About every 33 months, there are two Full Moons
in a calendar month, such as in
July, 2004.
It is commonly said such a moon is a "Blue Moon".
Is this true folklore
– or was this notion popularized
by Trivial Pursuit in the 1980s?
Pip Wilson investigates
Folklore is a fluid, funny thing. In our day and age, one marked by dissatisfaction, confusion and vertiginous change, nostalgia is powerful and antique folkways desirable. Modern Westerners, having by and large lost the certainties of traditional faith, seek an ersatz consolation in old things. Today is lousy, so yesterday must have been good.
Great-grandma's world didn't have video nasties or traffic snarls, no nuclear threat nor social breakdown, so yesteryear is an enticing Utopia. Evidence of the power of this sentimental longing for the past abounds. Brides arrive at heavily-booked cute sandstone churches in horse-drawn carriages;
here in Australia, modern project homes affect the Federation style; prestige books are bound in synthetic leather with mock-gold ribbing on the spines.
Antiquity invokes authority: any New Age channelled entity, whether from prehistoric Egypt or pre-Columbian America, is obliged to speak in the Jacobean English of Shakespeare and the Bible. The legal profession
in some countries is loath to relinquish wigs and robes for much the same reason.
Folklore is taken seriously today, because, like the booming genealogy pastime, it helps us root ourselves in a simpler and more wholesome past. I would feel like a heel to debunk a piece of
'old folklore', because I, too, need folklore to help me cope with modernity.
But debunk I must, when it comes to the modern received wisdom concerning the meaning of the expression
'once in a blue moon'. Once in a blue moon means very rarely indeed, according to the authoritative Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. That's all the normally loquacious Ebenezer Cobham Brewer has to say on the matter. Recently, however, the term has gained a new, or at least additional, meaning.
Nearly every three years (about every thirty-three months, to be more precise
–
the periodicity of double-moon months), newspapers report that,
'according to folklore', a second full moon in a calendar month is a "blue moon". The long-running, and hence authoritative, Sydney Morning Herald feature, Column Eight (formerly called Granny's Column), repeated the theory
some time back. Moreover, according to Granny, under a blue moon a woman is permitted by tradition to propose to her sweetheart.
I first heard the second moon/blue moon theory about ten years ago, and, doubting the hoariness of this explanation, raised the matter with a number of people. All of them knew that a blue moon was the second moon in a calendar month, but none could remember having heard the theory
until recent years.
Every thirty-three months the thing bugged me. However, Philip Hiscock, of the Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive, provided me with the solution to this vexing problem. Hiscock, similarly bugged, tracked down the origins of this
'folklore'.
Philip Hiscock first became aware of the explanation in May, 1988,
"when it seemed all the radio stations and newspapers were carrying an item on this interesting bit of
'old folklore'", so he searched all over for a reference to this meaning of the term, or for any term used to describe the calendar phenomenon of two full moons in a month. His search revealed nothing
–
"there just seemed to be no history to this term".
Hiscock did, however, track the mystery down to the Genus II edition of the Trivial Pursuit board game, published in 1986. From there he tracked it down to a late-1970s American radio show, Deborah Byrd's Star Date, which in turn got it from a 1939 edition of Sky and Telescope magazine. The author of the 1939 quiz attributed his information to a nineteenth-century Maine almanac, but Hiscock maintains that
"the term clearly was not commonly known in 1939".
The term was popularised by Trivial Pursuit, Deborah Byrd and a children's book by Margot McLoo-Basta and Alice Sigel, Kids' World Almanac of Records and Facts (1985). The real entrée of the term's
'meaning' into the world of folklore, however, came with the May, 1988 double moon, when press wire services fed the story into newspapers, radio stations and TV newsrooms throughout North America and, inevitably, the globe. Faster than a speeding bullet, the folklore
went … well, ballistic. It seems that the blue moon proverb was passed down not by the leisurely oral tradition of old wives but by rapid electronic data transmission.
The association with women popping the question is as yet unknown, but a certain Mr Hiscock, I'm sure, would be as thrilled as I to locate the origin of this
'tradition'. It echoes the genuinely ancient custom of women being able to propose marriage in Leap Year (or on Leap Year Day,
February 29), which actually began with Scottish legislation to that effect in 1288.
Despite Philip Hiscock, despite this article, the double moon story undoubtedly is here to stay. Once we are infected with a
meme, or thought virus, whether benign or otherwise, if it hits the right buttons unlearning is an almost impossible ask. Urban myths generally survive their debunkers; everyone knows that the Great Wall of China is the only human-made feature that can be seen from space
–
even though it's only as wide as a suburban street!
The expression,
'once in a blue moon', is four hundred years old, and now it has a new meaning. Thanks to Philip Hiscock we can understand now that even if it is not old folklore, it is still folklore. The old custom is just a new custom, that's all.
So,
when your radio station or newspaper starts talking about the blue moon, give
them a call and mention the origins – and maybe tell them Wilson's
Almanac sent you.
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Note: Since I wrote this article, and Hiscock wrote his, we have both learned that Sky & Telescope Magazine has uncovered some more evidence
– in fact, it was that very magazine, in 1946, that promulgated the new folklore. Don Olson writes:
"With help from Margaret Vaverek (Southwest Texas State University) and several other librarians, we have now obtained more than 40 editions of the Maine Farmers' Almanac from the period 1819 to 1962. These refer to more than a dozen Blue Moons, and not one of them is the second full Moon in a month. What's going on here? ...
... in March 1946, an article entitled "Once in a Blue Moon" appeared in Sky & Telescope (page 3). Its author, James Hugh Pruett (1886-1955), was an amateur astronomer living in Eugene, Oregon, and a frequent contributor to Sky &: Telescope. Pruett wrote on a variety of topics, especially fireball meteors. In his article on Blue Moons ... he went on to say, 'Seven times in 19 years there were
– and still are – 13 full moons in a year. This gives 11 months with one full moon each and one with two. This second in a month, so I interpret it, was called Blue Moon.'" Source
'Blue Moons' chart
