THE MAN IN THE MOON.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19261, 27 August 1924, Page 8

THE MAN IN THE MOON.

CARRYING STICKS FOR PUNISHMENT. We all feel very wise nowadays about the moon, and smile indulgently as we relate ta.cs ol its lonely old male inhabitant to the young. Our wisdom, based as it is upon ail these maps and photographs and scientific theories, is, However, of very recent origin, points out John o’ London's Weekly. The moon for generations was the greatest mystery oi mankind—greater even than the sun. When Galileo in 1609 first turned his telescope upon the moon he created throughout Europe a much greater sensation that did Columbus when he discovered America. Till then the scientific men had believed in Aristotle’s theory that the moon is a perfectly smooth and liiiind body, its markings being the continents of the world reflected as in a minor. Everyone else explained away the mysterious marks with myths. There is nothing more remarkable in history than the atram'c resemblances which exist between the explanations given by different races. Almost all of them interpreted tiie marks as being a man carrying a bundle of wood. Furthermore, they all seemed to regard him as one who, on account of a "crime, was condemned to eternal isolation on’the moon. He was, indeed, a horrible example to young and old alike. Ip European countries the story generally had a so-called Biblical significance m England it was Moses who found a man gathering sticks on a Sabbath, and ex pelleci him to the moon. The reference seems to bo a passage in the fifteenth chapter of Numbers, but the resemblance is only slight. In France the, man in the moon is none other than Judas Iscariot, and the wood a load which he must always carry as a punishment. The German version dealt with a peasant who was reprimanded by an angel for gathering faggots on a Sunday. He replied, “Sunday on earln, or Monday in Heaven, it is all the same to me.” For this he was sent to an eternal moonday in heaven.