I stared doing a series on the folklore names for the full moons over on my blog. Jhereg stopped by and left a really good comment about the Shawnee names for the moon and how many of them relate to food. So I thought I would throw out – as a challenge to the rewilding community – the idea of making full moon name calendars based on different concepts.
For the first one, let’s try food-related ideas. I present a partial calendar based on the Shawnee names for the community to build on. Obviously, the names we already have represent the more obvious options during the fruiting seasons. But I hope we can come up with some creative ideas for filling in the rest of the calendar.
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[center][size=12pt]The Food Moons[/size][/center]
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January - ?
February - ?
March - Sap Moon
April - Fiddlehead Moon
May - Strawberry Moon
June - Raspberry Moon
July - Blackberry Moon
August - Plum Moon
September - Papaw Moon
October - ?
November - ?
December - ?
I think… this will be different for all different people/locations.
I’d say moon names are best suited for the plant food available (or hunting seasons/migration patterns), activities done at that time or an extreme environment condition.
Also I’ve noticed some cultures go from full moon and some go from new moon. (I think going from new moon to full moon makes most sense?)
A few I’ve noticed: Seattle:
Sept-Oct = Salmon run
November = Rainy season begins
I like the idea of basing the months of the moons, so instead
of sept-oct it’d be called month of the Salmon, or w/e.
(anyone noticed our months are a bit odd? Like, Sept = 7 oct = 8 nov = 9 dec = 10, and yet, they are two months off? Suggesting that the first month was really March (or when spring starts–> makes more sense to me than January… middle of winter…)
It’s also about change. What has changed in the bioregion between this full moon and the last? In other words, what distinguishes this moon from the rest?
You make a good point, SA. I apologize for not pointing that out myself in the first post. The point of rewilding your calendar via phenology rests on noting the time of year according to the changes in the world around you. Thanks for bringing that out.
January is the first month in the Gregorian calendar it consists of 31 days. In the original Roman calendar, the Winter months of January and February were considered part of a monthless Winter period. At that time, the year began on March 1. The months of January and February were added around 700 BC by King Numa Pomplius.
which backs up your observation.
as for when the year starts, that varies among cultures as well, i think. some of my witch friends celebrate samhain (halloween) as the beginning of their year. personally, i like the winter solstice as my new year, as it coincides more with what i have grown up with but it also gives me a celestial event to mark the occasion with.
I think.. this will be different for all different people/locations.
I'd say moon names are best suited for the plant food available (or hunting seasons/migration patterns), activities done at that time or an extreme environment condition.
another point that i should have brought out in my first post, so thanks for touching on it. my main hope both with my blog series as well as with this thread rests in prodding our minds to think of the phenology and occurrences in our own locales.
i hope to try other events to focus on besides food phenology, but i thought it would feel fun to start things off with food, since … you know … we all need it.
i would assume, in the end, that if you come up with a moon calendar for your bioregion, that it will focus on a number of things, possibly whatever your tribe focuses on above all other things during that month. i doubt anyone would in actuality have a moon calendar with nothing but food terms or weather terms or any individual theme. but i hope that if we try to fill up several calendars, each with just one theme, that it will offer us some templates, of a sort, to pull from and mix and match into something that really will inform our own bioregions.
Well, that gets me thinking … what are some possible themes?
…Food/Harvest
…Weather/Climate (snow, rain, spring thaw)
…Activity (of tribe: e.g., Storing Winter Food)
…Activity (of nature: e.g., Leaves Fall)
…Animals (Salmon Run, like Fenris suggests, or Bears Wake Up, Butterflies Migrate, etc … could also be incorporated into Activity of nature theme)
For the most part I’m looking at this from a future guidance / remembrance point of view, captured by natural observations, that might serve useful in telling what’s out there, what’s going to happen, what to prepare for, what to seek, expect, etc.
I think that would be a good way for a rewilding person to design the calendar, but for a group that is already indigenous, would they need those reminders? I dunno. I dunno what the empirical evidence suggests. Eventually, I would want a calendar that has more of a spiritual focus and less practically oriented.
Food only names. Some of these could be in different months depending on the year or where you live. If you live on the coast your salmon season will be different than ours is 400 miles up stream. Some could be either in the fall or the spring, like whitefish.
January - Ice fishing moon
February - Snowshoe hare moon,
March - Whitefish moon, hungry moon
April - Nettle moon, Spawning Rainbow moon, Bear coming out moon, Turkey gobbling moon
May - Kokanee moon, Root digging moon, Grouse drumming moon
June - fawning moon (not exactly food, but sort of food related), wild onion moon
July - huckleberry moon, saskatoon (service berry in the US) moon
August - choke cherry moon, plum moon, canning peaches moon, fruit drying moon
September - Elk bugling moon, Deer shedding velvet moon, medicine root moon, Kokanee spawning moon, Fat bear moon, Apple moon, Salmon smoking moon, potato digging moon
October - moose hunting moon, whitefish spawning moon, Fat turkey moon
November - deer hunting moon
December - Sharing it all with your friends moon, burning fat moon
OH now this looks so good! I wish someone could help me out making a Wild Calender for North-West Europe as im quite unsure about what when and where. This could relly help out making just a “sense” of wild become an integral part…
nice contributions, heyvictor! and good point about the salmon. really any of the reminders you create for yourself by naming the full moon after them have to grow out of the phenology of your own bioregion.
timeLESS, do you have any festivals in your area that have to do with food or harvests or migratory events? just off the top of my head, here in arkansas, i can think of grape festivals, dogwood festivals (more an aesthetic thing for the locals rather than a food-related one, but a phenological festival, all the same), and hunting seasons. A quick internet search also led me to discover festivals relating to butterflies, elk, daffodils, bears, and chickens.
you may not get enough information to fill up a whole moon calendar, that way, but it could give you a good jumping off point. also, this page has some celtic and english moon names that may relate to NW Europe or give you some ideas, at least.
i think truly indigenous folks would have simply developed a sense of the year and a consensus for naming their moons over time. but since we don’t have the benefit of a millenia-old culture to draw from, i hope to stimulate some ideas for us to build upon by looking at and syncretizing with existing sources.
I think I’d call this moon “Purple Martins Arrive” although it doesn’t have anything to do with food. Every October here, we have the Mullet Festival (the fish not the haircut), so I guess We’d have the Mullet moon around October.
I read a book a few years ago called “Tales of Murasaki” by Liza Dalby. It describes a Chinese calendar which gives a name for each two week period based on what happens in nature at that time.
Oh thanks wilderix! That site u mentioned really got some good ideas flowing through my head. Im thinking that it makes it easier to understand where and when i am right now. Like a name the denotes time AND place. I really like integrating all these broken parts into a whole that i can understand by relating it to my experience. I hope this all makes sense.
Imagine there is no “Sunday through Saturday” or “January through December”. You see a relative that you haven’t seen for a few years and she has a young child now. You ask how old her child is and she says,
“She was born when we were picking the high country huckleberries up on Bear mountain the year before last.”
That pretty well narrows the time frame down to a period of a couple of weeks. Could be described as the huckleberry moon.
SilverArrow, I’m interested in how the calendar with the “spiritual focus” would look?
[quote=“starfish, post:12, topic:671”]I read a book a few years ago called “Tales of Murasaki” by Liza Dalby. It describes a Chinese calendar which gives a name for each two week period based on what happens in nature at that time.
Starfish, I love that link you shared. That offers a lot of ideas and jumping off points for figuring out something for your own bioregion.
Exactly! Time + Place. You nailed it, timeLESS.
[quote=“heyvictor, post:14, topic:671”]Imagine there is no “Sunday through Saturday” or “January through December”. You see a relative that you haven’t seen for a few years and she has a young child now. You ask how old her child is and she says,
“She was born when we were picking the high country huckleberries up on Bear mountain the year before last.”
That pretty well narrows the time frame down to a period of a couple of weeks. Could be described as the huckleberry moon.[/quote]
Beautiful, Billy!
It reminds me of Crocodile Dundee. He asked the village elders when he was born, and they said “summer”. But your example takes it to the next level. And to rewild your concept of the year, it makes sense to put it in terms of the natural occurrences.
When my son came into the world two years ago, I noted that it happened during the first waxing slivers of the new Worm Moon (late February of 2006). I worked the idea into a lullaby I sing to him, and let it (ala the doctrine of signatures) color the way I interpret his personality: “Well, you squirmy little baby. You really were born in the Worm Moon, weren’t you?”
with an average 29.5 day cycle from one full moon to the next, the lunar year and the solar year don’t correlate exactly with each other, just like the solar year doesn’t exactly consist of 365 days.
you only end up getting 13 moons in a year (let’s measure it from one winter solstice to the next, for argument’s sake) if the first full moon of the year happens closely enough after the solstice.
we can account for that extra moon by calling it the Blue Moon (as the folklore moon-naming system does now) or come up with whatever system we like to account for the 13th moon.
i described the two most common modern ways of accounting for full moon names and blue moons on my blog (granted, i condensed and dumbed it down for convenience) thusly:
Basically, two primary methods exist. The easiest one to wrap your brain around involves assigning a moon’s name based on what month it occurs in. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call this the [b]monthly method[/b]. In this method, if you want to talk about the full moon in January, you would call it the Wolf Moon. For the full moon in June, you would call it the Strawberry Moon. [i]If you happen to have two moons in the same month, you would call the second one a Blue Moon.[/i] The monthly method works in a really straightforward way, but it has its limitations in terms of rewilding, as we will see later.
The second method  we’ll call this one the seasonal method  divides the year up into seasons (like we already do, based on the equinoxes and solstices) and gives the names to the moons based on whether they come first, second or last in the season. In this method the Snow Moon, for instance, would apply to the second full moon in winter, regardless of whether it happened to fall in the month of February or January. The seasonal method also has its own way of dealing with Blue Moons. If you have four full moons in the same season, then you call the third one a Blue Moon  so that the order of first, second and last still apply to the other moons in the season.
;D