Fire on the Moon

On a summer evening in 1178, monks in Canterbury, England witnessed a remarkable sight.  As they gazed at the moon, fire erupted from the rim sending sparks flying from the slim crescent and turning the lunar surface black.  For centuries this mystery remained just that, until in 1976 a planetary astronomer proposed the radical theory that what the monks saw was an asteroid striking the moon and he had the proof to back up his claim.  We will be taking a closer look at this incredible sighting,  studying all the available evidence and try to figure the origins of the Fire on the Moon.

Transcript

FIRE ON THE MOON

Narrated by Jay Nix

Welcome back to Beyond the Fringe, the weekly paranormal podcast exploring some of the world’s greatest, strangest, and most baffling mysteries and then trying to make some sense of it all.

On this episode of BTF we’ll be taking look at a celestial event that was observed in the twilight skies over England in the year 1178.  

It was on a warm summer evening of that year that a group of monks in Canterbury, England witnessed an event that would go down in history as one of the most amazing astronomical sightings ever recorded.  As the abbots gazed at the crescent moon hanging low in the western sky, fire erupted from the lunar edge.   The slim horns of the crescent wavered in the sky before splitting in two and remained that way for several minutes before finally returning to normal.  

Though chronicled in the official history of Canterbury by the friar Gervase, the tale became largely forgotten and remained buried in the dusty tomes of the abbey for almost 800 years.  That is until the 1950’s when the first unmanned spacecraft began to circle the moon and photograph the lunar surface from orbit.  The photographs, though primitive and of low resolution, offered planetary astronomers their first glimpse of the moon’s far side and the mysterious features hidden from view of ground-based telescopes.  One such image proved to be of particular interest.  It showed an enormous crater with white rays projecting in all directions from its center and was located just beyond the visible edge on the moon’s dark side.  It was dubbed Giordano Bruno after a 16th century Italian friar and early proponent of modern-day cosmology.   The crater measured an astonishing 14 miles across and with its extensive ray patterns and high reflectivity, soon captured the imagination of the scientific community.  Planetary astronomers postulated that this brightness was due to the crater’s youthful age, young enough perhaps to have been formed within human memory.

That’s when, in 1976, a planetary geologist revisited the fantastic tale recorded by Gervase and put forward that what the monks had actually seen that June evening was an asteroid striking the surface of the moon, leaving behind a trail of debris hundreds of miles long and a hole the size of a large city.

At the time of our country’s bicentennial, I was a 13-year-old amateur astronomer and remember when this theory connecting the monks sighting to the crater was first proposed.  This seemed perfectly plausible as the details of the monks’ sighting dovetailed nicely with the known facts – eyewitness testimony that described an event occurring on the edge of a new moon, which coincidentally happened to be in roughly the same area on the lunar surface as the crater was later found to be.  It made perfect sense.  And for decades, I took this anecdotal explanation of the crater’s formation as gospel and was quick to repeat the account to anyone who would listen whenever I caught sight of a crescent moon.  But as the years passed and my passion for astronomy faded into a passing interest, I all but forgot about the amazing crater and the incredible tale of its formation.

Then just recently as my wife and I were driving home just after sunset, we spotted a slender new moon low in the western sky, much like the one those English friars saw the night of the event.  Once again, I related the tale of the fire on the moon, the asteroid strike, the spectacular crater and how the friars had happened to be in just the right place at just the right time.  It then occurred to me that this astronomical anecdote would be the perfect subject for an episode on the podcast – a true life mystery come to life.  So, I began to do some re-research the subject.  Now in the years since I first heard this story – and as one might expect -- great technological strides have been made in every scientific discipline including astronomy and geology.  

For instance, those clunky, Cold-war era artificial satellites we first sent to photograph the moon have been replaced by spacecraft so precisely maneuverable and optically advanced that their cameras can pick out the logo on a basketball from a distance of almost 60 miles.  Geologists and astronomers now have a wealth of photographic and radar-generated mapping information about our moon that has enabled them to study our closest neighbor in great detail.  By examining this data and employing time-honored and proven statistical models relating to the formation of the solar system and the moon in particular, scientists have been able to date the moon and its individual features with stunning accuracy.

Naturally one feature of particular interest to lunar geologists was the age of the brightest of all impact craters, Giordano Bruno.  And when these arithmetical models were used to find the age of this shiny far side crater, it was determined that it is indeed young – in geological terms.  Considering that the moon on whole is more than 4 and ½ billion years old, this crater is just a tike.  But this youngster still clocks in at between 1 and 10 million years old, certainly far older than a resulting lunar scar from an event witnessed in 1178.  Seems that this true story that I had been repeating as fact all these years was not true at all.  But if that’s truly the case, and it wasn’t an asteroid impact forming a crater on the surface of the moon that night, then what was it that the Canterbury monks saw?  

I think the best way to understand this whole saga and to see how the original sighting corresponds to current scientific wisdom is to start with the genesis of the story itself.  Then we’ll look at what is presently known about the moon with respect to the story and how scientists go about arriving at the currently accepted age lunar features and in particular impact craters.  Finally, we’ll try to and see if there is any way to reconcile the disparities in what was seen and what we now know.  So, let’s get started.  We’re going take a trip back in time to the English countryside in the early evening hours of June 18th, 1178.

Our story begins in the town of Canterbury in Kent at the Christ Church Cathedral.  This imposing structure was built on the grounds of an old Benedictine monastery and completed in 1077.  The cathedral is famous, or rather infamous, as the place where Thomas Beckett, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in 1170.  In fact, it was Beckett’s martyrdom that set the stage for the pilgrims’ stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer what would eventually become The Canterbury Tales.  Getting back on track, in the later part of the 12th century, the chronicler of life at the abbey and those who passed their days there was fellow by the name of Gervase.  It was in the chronicles of Gervase that historians discovered the passage on which the crux of this story is based.  While Gervase himself does not claim to have been present at the event, he dutifully records the account as related to him by five monks of the order who witnessed the spectacular sight themselves.  Here is the English translation of the original Latin text concerning this event.

"The upper horn [of the moon] split in two.  From the midpoint of the division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the Moon, which was below, writhed as if it were in anxiety, and to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the Moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed its proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then, after these transformations, the Moon from horn to horn, that is along its whole length, took on a blackish appearance".

This detailed statement was included in the official records of the church, so was viewed with some importance rather just as a whimsical tale.  Additionally, the witnesses stated that they were “prepared to stake their honor on an oath that they have made no addition or falsification in the […] narrative.”

The “Fire on the Moon” would live on in the chronicles and local and monastic legend for centuries, but as one would expect the story became less and less frequently told until eventually it would fade into obscurity.  

But here it is.  Five monks, reporting a first-hand sighting of a celestial event to one of their superiors, who then dutifully recorded the event in the official chronicles of the church.  None of the friars nor Gervase himself seem to have put forward any explanation for what had been seen.  There is no expounding on the subject or discussion about the event in later additions to the chronicle.  This entry seems to have been a one-and-done recording of the episode.  And that seemed to have been the end of it as far as Gervase and the church were concerned.

The first issue we’re confronted with in respect to the story is the obvious time lapse between when the event was witnessed and recorded and when the first attempts to explain it were made.  What took so long?  And keep in mind that the monks of Canterbury were not the only people on the planet that could have seen the moon that night.  

The study of the skies is as old as man himself and has been practiced by every society, both primitive and advanced, the world over and throughout history.  Yet none of them recorded any difference in the appearance of the moon after the purported fiery event.  If fact, no one else anywhere in the world reported seeing this event at all.  Certainly, weather in other parts of the world could have prevented many from viewing the moon, the time of day, terrain, the failure to record that event of loss of records written down almost 1,000 years ago could all explain why the Canterbury account is the only surviving record we have of this incident.  But taking for granted that the event occurred as chronicled by Gervase, there must be some corroborating evidence to support the sighting, right?  Surely an event as dramatic as the fire and sparks that the monks saw would have left some trace on the lunar surface that observers on Earth would have been able to see.  Wouldn’t you think?  Certainly, we can see craters on the moon, some even with the naked eye.  So why was there no change in the moon’s appearance reported after the event reported by the monks?

Let’s put a pin in that for a sec and jump forward four hundred years, when Dutch lens crafters Lippershey, Janssen and Metius began constructing the first telescopes in the Netherlands in 1608.  Almost immediately, people began turning these scopes to the heavens and in particular toward the moon.  With this newfound ability to view the moon up close, one would think that someone would have noticed a newly formed crater or scar, or a big chunk gouged out of the lunar face in the area noted by the monks.  Yet no one did.  So why did no one see it?

A little side lesson on the orbital behavior of the moon will help clear this up.  No doubt you are familiar with the phrase “dark side of the moon”.  Well Pink Floyd references aside, this term refers to the visible surface of the moon facing away from Earth, and therefore not discernable to observers on earth.  Okay, but wouldn’t this far side eventually become the near side as the moon continues to spin on its axis?  Short answer: no.  

This is because the near side of the moon, the face that if you look at the moon right now, is the face you always see.  It never changes.  Every time you look at the moon, no matter where you are or when you look at it, it is exactly the same side of the moon that you are seeing.  The reason for this is that the moon revolves around the earth in what is known as a geosynchronous orbit.  That is that the rotational period, or the time it takes to spin once on its axis, is exactly the same as its revolutionary period which is the time it takes to complete one orbit around the earth.  In simpler terms, the lunar day is equal to a lunar year.  In the case of earth, its rotational period is 24 hours.  One day.  Its revolutionary period is 365 days (and change), or one year.  Now if earth’s rotational period were the same as its revolutionary period, the sky would never change.  On the near side, the sun would always be in the same spot in the sky, never rising or setting.  On the far side, it would be perpetual night, with the sun never rising or setting.  So, with respect to the moon: in that it spins on its axis once every 28 days, and revolves around the earth once every 28 days, it presents the same visible face toward earth at all times.  Thus, the far side of the moon is always the far side of the moon.  You can never see this side of the moon from earth.  

So, it would have made no difference with how large a telescope scientists were using to study the lunar surface, if the event the monks of Canterbury witnessed happened just beyond the visible edge on the far side of the moon, it would not be visible from Earth.  Not then, not now, not ever.  Now there is a little wiggle room here in that the moon goes through what is known as libration, or a wobble as it were.  As it proceeds around the earth in the course of its orbit, sometimes the viewers’ perspective shifts a bit and areas just along the edge of the far side inch into view.  Not by much, and certainly not enough by which observers on Earth could study or more to the point even see with clarity these features.  But it is interesting to note that one of the features that does pop up from time to time over the rim of the far side with respect to earth during libration is this relatively new impact crater named Giordano Bruno.

But getting back to the pin we put in the story a while back.  So, if we take it that the event witnessed by the Catholic friars happened at a point on the moon just out of visible range on the far side, how and when did we become aware of its existence of this crater that may hold the key to the monk’s report of fire on the moon?

On October 4, 1957, Soviet scientists launched history’s first artificial satellite into orbit.  23 inches in diameter and sporting four long thin radio antenna, Sputnik was man’s first foray into interplanetary travel and effectively set off the space race between Russia and the United States.  Other vehicles by both nations soon followed.   Then exactly 2 years after Sputnik took flight, the Soviet probe Luna 3 was launched.  Its mission was to fly around the moon, photograph the never-before-seen dark side, turn back towards earth and transmit the photos.  The vehicle experienced some difficulties early on, but did manage to capture 29 photos on 7 October from a distance of about 40,000 miles.  Due to the low signal strength of the satellite’s transmissions, only 17 (and some say as few as 12) of the images were eventually sent back and received by image analysts on Earth.  Though grainy and of poor quality, these photos represented the first time man had been able to see the far side of the moon.  And in one of those images, Soviet scientists spotted a large crater with bright white rays fanning out in all directions from its center.  As I’m sure you can guess, this bright impact zone with its expansive ray system was the crater Giordano Bruno.

Although the name of the person who picked Bruno as the crater’s namesake is unknown, the reasoning behind this choice is an interesting one and something we’ll talk about later.  Subsequent artificial satellites became more advanced and their optical capabilities more sophisticated, and this ledd to sharper and more details photos of the lunar far side and further study of Giordano Bruno became possible.  The crater’s brightness when compared to its surroundings was striking and the extensive rays of ejecta – material thrown off as a result of an impact – stretched much farther than had been previously estimated.  The crisp, un-eroded rim of the crater itself appeared remarkably sharp and well-defined.   Added together, this evidence pointed to an impact scar on the lunar surface far younger than any other yet seen.  In fact, some argued that the depression had been formed in the very recent past, perhaps within recent memory.

Seizing on this new-found information, planetary geologist Dr. Jack Hartung proposed an intriguing correlation between the formation of Giordano Bruno and the cosmic event witnessed by the monks of Canterbury in 1178.  Published in 1976, Hartung’s theory was that the fire on the moon was the result of a massive meter or asteroid slamming into the lunar surface at hypersonic speed which led to the formation of the Giordano Bruno crater.  Such a catastrophic collision of celestial bodies would have created massive amounts of energy, enough to melt and even vaporize the rock and metals that comprised the lunar soil and hurtle millions of tons of ejecta out and away from the site of the impact.  Much of the material would have fallen back to the lunar surface to form the rays of ejecta seen in the photos, while millions more tons of dust and rock would been flung high enough enter a low lunar orbit and thus naturally obscure the reflected sunlight bouncing off the surface.  This would have caused the crescent to appear black when seen by an observer on Earth.  

And in that Giordano Bruno is located at 35.9 degrees N, 102.8 degrees E, this puts it in almost the exact location associated with the monks account of sparks spewing from the edge of the disc.  Thus, if Hartung was right, it seemed that the story was no longer legend and that the monks of Canterbury had seen something no other human being had seen before or has seen since.

The attribution of this medieval mystery to an asteroid strike was a hit with the media -- (Yes, pun intended) – and caused a sensation within the scientific community.  Almost immediately astronomers and planetary scientists alike began issuing responses that came down on both sides of the fence: those who supported Hartung’s theory and those who derided it.  

Perhaps the first to publish a counterproposal were H. H. Nininger and Glenn Huss at the American Meteorite Lab who in 1997 argued for an explanation a little closer to home as it were; and we’ll talk about this in a bit.  However, in February 1978, astronomers O. Calame and J.D. Mulholland published an article in Science magazine citing their own study of lunar impact oscillations, or “wobbling” as it were, using laser range finders which seemed to lend credence to the Hartung hypothesis.  

Yet as scientifically promising and romantically appealing as the Canterbury sighting theory appeared, the crux of the argument would soon begin to sag under the weight of scientific reality.   And the more precise and advanced the study in lunar topography became, the less likely that the British friars had witnessed the formation of the crater.  So let’s examine how what the monks claimed to have seen could not possibly have been the asteroid impact that resulted in the Giordano Bruno crater.

Like I mentioned earlier, fantastic strides in the technology used in space exploration has been advancing exponentially since its inception.  From the failed launch of Pioneer Zero in August 1958 to the Chinese Chang’e 5 lander which landed on the moon and then returned to earth with rock samples in 2020, there have been over 90 manned and un-manned missions to the moon.  However, with respect to our discussion on dating the lunar surface features, we’ll focus mainly on the 2008 Japanese mission to map the lunar surface utilizing the photographic probe knows as the Selenological and Engineering Explorer or SELENE for short.  

The Japanese nickname for the probe was Kaguya which translates into “radiant night”, and it was launched from the Tanegashima Space center in September 2007.  The images that SELENE returned were unprecedented.  The spatial resolution of the cameras on the probe was 10 meters per pixel, more than 10 times the resolution of any previous photographic survey of the area surrounding the crater Giordano Bruno.  Using these newly acquired images from Kaguya, a joint team of scientists from JAXA (the Japanese Aerospace Exploration agency, basically their version of NASA) were able to examine in great detail the ejecta blanket radiating out from Giordano Bruno.   

This was important in that it allowed these scientists to better distinguish between the Primary and Secondary impact craters within the crater’s ray system.  Why this is crucial in determining the age of a crater is that by counting the number of smaller primary impact holes within a craters ejecta blanket and comparing this number to known statistical models, it is therefore possible to estimate the age of a crater with a great deal of accuracy.  Studies have shown that meteoroid impacts on the moon happen at a fairly regular and predictable interval, and extrapolating a timeline using this interval as a baseline shows how many primary craters one should expect to see in any given area over a given time.  

But for the count to as accurate as possible, the craters caused by secondary impacts must be effectively eliminated from the equation.  

Secondary impact craters were formed just after the formation of the main crater itself, in this case Giordano Bruno.  Millions of tons of rock were blasted away from the surface of the moon when the asteroid that formed Bruno collided with the lunar surface.  And while much of this debris would escape into lunar and even into earth’s orbit, a large percentage of these rocky fragments, some hundreds of meters across, would eventually fall back onto the moon and thus crate small impact craters of their own.  The high-res images returned by SELENE allowed scientists to make these distinctions between primary and secondary impacts with a confidence never before possible.  

As a result of the study of the ejecta field based off these new photos, JAXA scientists concluded that the asteroid impact that created Giordano Bruno occurred from between 1 and 10 million years ago, with a commonly accepted average of roughly 4 million years.  

That would make crater Giordano Bruno far too old to have be the result of the event the monks witnessed in 1178.  It’s not even close.  Had that been the case, one would have expected to see few if any primary impact craters in the ejecta rays.  But as is clearly seen in the photos, there are a great number of them.  This fact alone points to Bruno being much older than 1,000 years.

But there are other facts that effectively eliminate the creation of Giordano Bruno as the event reported in 1178.  And these are much less technical and are much easier to understand.  

First of all, the only first-hand account of the event in question comes from the chronicles of Gervase and is dated June 18, 1178.  Even an initial glance of the story tells us that this was a catastrophic event on an unimaginable scale.  Such a cataclysmic occurrence affecting the moon would have been visible from anywhere on earth where the moon was visible in the night sky at that time.  And certainly, anyone witnessing such an event would have preserved the sighting for posterity just as Gervase had done.  Right?  Well, they didn’t.  In fact, in the record of human history at that time, the monks are the only people on the planet who reported seeing the fire on the moon.  I can’t imagine that an affair as earthshattering as these lunar explosions would not have merited even a diary entry by someone, anyone else.  But the fact remains that but for the chronicles of Gervase, there is no written record of this event ever happening.

The second point that casts doubt on the monk-Giordano Bruno connection was put forward in 2001 by astronomer Paul Withers, and this concerns the lack of any abnormal meteor activity reported at the time of what had become known as the “Canterbury Tale”.  Simply put, when large celestial bodies collide, a storm of debris and dust is created as the bodies fragment and shatter in billions of smaller pieces.  When the body that formed Bruno hit the moon, millions of tons of this debris was thrown off as such high speeds as to allow it to escape the moons gravity.  But not Earth’s gravity.  Our gravitational field is 6 times stronger than that of our satellite and the fragments that didn’t fall back to the lunar surface would have been subjected to Earth’s gravitational pull.  

After traveling the 225,000 miles over the next day or so, this debris would have then begun falling toward the surface of the Earth.  Once this debris – and in this case the billions of rock fragments kicked up by the asteroid collision on the moon --, which is traveling upwards of 20 kilometers per second (or 45,000 miles per hour), contacts the atmosphere they immediately begin to heat up as a result of friction with the air in the atmosphere.  99.999 percent of the time, these rocks are small enough to be completely burned up high in the atmosphere before ever reaching the ground.  This is what we are seeing when we spot a meteor or “falling star”.  

Now, imagine the immense cloud containing millions of rocks, relatively tightly grouped together and some the length and width of a basketball court, hitting the earth’s atmosphere in the days just after this huge lunar impact.  It would have seemed that the sky was raining fire.  There would have been upwards of 50,000 meteors streaking across the sky every hour, and this light show would have been visible in the night sky from every spot on Earth.  And this meteor storm would have lasted a week if not more.  Yet there isn’t a single reference to this abnormal meteor activity from anywhere on Earth, including from Canterbury, in the written record.  No scrolls, no books, no tablets, no paintings, no nothing to suggest a massive meteor shower around the time of the monks purported sighting.

So, the monks did not witness the formation of the crater Giordano Bruno.  That much is now clear.  But if they didn’t witness a lunar impact that night, then what did they see?

I mentioned earlier an article by H. H. Nininger and Glenn Huss at the American Meteorite Lab that was offered as a rebuttal to Hartung’s hypothesis concerning the Canterbury monk’s connection with the crater Giordano Bruno.  Nininger and Huss proposed that what the monks had seen that night was a meteor, but not one striking the moon.  Their argument was that the monks had been in just the right place time to see a meteor falling through the Earth’s atmosphere at a visual angle that matched that of their view of the moon.  The meteor was in essence falling straight toward them, thus the lack of a tail.   And that the meteor exploded in the atmosphere at a point between the observers and the moon.  This could explain the “sparks and fire”, and the heat generated could have caused the refraction of light to distort the moon’s appearance, causing it to “waiver” or “writhe like a wounded snake”.  

I myself have actually witnessed a meteor fall similar to the one Nininger and Huss described.   One evening while looking for comets in Cassiopeia, I just happened to be looking up at the right time and saw a bright flash of white light with a reddish rim and I was certain that I had just witnessed what is known as a flare star, basically a solar flare on a distant sun.  I logged the location as accurately as I could on my chart and the next day called the head of the astronomy department as Ole Miss to report my sighting.  Thinking I was going to be credited with a major finding, I had even begun coming up with names of my new discovery.  But my excitement was short lived.  Not to go into detail here, but I was assured that what I saw couldn’t possibly have been a flare star.  A more likely candidate was a meteor on a perpendicular trajectory with earth, that appeared as a burst of light rather than a streaking tail.  A rare event, but an easily explainable one.  And having witnessed this phenomenon for myself, I guess I could see how the monks might have been misled, if in fact what they had seen was a meteor falling in this manner.

This head-on meteor hypothesis might make a compelling argument but for one nagging little detail in the account that almost everyone seems to have overlooked.  And that is that what the monks claimed to have seen that night was not a singular event.  

Remember the translation of the account I shared with you at the beginning of the podcast?  There is one line in this story that is easy to overlook but helps refute most if not all of these later-day theories outright.  When the monks related their report to Gervase, they qualified their account by saying, “This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal”.  Whatever it was that the monks say they saw didn’t happen once, or twice.  It was repeated at least a dozen times.  Even if we were to take the crater-forming strike as a viable theory (which it is not, but just for the sake of argument here), it is a physical and statistical impossibility that a dozen asteroids would line up and strike the same point on the moon 12 times row one after the other.  Almost as improbable would be to suggest that 12 meteors on identical trajectories would enter the atmosphere and travel along the same flight path between the moon and an observer on earth 12 times in succession without variation.  

And lastly and perhaps the most easily verified contradictory evidence to the fire on the moon is that the moon was all but invisible the night of the June 18, 1178 from Canterbury England.  The new moon that month fell on June 17 at around 1 PM local time, just one day before the monks alleged sighting. A new moon is the phase in which the moon is in conjunction with the sun and therefore not visible from earth.  It is effectively drowned out by the sun’s glare.  It is during new moons, allowing for the similar alignment of the orbits of the sun and moon with relation to earth, that we experience solar eclipses when the moon passes directly between the earth and the sun.  So, even allowing 24 hours after the new moon to move away from the suns glare, the lunar disc is still so close to the sun as to be visible only briefly low in the western sky after sunset, barring weather and topographic obstructions.  So while yes it’s possible that the monks could have glimpsed the razor-thin crescent hovering in the suns glare near the western horizon that evening, it seems unlikely that they would have had enough time before the moon set to witness this miraculous 12-fold event in such a limited time frame.  

It’s no longer science that has come to cast doubt on the Canterbury Tale as it were, but the tale itself has become its own worst enemy.  The egregious repeats to the stellar performance have removed what little credibility the tale had to begin with, and now we’re left asking, “If this event didn’t happen, why did the monks make it up”?

I am now of the opinion that the tale of the monks witnessing the fire on the moon was little more that just that: a tale.  But I have also come to believe that it was not the monks who forged the story.  I mean for what possible purpose would members of a religious order, not much concerned with the inner workings of the universe beyond what they knew of from scripture, lie about seeing fire erupt from the crescent moon?  Simply put, they would have no reason to do so.  Which is why I don’t think that they did.  But if the monks didn’t make up the story, then who did?

That distinction falls to none other than the official chronicler of the Canterbury order, Gervase himself.  The keeper of the history of Canterbury was the only person with both the authority and literary ability to enter any writings into the official church records.  And it isn’t as if Gervase was dictating the monks report of the sighting into the chronicles in real time.  His history of Canterbury, including the events of the night of June 18, 1178, were transcribed into the book years later after he had compiled the history from various other sources.  Okay, so if was Gervase who made the whole thing up, then why?

To understand this, we’ll need to take a look at was happening in the world in the time of Gervase.  

It was a time of uneasy truce in this period of the High Middle ages.  The 2nd Crusade to the Holy Land had been launched by Pope Eugene III in 1147 and had been carried out largely by German and French forces.  And while English and Scottish armies did not participate in this crusade, from a religious standpoint the monarchies of the British Isles still retained a stake in the outcome of the conflict.  The end of the 2nd Crusade had ended in 1150 with Muslim forces achieving decisive victories over the European invaders.  The victory had given the indigenous kingdoms almost complete control of the Holy Land, and Jerusalem in particular.  Afterwards, bad blood festered between the French and the eastern European realms as suspicions of collusion with the Turkish forces were blamed for the Crusades’ ultimate failure.  The Catholic church was incensed by this resounding defeat and holding fast to the assertion that the land of Christ was theirs by divine right, sought to repair the ill feelings between Christian lands in order to build an invincible army.  And when the time was right, his holiness would try once more to wrest control of the Holy Land from the Muslim occupiers.  

So, upon the proclamation by Pope Gregory VIII known as the Audita Tremendi in 1189, Philip II of France, Richard I of England and Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor joined forces to launch the 3rd Crusade into the Holy Land.  This campaign was much more successful for the Christian forces and in July 1192, the Muslim armies finally surrendered at Acre.  Tragically Fredrick Barbarossa, drowned while crossing the Saleph River and thus didn’t live to see the final victory.  But for the Christian world and for the Catholic church in particular, the triumph of the 3rd Crusade was seen as a vindication of their beliefs and proof of the divine intervention that gave them control of Jerusalem.

Okay, great history lesson.  But what has this got to do with the Canterbury monks and their sighting of the fire spitting the moon in two?  

The answer lies not in the event itself, but what the alleged event symbolized to the church and to Christians around the globe.  

Symbolism has played a decisive roll in religious belief the world over and is not confined to Christian doctrines.  Prophecy and Symbology, or the interpretation of symbols, have been employed habitually by spiritual orders predating the Egyptians dynasties.  In the middle ages, as it is today, the symbol of the Muslim world was the crescent moon.  The national flags of nine eastern countries currently contain the image of the crescent moon.  Thus, any precognitive vision or sign that could be interpreted positively for the church or Christendom at large and negatively on their Islamic enemies would have been eagerly employed and disseminated to the faithful.  If in midst of a Holy War for the very seat of Christianity, monks of the Catholic clergy were to see the crescent moon (remember, the very symbol of Islam) being torn asunder by fire, this would have been like hitting the divination jackpot.  Any prophet worth his salt would have quickly seen this burning of the Muslim moon as an omen portending Islam’s ultimate defeat.    And the fact that it happened 12 times (coinciding with the 12 apostles, perhaps), so much the better.  

But what would really give this prophecy a boost is if the event occurred on an equally prophetic date.  In this instance the moon was torn in half by fire on June 18.  This just so happened to be the 23rd anniversary of Frederick I ascension to the throne as Holy Roman Emperor.  So that’s 1) the moon was rent in half by fire representing the fall of Islam, 2) that it happened 12 times to represent the 12 apostles of Christ and 3) that it happened on the same date that Frederick I was crowned Holy Roman Emperor.  Thus, the prophecy was that the army of Frederick would defeat the Muslim forces and retake the Holy Land for Christ.  And this is pretty much what actually happened.  Yeah, Frederick had died before the final surrender of the Muslims in Acre, but who else was the Catholic church going to credit for the return of Jerusalem to the faithful?

This all might seem a little too coincidental until we remember that Gervase had not written this account of the monks sighting in 1178 as it happened.  Gervase had written the chronicles of Canterbury years after the fact upon compiling the collective works of the order written over the course of several decades.  Gervase’s Chronicle covering the history of Canterbury included events ranging in date from 1100 to 1199.  But it should also be noted that Gervase was not appointed sacristan, that is the officer in charge of the church and its contents – to include its historical writings, until 1193.  That’s 15 years after the date attributed to the sighting of the fire on the moon.

Peter Nocklolds, a British independent scholar whose research relates to hidden symbolism in linking mathematical sciences to literature, is of the opinion that Gervase made the whole thing up.  According to Nockolds, Gervase often utilized correlations between what was happening in the world around him to political and religious events as a method of post-dating pre-determination as it were.  This incident of fire on the moon is by no means an isolated premonition in Gervase’s writings.  

And this type of past posting of events to an earlier date was not a ploy used solely by Gervase.  Medicants, prophets and even modern-day psychics regularly employ this tactic to lend credence to their quackery.  Gervase’s motivation behind the creation of this prophetic tale seems obvious: to show that the defeat of Islam by those who had taken up the cross for Christ had been foretold and was all but inevitable.  Crediting Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, rather than the English King Richard I speaks to the prophecy’s relevance and importance to the church more so than the English crown.   

This tale of the fire on the moon has endured for so many years due largely to coincidence.  That a large and geologically young lunar crater just happened to be located near where medieval monks claimed to have witnessed flame shooting from the surface of the moon has had researchers and scientists alike scrambling to reconcile the events into a cohesive singularity for decades.  But the truth of the matter would have been much easier to grasp had all the evidence been taken into account from the get-go.  

While the story of the monks’ sighting can now be seen as a tale steeped in theological fanaticism, the crater with which the story has become inextricably intertwined is very real indeed.  

Giordano Bruno, the crater’s namesake, was theologian and monk, but he was also a proponent of free thought and scientific theorems centuries ahead of his time.  He believed in the Copernican universe and the idea that stars were in fact individual suns like our own, and like our sun harbored planets and even life.  Such radical teachings were perceived as a threat to the Catholic church and its tenants of divine creation.  As can be expected, Bruno’s genius was condemned as heresy by the Catholic church, and heresy was punishable by barbaric torture and death.  And so, in 1593 he was arrested as a heretic and imprisoned.  For 7 years he would languish in captivity until Pope Clement VIII finally condemned him to death in 1600.  Upon receiving his death sentence, Bruno remained defiant until the end by asserting to his judges, “Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it”.  

Giordano Bruno spent his life in the pursuit of the truth, even as it cost him his life.  The brightness and radiance of Giordano Bruno, hidden just beyond sight on the moon’s dark fringe, is an ironic reminder of the man himself and difficulties often encountered in the pursuit of truth.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Beyond the Fringe.  Be sure to rate, review and subscribe to the podcast as new episodes are uploaded weekly.  You can follow us on Twitter at podcastbtf and If you’d like to drop us an email telling us how much you love the show or to suggest topics for future episodes, the address is podcastbtf@gmail.com.  Until next time this Jay reminding you to “Keep it Real”.