Page two- the celestial timepiece

The second crucial effect of the Moon came sometime in the Paleolithic period, when men were food-gathering primates, perhaps not noticeably more successful than others of the order. Man's primitive ancestors were already the brainiest land creatures that ever lived, but it is possible to argue that brains in themselves are not necessarily the best way of ensuring survival. The chimpanzee is not as successful in the evolutionary scheme of things as the rat, nor the elephant as the fly.

For man to become successful, for man to establish himself as the ruler of the planet, it was necessary for him to use his brain as something more than a device to make the daily routine of getting food and evading enemies a little more efficient. Man had to learn to control his environment; that is to observe and generalise, and give birth to a technology. And to sharpen his mind to that point, he had to number and measure. Only numbering and measuring could he begin to grasp the notion of a universe that could be understood and manipulated.

Something was needed for a push towards numbering, as once something had been needed for a push towards dry land.

Man would have to notice something orderly that he could grasp - something orderly enough to enable him to predict the future and give him an appreciation of the power of the intellect.

One simple way of seeing order is to note some steady, cyclic rhythm in nature. The simplest, most overbearing such cycle is clearly the alternation of day and night. The time must have come when some man (or manlike ancestor) began to have the conscious knowledge that the Sun would certainly rise in the east after having set in the west. This would mean the consciousness of time, rather than the mere passive endurance of it. It would surely mean the beginning of the measurement of time, perhaps the measurement of anything, when an event could be placed as so many sunrises ago or as so many to come. Yet the day-night cycle lacks subtlety and is too overwhelming and black-and-white (literally) to call out the best in man. Of course if men observed very closely, they might notice that the day lengthened and shortened and that night shortened and lengthened in what we would today call a yearly cycle. They might associate this with the changing height of the midday Sun and with a cycle of seasons.

Unfortunately such changes would be hard to grasp, hard to follow, hard to measure. The length of the day and the position of the Sun would be hard to observe in primitive days; the seasons depend on many factors that tend to obscure their purely cyclic nature over the short run; and in the tropics, when man developed, all these changes are minimal.

But there is the Moon - the most dramatic sight in the heavens. The Sun is glorious but cannot be looked at. The stars are unchanging points of light. The Moon, however, is an object of soft and glowing light that changes its shape steadily.

The fascination of that changing shape, accompanied by a changing position in the sky relative to the Sun, had to attract attention. The slow death of the Moon's crescent as it merged with the rising Sun, and the birth of a new Moon from the solar fire of sunset may have given mankind the first push towards the notion of death and rebirth, which is central to so many religions.

The birth of each new Moon (still so called), as a symbol of hope, may have exercised the emotions of early man sufficiently to give him the overwhelming urge to calculate in advance when that new Moon would come so that he might greet it with glee and festival.

The new Moons come sufficiently far apart, however, for the matter to prove an exercise in counting; and the count is large enough to make it advisable to use notches in a piece of wood or bone. Furthermore, the number of days is not unvarying. Sometimes the interval is twenty-nine days between new Moons, sometimes thirty. With continued counting, however, a pattern will appear.

Once the pattern has been established, it will eventually be seen that every twelve new Moons will include a cycle of seasons (it is easier to count and understand twelve new Moons than 365 days). And yet the fit is not right, either. With twelve new Moons the seasons drift forward. Sometimes a thirteenth new Moon must be added.

Then, too, every once in a while the Moon goes into eclipse. (Since eclipses of the Moon can be seen all over the world at once, while eclipses of the Sun - roughly equal in number - can be seen only in some particular narrow region only, then from a given spot on Earth one sees many more eclipses of the Moon than of the Sun.)

The eclipse of the Moon: its comparatively rapid death at the moment of complete maturity (the eclipse always comes when the Moon is full), and the equally rapid rebirth, must have had enormous impact on primitive people. It would have been important for them to know when such a significant event would occur, and calculations must have had to reach a new level of subtlety.

It is not surprising, then, that early efforts to understand the universe concentrated on the Moon. Stonehenge may have been a primitive observatory serving as a large device to predict lunar eclipses accurately. Alexander Marshak has analyzed the markings on ancient bones and has suggested that they were primitive calendars marking off the new Moons.

There is thus good reason to believe that man was first jolted into calculation and generalization by the need to keep track of the Moon; that from the Moon came calendars from them, mathematics and astronomy (and religion too); and from them, everything else.

As the Moon made man possible as a physical being through its tides, it made him an intellectual being through its phases.