Lunar Explosion, Wounded Snake

I knew this was some kind of weird moon time right now, although this doesn’t come from “right now”, but it splashed across my radar screen today at the top of an email. On this day in 1178 (today in our time being the Full Moon):

Just after sunset, according to the English monk and chronicler Gervase of Canterbury, five monks watch the moon explode into flames.

Gervase said the observers were looking at a new crescent moon when the upper part “suddenly split in two. From the midpoint of this division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out … fire, hot coals and sparks…. The body of the moon, which was below, writhed … throbbed like a wounded snake.”

Articles With Similar Themes:

• A Snake A Day…
• Python Bursts After Eating Alligator
• Podcast 10: There’s A Snake Inside Us!
• Electro-Snakes and Ocean-Going Semis
• Those guys’ll just shoot anybody who comes along

Read In Sequence:

• Prev: Messiaen’s Francis of Assisi
• Next: Pirates > Privateers

1 Reader Responses

1. Big Elk Says:
   June 18th, 2008 at 2:28 pm

   http://www.weblore.com/richard/june_18_1178_impact_crater.htm

   In this year, on the Sunday before the Feast of St. John the Baptist, after sunset when the moon had first become visible a marvelous phenomenon was witnessed by some five or more men who were sitting there facing the moon. Now there was a bright new moon, and as usual in that phase its horns were tilted toward the east; and suddenly the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of this division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety, and, to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards, it returned to its proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then after these transformations the moon from horn to horn, that is along its whole length, took on a blackish appearance. The present writer was given this report by men who saw it with their own eyes, and are prepared to stake their honor on an oath that they have made no addition or falsification in the above narrative.