The Major Lunar Standstill.

 

Most people have never heard of the so called The Major Lunar Standstill so I want to tell you why you should care about it.

It’s called ‘standstill’ because it’s that’s a translation of the word solstice, and what a solstice is, is a figurative ‘standing still’ or no further movement along the horizon of the daily rising or setting of the sun or the moon, because although we all know what a sun solstice is, it might be slightly less clear what a lunar solstice involves. So before we get to the big all important ‘Major’ Lunar standstill, I will tell you a little about the common ordinary lunar solstices and they take place twice every sidereal month.

In the same way that the sun can be said to figuratively ‘stand-still’ on the occasion of the winter-solstice when the sun is at its minimum angle of declination -23.5 degrees south of the equator, and summer solstice when the sun is at its maximum angle of declination 23.5 degrees north of the equator. For three days the position of its rising and setting doesn’t change. 

The word ‘solstice’, ‘sun stand-still’, from the Latin Solstitium, which then became the French word Solstice which we were bequeathed after 1066. It is only after this period of three days that the sun starts to reverse its course, in the case of the winter solstice it starts to rise a little more Easterly and set a little further West every day and after the summer solstice when the sun rises at its maximum point on the horizon East and reaches the zenith, that is, at noon it is directly overhead, to set at its further point in the West, drawing a largest and highest arc in the sky and the day being the longest since the sun is tracing its greatest distance from East to West across the summer sky,  it then gradually starts to rise a little more Westerly each day, and set a little more to the east, and 6 months later we are back to the winter solstice. 

As we probably know, many rituals and monuments were established throughout the world to commemorate, record and predict this phenomenon, and this is what is meant when they say Stonehenge is a calendar, since the stones at these ancient sites can be demonstrated to be aligned to the specific rising and setting of the sun and moon and these astronomically significant dates. To understand the importance of these monuments to the ancient people they served we have to forget all about our digital devices, our clocks, our Greenwich meantime and the constant electronic activity of a world which always knows what time it is, and place ourselves in a world where the only time keeper was the sun in the sky and its ever-changing movements. 

We can observe how at the ancient site of Newgrange in Ireland, established some 5,000 years ago, classified as a passage tomb but in reality more a kind of temple and centre of pre-historic religious ritual, it was built with a specific alignment to the sunrise of the winter solstice where for 17 minutes, sunlight enters through an opening above the entrance known as a ‘roof box’ and sends a long shaft of light to gradually illuminate the long inner chamber. 

To call Newgrange a tomb is like calling Westminster Abbey a tomb because 3,000 famous people and dignitaries are buried there, all of the major Christian cathedrals contain the bodies of well-known people of renown, yet of course, these buildings also serve a purpose for the living and form part of their ongoing cultural continuity and the attempt to bridge the gap between the known material world and the supposed existence of another transcendent realm beyond life. 

On the other side of the country at the Carrowkeel cairns in Country Silgo, sunset of the summer solstice passes through the roof-box above the opening of the tomb which looks rather like one of those World-War 2 pillboxes we sometimes see along the coast, and the sunlight then travels along the back of the chamber, illuminating different parts of the tomb during the course of the sunset. 

We can only guess what ritual significance this unfolding event of light, like at Newgrange had, but we can surmise that some great yearly mystery was revealed, whether it was part of some kind of symbolic spiritual ritual relating to the ancestors or indeed whether it was a symbolic ritual for the living, or indeed, an idea which from my meagre studies in the ancient past of these isles, both, since for the ancients the dead lived alongside the living and they were always present and embodied in some way, sometimes even in the ancient stone monuments themselves which Is why we so often find ashes and bones beneath these great stones, as if perhaps, they dead were being embodied in the stones to watch over the living, but I must admit that is only my pet theory. It may be utter nonsense but I like it, and it fits the facts.

The reason the Lunar Standstill is neglected, and just for the point of clarification but with a creeping presentiment that I am only introducing the first fogs of confusion in this somewhat esoteric subject, there are actually two lunar standstills, a minor standstill and a major standstill but that’s only for the general record, we will indeed be focussing on the Major Standstill because it’s more interesting and the effects much more pronounced. The Minor Lunar Standstill is rather dull by comparison, but the reason the Lunar cycle is neglected whereas the various solar cycles of solstices, equinoxes, and eclipses are generally fairly well understood by most people is because of course we can clearly see and feel the effects of those cycles on our immediate environment. 

Most people are aware that there is a 30 day moon cycle, which is known as the synodic month, and in many cultures, such as Islam for instance, they have a lunar calendar and base their months and their various religious festivals on the activity of the moon. For instance the beginning or ending of Ramadan is judged by the visibility in the sky of the tiniest slither of the first crescent of the moon which for them signifies the start or end of a month, and we can observe ourselves that our word for ‘month’ is related to the word for ‘moon’. But because we follow a solar calendar rather than a lunar one, our months appear at particular times within the solar year cycle, and are not tracked to the moon, in Islam however the months float around within the solar cycle and move, so Ramadan for instance, which is the 9th month of the Muslim calendar of 12th months, moves forward 10-11 days each year, since it tacks the moon cycle and not the solar cycle. The Chinese also follow a lunar calendar, and as a result the date of their ‘new-year’ changes every year, however they have managed to contain their floating new-year so that it only occurs between January 21st and February 21st because they have also tacked their calendar onto the solar cycle by starting their new-year on the second or third new moon after the winter solstice, which is very practical and elegant solution, but this does necessitate the slightly less elegant necessity of the addition of an occasional ‘leap month’ to pack out the missing days from coming up short with 12 lunar months of 30 days, this effectively means the leap year can have as many as 385 days. The intercalary month is like a repeat of the previous month, which means that any holidays are repeated. Due to operating on two calendar systems simultaneously, the Gregorian system used in the west and the traditional Chinese calendar, one on the western date, the solar calendar, and another, roughly a month later, based on the same day according to the lunar calendar which of course, will have shifted by a month. In fact by rights some Chinese people should have no less than three birthdays a year since with the addition of the intercalary year, any holidays and festivals from the previous month are repeated again in the added month.

And if the Chinese don’t have enough birthdays, just to further hammer home the point there is a 4th birthday called Renri which falls on the 7th day of the first month of the Chinese year called Zhengyue.  Renri commemorates the creation of mankind on the 7th day by the goddess Nüwa, who created mankind on the 7th day after first creating chickens on the first day, then dogs, boars, sheep, cows horses and finally mankind. So the 7th day is a collective birthday for everyone.

Perhaps it’s for this reason, namely the abundance of possible personal birthdays in a single year, that the Chinese do not particularly celebrate birthdays in the way we do, though that appears to be changing if the article I read in the Times recently is anything to go by, where a woman in the Hunan province rented 520 drones at the cost of nearly 12 thousand pounds, to spell out the words ‘Happy Birthday Doudou’, which then turned into a birthday cake and then a gift box containing a bone, all this while a group of people wearing Christmas hats sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to the animal who is can no doubt, make no sense whatsoever of what is taking place. 

But with all this talk of Chinese birthdays we’re straying slightly from the point and I will endeavour to get back to it.

The lunar standstill or lunistice as it is sometimes referred to, is an important but mostly neglected phenomenon. The Major Lunar Standstill occurs at the end of a cycle of 18.6 years and brings with it increased tidal forces, increased risk of flooding, and can influence the weather. In order to understand how this cycle works we need to visualise the moon orbiting the Earth. Now we need to realise that the moon’s orbit around the Earth is tilted, it does not merrily orbit on a flat plane in the same way around and around forever, what happens is that because of this tilt, and the angle of the tilt is 5.14 degrees to the elliptic or imaginary flat plane of our orbit around the sun, so that means that the moon is usually either above or below the plane of the elliptic within a limit of + or – 5.14 degrees. Where the complication arises is that the Earth’s orbit around the sun on the plane of the elliptic is also tilted 23.5 degrees to the equatorial plane, without the tilt of the Earth we would not experience the seasons of course.

In June in the northern hemisphere we experience the start of summer, and this is because the sun’s declination is at +23.5 degrees above the equatorial plane and is closest to the northern hemisphere. However as the year progresses and the Earth continues its year-long solar orbit we find that gradually because of this 23.5 degree angle of tilt between the equatorial plan and the elliptic plane, the is gradually getting further away and this is show by a decreasing height in the sky at noon until we get to 21st December and the start of winter and we find the sun hardly rising in the sky at all because the sun’s declination relative to us in the northern hemisphere is now at an angle of -23.5 degrees below the equatorial plane. Which means summer time for the southern hemisphere but winter time for us. This cycle of course takes one year to complete.

The moon however completes this cycle once every sidereal month of 27.212 days, being slightly different from the synodic month which is a , the sidereal month or lunar node-cycle, is the time taken to travel once around the 360 degrees of the Earth’s orbit, 27.32 days, but this does not give us a complete moon cycle from moon phase to moon phase because it doesn’t account for the movement of the earth around the sun which means even though relative to itself, the moon has completed a full orbit of the Earth, the fact that the Earth’s movement through the sky around the sun means that the moon has to travel a little further to complete a whole phase to phase cycle from the perspective of the Earth, this take 29.53 or roughly 30 days.

As we saw earlier the moon’s monthly orbit around the Earth is tilted at 5.14 degrees relative to the elliptic plane, or the orbital plane around the sun. So, in the same way the tilted Earth moving around the sun creates a 6 monthly cycle of moving from summer with a solar declination of 23.5 degrees to winter and -23.5 declination and another 6 months to complete the year and get back to summer again, so too the moon goes through a similar cycle of changing declination around the Earth. So, where the sun is high in the sky in summer and low in the sky in winter, the moon relative to us observing from a fixed point on Earth, goes through this cycle in one sidereal month, with the highest declination of +5 degrees having the moon high in the sky, then two weeks later, half way through the cycle, it has gone to the lowest declination relative to us, at -5 degrees and appears low in the sky. Of course, just like summer and winter, anyone in the southern hemisphere will experience the opposite, when the moon is highest in the sky for us, it will be lowest in the sky for them and vice versa.

This would all be fine and dandy but the complication here is that 5 degrees is not the only angle of declination we have to work with but we also have to consider the Earth own axial tilt relative to the sun of 23.5 degrees.

In order to understand this, we need to visualise it. The sun in the Northern hemisphere at the summer solstice rises in a position on the horizon but doesn’t rise up vertically above the horizon then drop down for sunset, but instead it traces a large loop across the size travelling from East before finally lowering down into a western sunset. The position of its rising and setting on the solstice is the widest extreme of travel for the sun, since it spends the longest time in the sky and rises at its midday zenith at the highest point in the sky directly overheard. The solstice, or standing still element is that the sun rise will not move any further East, nor the Sunset any further West. It standstill. And from the high point of solar declination it will then start to move again, rising at a position more and more Westerly and setting at a position more and more easterly until the winter solstice sees the sun rise at its minimum easterly position and setting in its minimum westerly position. It rises, draws a low arc across the sky, and travels from our perspective a short distance reaching its lowest point in the sky at noon. It stands still because it cannot rise any further west or set any further east.

The moon goes through this same cycle relative to us, every sidereal month. Remember the sidereal month is a complete revolution of the Earth but independent of the moon phase cycle. At the beginning of the cycle, at the solstice, the moon rises in true East and sets in true West like the sun, and this is because of the Earth rotation from West to East, the moon and the sun appear to rise in the East and set in the West. The lunistice means the moon will not rise any further east or set any further west and will complete its highest as it traces its arc across the sky. 

The moon will rise at its most westerly point in the East and set at its most Easterly point in the West and will rise in a very shallow arc. But as the cycle progresses, the moon will rise at a different position each day, appearing to rise a little further westward and setting a little further towards the east until, halfway through the cycle, two weeks later, the moon is at its other lunistice, or ‘winter’ lunistice, the minimum standstill, the moon rises at its furthest point in the East towards the west, and sets at its further point East in the west, tracing a very shallow arc in the sky and rising to a position of minimum amplitude in the sky.

And two weeks later the cycle returns to the maximum lunistice. 

Where this gets complicated is that we have to superimpose this ongoing cycle of two lunistices every sidereal month, onto the yearly solar solstice cycle. So the axial tilt of 23.5 degrees and the lunar tilt of 5.14 degrees, interact, so to speak. The axial tilt of the moon is either added to the tilt of the Earth at the Lunar maximum to give a total declination of the moon of 28.64 degrees or else the tilt of the moon is subtracted, so to speak to give the Lunar Minimum of 18.5. 

So, at the Lunar Maximum, the moon will have a declination greater than the usual monthly cycle and will therefore rise at a position furthest East possible during the 18.6 year cycle. Since its declination of 28.64 degrees at the maximum is higher than the sun’s highest summer solstice declination of 23.5 degrees, the moon will rise at a point further East than the midsummer, and set at a point further West than the setting midsummer sun, this also means it will trace an arc across the sky where it will rise at its Zenith, even higher than the noon solstice sun, so not only overhead, but actually so high as to be slightly behind you looking due North. Because this is still part of the sidereal month cycle two weeks later it will reach the ‘winter’ phase of the lunistice, which means the Southern hemisphere will have the moon rising highest in the sky while the Northern hemisphere will experience the lowest possible height of the moon in the sky. This phenomenon in particular has had an impact on the neolithic landscape of ritual and religion and produced a very interesting phenomenon and a most remarkable spectacle which can be seen to this day at the neolithic ritual site of Callanish in Scotland whose existence was attested by Greek 1st century BC writer Diodorus Siculus in book 2 of his Bibliotheca Historica where he refers, in a brief passage to the legendary accounts of the Hyperboreans, ‘hyperboreans’ being the Greek word for the mythical people in the far North of Europe who were said to live in a realm of perpetual sunshine beyond the cold of the north wind. 

“Of those who have written about the ancient myths, Hecataeus and certain others say that in the regions beyond the land of the Celts​, there lies in the ocean an island no smaller than Sicily. This island, the account continues, is situated in the north and is inhabited by the Hyperboreans, who are called by that name because their home is beyond the point whence the north wind (Boreas) blows; and the island is both fertile and productive of every crop, and since it has an unusually temperate climate it produces two harvests each year. Moreover, the following legend is told concerning it: Leto​ (the mother of Zeus and Apollo) was born on this island, and for that reason Apollo is honoured among them above all other gods; and the inhabitants are looked upon as priests of Apollo, after a manner, since daily they praise this god continuously in song and honour him exceedingly. And there is also on the island both a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo and a notable temple which is adorned with many votive offerings and is spherical in shape. Furthermore, a city is there which is sacred to this god, and the majority of its inhabitants are players on the cithara; and these continually play on this instrument in the temple and sing hymns of praise to the god, glorifying his deeds.

They say also that the moon, as viewed from this island, appears to be but a little distance from the earth and to have upon it prominences, like those of the earth, which are visible to the eye. The account is also given that the god visits the island every nineteen years, the period in which the return of the stars to the same place in the heavens is accomplished; and for this reason the nineteen-year period is called by the Greeks the "year of Meton.”

Another local belief says that at certain times, the ‘shining one’ walks along the stone avenue and her arrival is heralded by the call of a cuckoo.