Every month, the full moon brings with it a host of articles excitedly explaining the purported name of the moon. You’ve probably seen them – “strawberry moon” or “worm moon” proliferate across news outlets (including inews) and social media for a few days a month, but the true origins of the names are opaque, and reasons they’ve infiltrated pop culture are surprising.
Sometimes, those names are given extra credibility by being blended together with astronomical phenomena as well, peaking with one in January last year – “Super blood wolf moon“, a name so evocative it eventually even became the title of a Pearl Jam song. The “super blood wolf moon” was a combination of a lunar eclipse giving the moon a red hue (“blood moon”) and the period when the moon comes closest to earth during its elliptical orbit and appears larger (supermoon) – and the fact that it was January (“wolf moon”).
But why has it been determined that January is a “wolf moon”, and July is a “buck moon” – and why are these names so important that they’ve become widely understood terminology among readers and publishers including the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and the Times?
The modern rebirth of a traditional name
Google search trends suggests that before 2014, phrases describing specific full moons were mostly obscure, with tiny spikes of interest totally unlinked to the ‘correct’ month. “Wolf moon” appeared intermittently due to the famous “Three Wolf Moon” t-shirt, and “Strawberry moon” due to the 1951 Anita O’Day song. At this point many of these names were known, but not popular – a minor 2005 blog from Space.com lists most of the names of the ones that have subsequently become popular, for example, and the New York Times occasionally published quirky pieces that referenced them.
But by January 2015, articles were more commonly being published about the “wolf moon.” They only started appearing in volume after the spectacular April 2014 lunar eclipse, which was poetically named a ‘Blood moon.’
The name caught on. “People understandably remember the most romantic sounding names.” said Robert Massey from the Royal Astronomical Society.
While the Blood Moon describes a real phenomenon, the phrase itself took off in 2014 for religious reasons – the Blood Moon Prophecy. The striking term came from series of prophecies in the Bible promoted by two Christian preachers, John Hagee and Mark Biltz. Their belief was that the end of the world was being signalled by four lunar eclipses – beginning in April 2014. A book about it, Four Blood Moons, reached Amazon’s top 150 in the same month, and mainstream outlets including The Washington Post reported on the existence of the prophecy, drawing the name to a wider audience.
Mr Massey said that before this time the term had rarely come up with experts, and while he doesn’t take any issue with it points out how language around the moon can change.
By January 2015, outlets had began to run images of the full moon, which they had done previously, but now they also seemed to start hunting for the most romantic names they could find, likely because readers understandably seemed to prefer them. From this point on, familiarity with the names grew, embedding them in culture. Now, as each full moon approaches, there’s a glut of cyclical reader interest and articles about the name of the moon.
But it’s still not clear why these are the romantic names that have stuck – and even if they’re based on actual cultural history.
Questionable provenance
The names, like wolf, strawberry and worm are generally said to have been used by Native American tribes. But there is no standardised Native American calendar, explained Laura Redish, director and cofounder of Native Languages of the Americas.
Some outlets cite NASA, who say the names derive from the Algonquin tribe. The Algonquin people lived in the Ottawa Valley, Canada, for at least 8,000 years before the Europeans arrived in North America. They form part of a larger cultural linguistic group called Algonquian, which includes many tribes and dialects, and they continue to live on the Ottawa River and its tributaries. Giving each full moon a distinctive name was a key way of keeping track of the seasons, essentially breaking the year down into months.
Terms like “Worm moon” for example, were reportedly used to describe the period of year this moon would occur in, in which the soil would begin to thaw and earthworm casts would be visible on the ground again, signalling the beginning of spring.
“These named moons are a cultural invention – each full moon of each month has a special name that refers to the time of year- for example ‘Strawberry moon’ in June is when strawberries are picked. It doesn’t have any scientific significance beyond that,” explained Sara Russell, a Researcher at the Natural History Museum.
Some of the popularly used names do seem to be Algonquin, according to a list published by Algonquin Nation Tribal Council in 2005. Others aren’t. The organisation said that the tribe’s names for the months were:
- Long moon month (January)
- Groundhog month (February)
- Goose month (March)
- Breaking up of the ice month (April)
- Flower month (May)
- Strawberry month (June)
- Raspberry month (July
- Blueberry month (August)
- Hulling corn/harvest month (September)
- Trout month (October)
- Whitefish month (November)
- Beginning of winter month (December)
As we can see, strawberry moon and harvest moon are the same terms popularly used for those months by digital publishers now. The harvest moon obviously resonated in the northern hemisphere as September is harvest time, and thus remained a term used in modern western culture, Mr Massey pointed out.
In contrast, labelling December as the beginning of winter doesn’t fit into a contemporary understanding of the seasons, which is why it wasn’t absorbed. Names such as “worm moon” are also notably absent from the Algonquin list.
According to James Morrison, a scholar in Canada, in 1913 the anthropologist Frank Speck, obtained a similar form of the calendar on the Timiskaming Reserve. But that version differed from versions other tribes gave him. February was ‘little cub month’, rather than ‘groundhog month’, for example.
So as Laura Redish explained, different tribes used different calendars, and a range of calendars seem to have been swiped for the popularly used names. The canonical list appears to stem primarily from a list first published by the Old Farmer’s Almanac in the 1930’s. It doesn’t attribute its list to any specific tribe, saying only that it is compiled from “Native American tribes, Colonial Americans, or other traditional North American names passed down through generations”. They are:
- Full Wolf Moon (January)
- Full Snow Moon (February)
- Full Worm Moon (March)
- Full Pink Moon (April)
- Full Flower Moon (May)
- Full Strawberry Moon (June)
- Full Buck Moon (July)
- Full Sturgeon Moon (August)
- Full Corn Moon/Harvest Moon (September)
- Full Hunter’s Moon (October)
- Full Beaver Moon (November)
- Full Cold Moon (December)
This now mostly canonical list, it seems, was borrowed from a range of sources, and could even have been partially fabricated, giving American farmers of the early 20th century a whimsical way to think about the seasons. It lingered in cultural memory, popping up online occasionally until digital publishers noticed that the idea of the “Blood Moon”, based on an apocalyptic Christian conspiracy, resonated with readers. Hunting for similarly evocative images, this list was stumbled on, and used to create a monthly event that now spawns popular interest – and traffic for publishers.
