🌙 Module 14 — Supermoons, Blue Moons, and Black Moons | The Moon Course
- 8 hours ago
- 7 min read
Free Course by Everything IFS Academy | Divination Series
Help us reach the people who may need this most by sharing this free course with friends, family, colleagues, online communities, social media or on your own website.
🎧 Audio is read by AI
Module 14 — Supermoons, Blue Moons, and Black Moons
A few times a year, the moon makes the news. A headline announces a supermoon, a blue moon, a rare black moon, social feeds fill with horizon photographs, and for one evening the whole world is briefly a moon-watcher. What almost nobody in that crowd suspects is how young and how strange these famous names are. The named full moons of the almanac carry centuries of farming and folklore; the headline moons of this lesson carry a 1979 astrology column, a magazine typo that conquered the world, and one name so new it barely has folklore at all. This lesson teaches the four rarities honestly, beginning with the one piece of celestial machinery this course has not yet needed: the fact that the moon's circle around the earth is not actually a circle.
The Supermoon
The moon's orbit is an ellipse, a slightly stretched circle, which means its distance from earth changes continuously through every month. The near point of the orbit is called perigee, the far point apogee, and the difference between them is substantial: at perigee the moon rides roughly fourteen percent wider and up to thirty percent brighter than at apogee. A supermoon is simply a full moon, or a new moon, occurring at or very near perigee: the moon at its closest, caught at its most photogenic phase. Astronomy's own name for the event is the magnificent mouthful perigee syzygy, a syzygy being any straight-line alignment of sun, earth, and moon, and the fact that nobody outside an observatory has ever used that phrase explains everything about why the other name won.
Because the other name was coined for headlines, and not by an astronomer. The word supermoon was invented in 1979 by the astrologer Richard Nolle, writing in an astrology magazine, who defined it as a full or new moon within ninety percent of its closest approach. The term sat quietly in astrological circles for three decades, leapt to global fame when the media adopted it around 2011, and has since completed one of the great vocabulary heists of modern times: a word minted by an astrologer now appears, slightly sheepishly, in official astronomy press releases, because the public simply refused to stop using it. Two honest notes keep this entry true. First, the size difference is real but subtle to the unaided eye; a supermoon is measurably grander, and almost no one could pick it out of a lineup. Second, the giant moon people photograph looming over rooftops is mostly a different phenomenon entirely, the moon illusion, a trick of human perception that inflates any moon near the horizon and has never been fully explained. The supermoon's most measurable effect is on the actual ocean, where perigee full moons raise the year's highest tides. The modern lunar tradition reads the event exactly as that fact suggests: an amplified lunation, the full moon's culmination or the new moon's seed-moment, taught in their owning lessons, turned up in volume, bigger tides above, the lore says, and bigger tides within.
The Micromoon
The supermoon's quiet twin lives at the other end of the ellipse. A micromoon is a full moon at or near apogee, the orbit's far point: the smallest, dimmest full moon the cycle can produce, also called a minimoon or an apogee moon. It has no ancient pedigree whatsoever; the name is a recent coinage built by simple analogy once supermoon caught on, and unlike its twin it generates no headlines, because there is no story in a slightly modest moon. Most people have watched dozens of micromoons without the faintest idea.
The modern tradition, where it reads the micromoon at all, reads it softly, and the reading follows the sky with the same logic every entry in this course has used. The far moon is the gentle version of the near one: a culmination at lower volume, distance where the supermoon brought intensity, and the lore that has begun to gather around it speaks of subtlety, perspective, and the quieter kind of completion, the month's harvest brought in without fireworks. There is something fitting, readers of the tradition note, in the fact that the cycle's most overlooked full moon carries the themes of what gets overlooked: not everything that completes announces itself, and the moon spends half of every orbit demonstrating exactly that.
The Blue Moon
Everyone alive knows the phrase. Once in a blue moon has meant rarely for centuries, descending from an old English expression in which a blue moon stood for the absurd or the never, and gradually softening into the seldom. But ask what a blue moon actually is, and the answer turns out to be the best detective story in the entire lunar vocabulary, because the definition nearly everyone knows is a mistake, and the mistake has been traced.
The older, almanac definition. The Maine Farmers' Almanac, carrying the seasonal logic of the named-moon calendar, defined a blue moon by the seasons: ordinarily each season between solstice and equinox holds three full moons, but every so often it holds four, and when it does, the third of the four was called the blue moon, a placeholder that kept the season's proper moon names falling where they belonged.
The modern, accidental definition. In 1946, an amateur astronomer named James Hugh Pruett, writing in Sky & Telescope magazine, misread that almanac rule and stated it as something simpler: the second full moon in a single calendar month. The error was clean, memorable, and wrong, and it spread for decades through radio programs and trivia games until it became the world's working definition. Sky & Telescope itself ran the investigation in 1999 that traced the whole chain and owned the mistake in print, by which point it was far too late: the typo had won.
Both definitions are now legitimate currency, distinguished as the seasonal blue moon and the calendar blue moon, and either kind arrives roughly every two and a half years, which is honestly rare without being mythic. The drift behind it is an old friend: the lunar cycle lesson taught that 29.5-day months refuse to fit the calendar, and the blue moon is simply the place where the misfit becomes visible, the thirteenth moon squeezing into a twelve-name year. Two footnotes complete the entry. The moon can, very rarely, turn literally blue, when volcanic ash or wildfire smoke of exactly the right particle size filters its light; after Krakatoa erupted in 1883, the moon shone genuinely blue for many months. And the modern tradition, handed an extra full moon with no name and no season, has settled on reading it as the second look: a bonus culmination, the month's themes granted an encore, a chance, in the lore's framing, to complete what the first full moon only revealed.
The Black Moon
The last of the headline moons is the youngest name in this entire course, and the only famous moon that is, by definition, impossible to see. The black moon is the blue moon's dark mirror, and its most common definition follows the same calendar logic: a second new moon in a single calendar month. Rarer usages float alongside it, a calendar month containing no new moon at all, which only February can manage, and a seasonal version mirroring the almanac's rule, and the honest report is that the term is not yet fully settled; it is internet-age folklore, surfacing in the late twentieth century and popularized in the last two decades, with no almanac pedigree, no Algonquin sources, no Babylonian tablets, nothing but the modern moon world's evident hunger to name things.
Which makes what has gathered around it instructive, because folklore is forming in real time. The reading comes almost entirely from the magical stream, and it is built by doubling: the dark moon, taught in full in the waning lesson as the cycle's true void, with its associations of deep rest, endings work, and inward sight, is held to arrive at double strength when the calendar delivers the dark twice in one month. Practitioners in the Wiccan and witchcraft traditions describe black moon workings as unusually potent, the deepest dark of an already deep door, while plenty of astrologers shrug and note that the moon itself neither knows nor cares what month the calendar says it is, a disagreement worth keeping, since it is the same argument the blue moon's two definitions have been having for eighty years. There is a fine irony in the headline moon nobody can photograph, and a fitting close to this lesson's inventory: the supermoon is barely visible as special, the micromoon is invisible as special, the blue moon is not blue, and the black moon is not there at all. The rare moons, taught honestly, are four lessons in how much of what the sky means is decided on the ground. Whether the moon does anything to the ground, and to the people standing on it, is the next lesson's entire business, and it is the question this whole course has been saving.
Disclaimer:
Everything IFS Academy is an independent educational platform and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the IFS Institute. While we strive for accuracy, errors can occur, and users are encouraged to cross-reference critical information. These courses present divination systems and their traditions for educational, historical, cultural, and self-reflection purposes only. They describe what these systems and their traditions teach and how their readers have traditionally interpreted them; they do not constitute fortune-telling services, predictions, religious instruction, spiritual direction, or an endorsement of any metaphysical claim, and they should never be used as a basis for medical, financial, legal, or safety decisions. They do not constitute therapy, mental health treatment, clinical training, or crisis support, and they should not be used as a substitute for professional mental health care.
Crisis Support: 🚨
If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, feel unsafe, feel at risk of harming yourself or someone else, or feel too overwhelmed to safely use self-directed practices, please pause this material and reach out for immediate support. Contact a licensed mental health professional, call or text 988 in the U.S. or Canada, or use your local emergency or crisis resources.
Comments