The Long View

Lunar Hydrosphere; Easter; Elijah Meets Frodo

So the Moon has a dynamic hydrosphere, does it? As I understand the current model, water is being continually generated by the interaction of the solar wind with the surface, and then migrating to remarkably pure ice reservoirs in craters at the poles.

Less interesting, but still important, is the fact that the samples taken during the Apollo landings apparently contained evidence along these lines, but NASA was true to form:

Ambiguity plagued other hints of water. Researchers argued that brown rust stains on an Apollo 16 rock could have formed if the rock contained a mineral called lawrencite and was exposed even briefly to terrestrial water vapour. And reports of what appeared to be a water-bearing mineral called amphibole in several lunar samples simply "never caught on", says Apollo scientist Larry Taylor of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville...Despite the uncertainties, these hints may have been dismissed too quickly due to "group think", says Apollo veteran David McKay of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. "These [reports] were discounted very early because most lunar rocks showed no sign of water," he says. "It was almost taboo," adds Roger Clark of the US Geological Survey. "It really showed a bias in the science community."

There is some reason to suppose that something similar happened in connection with the biology experiments on the Viking probes on Mars, but that is more problematic.

There is a pattern here, I am afraid.

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Anyone in or around the New York City area during Holy Week might want to consider the Latin services at Holy Rosary Church here in Downtown Jersey City. Here is a further display of my deeply hidden graphic talent:

I was taxed with Low Church evangelical leanings because of that poster, which wholly lacks cherubs, Roman soldiers, or anachronistic Baroque architecture.

Why did Michelangelo run screaming from the Sistine Chapel?

The cardinals told him they decided to go with the wall paper instead.

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Speaking of religious controversy, David Goldman at First Things has some interesting thoughts on Christianity and Myth: Why There’s No Jewish “Narnia”.

The author plainly admires Tolkien's work more than C.S. Lewis's. In any case, both used the themes they did because Christendom has kept a connection with its pre-Christian past that has no Jewish analogue. The Lord of the Rings in particular is designed to redeem that past. In contrast, we are given to understand, the issue does not come up in Judaism:

A few of the ancient Canaanite and Babylonian myths do peek through Jewish Scripture, such as the Leviathan mentioned by Weingrad. But Judaism has no need of myth; on the contrary, it is hostile to it. There are of course mythological elements attached to the first chapters of Genesis, but Genesis mainly is a family history. The miracles of Exodus have a mythological quality, but it is not a necessary one: what occurred, Jews believe, was miracle, not myth.

Most remarkable in Jewish scripture is that the entire account of the House of David and the subsequent exile and redemption of Israel over the first six hundred years of the first millennium B.C.E. contains very few supernatural elements at all: the lightning igniting Elijah’s sacrifice and his assumption into heaven, Elisha's reviving of the Shunnamite woman’s son, Saul’s interrogation of ghost of Samuel, for example. Compare this to the contemporary of the authors of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, e.g. Homer, who lived in a god-infested world.

Maybe, but at the risk of waxing anthropological, let me note that we should not conflate "supernatural" with "mythical." In the most narrow sense, a myth is a story that explains a ceremony. The making of unleavened bread before the flight from Egypt would be mythical in this sense, since it informs a liturgy, but Saul's consultation with the Witch of Endor would not be, since it is something that is actually forbidden. But regarding the deployment of supernatural themes for the purposes of edification, surely the books of Jonah and Tobit would qualify?

Getting back to Tolkien as an evangelist, though, plainly Goldman is on to something. As I suspect I may have mentioned before in this space, Gandalf is more like Elisha and Elijah than like Merlin.