sailors also relied on the Roaring Forties. These are winds occurring at 40° S latitude which blow steadily around the Horn. They were formerly known as the Brave West Winds.

The monsoon is time-predictable (blowing towards Asia at the end of May and in the opposite direction at the end of October) and has always played an important part in the economy of the Middle and Far East. It blew the frail craft of the first adventurous traders from the east coast of Africa across the Indian Ocean to the rich Malabar Coast of India. By the first century AD, Arabian mariners, trimming their sails to it, fared safely north-east across the Gulf of Aden to the mouth of the Indus River. Three centuries later, they rode the steady monsoon winds all the way to China.

Even today, India's economy is at the mercy of the monsoon. The country's huge rice crop, the staple food for millions, depends on moisture that the monsoon brings from the Indian Ocean. The Greek word mene means Moon, while the words monsoon and season derive from mausim, the Arab word for Moon.

Nature is predictable. The whole thrust of science is towards discovering nature's patterns. Obviously, to begin with there must be an assumption that some predictable patterns exist. As discoveries are made, more patterns are revealed. It would be more unusual to find that events occur in isolation with no precedence or subsequence. In fact, there's a case for there being no true randomness, because what we know of randomness is also something predictable.

So it is with the weather, which is caused by the behaviour of the Moon. There is nothing mysterious about the Moon's motion; it has been measured extensively and is predictable.

But we cannot easily see slow movements. Try watching a child grow or the big hand of a clock move. Because we do not observe slow changes unless we write them down, we easily miss the variations in the way the Moon moves and appears – changes visible to the naked eye that can occur within just two days. Little wonder, then, that memories of some changes of movement over longer periods – like certain cycles encompassing 19 years, 133 years, 679 years, and more – go unnoticed by most people. Indeed most of us can't remember what the weather was doing last week. Let us look at these changes, starting with the most obvious.

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