The September 28, 2015 Super Blood Moon Full Eclipse

There is a blog entry on Labor Day at https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/labor-day/

With a name like that, wouldn’t cult members be just delighted? It calls for a blog entry of its own.

Actually, I should have written about this last year. That’s because this is the last of four full lunar eclipses in a row, two last year and two this year, with no partial eclipses in between them. It’s called a tetrad, meaning four. Tetrads are unusual, but not particularly rare.

There have been sixty-two tetrads from 1 AD to 2100 AD. There were none in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, but there are eight from 2001 to 2100. The dates of the lunar eclipses in this particular tetrad are April 15, 2014, October 8, 2014, April 4, 2015, and September 28, 2015. There are six lunar months between each of the full eclipses.

A Super Moon is a moon that appears 14% larger and 30% brighter than most moons, simply because the moon’s orbit is not exactly circular and super moons are at the point closest to earth. (The closest point is called the perigee and the farthest is called the apogee. Perigee comes from the Greek, perigeion ‘close around the earth,’ via Latin and then French, entering English in the late 16th century.) Super Moon is a catchy modern phrase; astronomers call it a perigee moon.

Blood Moon can refer to two different things.

Moons that appear low in the sky look reddish because light passes through more of our atmosphere before reaching the moon and the atmosphere filters out the blue part of the spectrum. As the moon rises in the sky, it loses its reddish tinge. The oldest usage of the term Blood Moon is in reference to the Hunter’s Moon, which usually appears low in the sky in October. The Hunter’s moon comes right after the Harvest Moon and is the closest full moon to the fall equinox.

People are also calling the eclipsed moon on September 28 a Blood Moon. The light illuminating an eclipsed moon comes from thousands of sunsets and sunrises around the Earth. If the sky is clear for the sunsets and sunrises, the eclipsed moon will be reddish. If it is cloudy, the eclipsed moon will be dark. There is no way of predicting this in advance. So we might or might not have a Blood Moon.

There are three verses in the Bible that refer to Blood Moons.
Joel 2:31 “The sun will be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.”
Acts 2:20 “The sun will be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and glorious day of the Lord comes.”
Revelations  6:12 “And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.”

These verses form the basis of modern apocalyptic prophesies. A book on this topic, Four Blood Moons: Something Is About to Change (2013) by John Hagee spent several weeks on the New York Times best seller list. (There is a preview on books.google.com.) If you search for “Blood Moon” and “prophecy,” you will find several Christian sites that explain their beliefs.

The occurrence of the eclipse on the first day of the Jewish festival of Sukkoth lends additional weight to the significance of this Blood Moon. Sukkoth commemorates the end of the forty years of the wandering of the Jews in the desert after fleeing Egypt. The other three eclipses in the tretrad also fell on Jewish holidays: April 15, 2014 – Passover; October 8, 2014 – Sukkoth and April 4, 2015 – Passover.

The eclipse can be seen over the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia.  Easy-to-understand maps are at http://www.moongiant.com/Lunar_Eclipse_Calendar.php and http://moonblink.info/Eclipse/eclipse/2015_09_28 Information on when and where the eclipse will be visible is at  http://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/lunar/2015-september-28

So how are Satanists going to mark this event? I have no idea, except it won’t be pretty. I do know that on the West Coast, totality occurs about 7:30 at night, which is an awkward time to hold a ritual. I’m sure they will figure out how to cope with that.