New Moon

Dazzle mine eyes, or do I see three suns?

• Edward in Henry 6, pt. 3 (II.i.25)

Monday morning, the image from my phone just didn’t work — at all — but it was a thinnest crescent of a last quarter moon¹, and Venus, bright and hard at hand, just a few degrees off to one side.

I was listening to a podcast work through Act 1-2 of Henry 6.3, and there was the poetic element, an image of three Suns in the air. While it is a rare atmospheric event, it is not unrealistic, and as the podcaster cites, not without historical precedent.

Three glorious suns, each one a perfect sun,
Not separated with the racking clouds,
But sever’d in a pale clear-shining sky.

• Richard Henry 6.3 (II.i.26-8)

Three sons, Edward IV, Edward V, and Richard III (later, a hunchback toad). Three Suns in the air, called a Sun Dog (thanks wiki), is both historically accurate, poetical, and adds a fine point to the image I was trying to capture.

I paused the recording, echoing in my ear, and started trying to position, real, real-life events with signs in nature, or elsewhere, and how that works.

Using the ubiquitous WikiPedia, I glanced through the brief data on the phenomena of three suns, and a cursory search pointed to a similar event, recently covered in popular media, as an observation. But what it means, and the question I was working on, does an infinite being give us mere humans symbols here, to point us in the correct directions? Or is is mere coincidence?

In the matter of a Shakespeare play, artistic license takes over, and the stories are “Based upon a true story,” but not always verified historical fact. Directed by known facts, and accepted histories, but yeah, some stuff is clearly made-up. Still, the way the astronomy, the astrology, of the times plays into the allegories and dances through the language?

New Moon

That Moon, I failed to adequately image? Venus off to a side? Looks like symbolism on certain² flags? Against the symbolism in nature, or just in the world around us, clearly observable? Are those signs that are put there for us?

The image of the three suns, unsubstantiated, but reasonable, and reasonably accurate? Makes for pretty poetry and carries the idea, “As above, so below,” because, in the play, and the historical battle, the three sons won.

Now, the question, did a certain divinity, did the good lord above, did that supernatural being sprinkle the ice crystals in the atmosphere so that the three suns would appear? Or is this a humankind invention, readings symbols where there might — or might not — be real messages from on high.

The last sliver of a moon before it is new and reborn? Highly symbolic to cleaning up one, last deal. Fixing a problem we ignored. The question I was wrestling with, brought about by Shakespeare scholarship and the image of the Moon and Venus in the morning sky? Is the symbol “heaven sent,” or are we intreating existing images to fit what we want it to fit?

New Moon

I don’t know, not this morning. New Moon in Virgo³, shortly, and time to start anew.

1. The Balsamic Moon, in myth and metaphor. ↩
2. Various “Islamic” places reputedly use the crescent shape and star, but it also rejected for its pagan meaning. ↩
3. Moon conjuncts Sun at 5:59 AM, Sep. 17, 2020 at 25° Virgo. ↩