Full Moon Names

The list you have seen

If you have met a January full moon called the Wolf Moon, you have met the Old Farmer's Almanac and the cottage industry that reprints it. The familiar twelve — Wolf, Snow, Worm, Pink, Flower, Strawberry, Buck, Sturgeon, Harvest or sometimes a separate Corn, Hunter, Beaver, Cold — circulate online as if they were the moon's real passport. They are not. They are an English-language almanac tradition, assembled and popularized in the United States, drawing on colonial American sources and on names recorded by settlers, often from Algonquian-speaking peoples of the northeastern woodlands, then flattened into one list for a whole continent. Treat the Almanac page as Almanac tradition. It is a real tradition. It is not everybody's tradition, and it is not ancient Europe in disguise.

Two names in the wider English habit are a little different and should not be stirred into the same pot. Harvest Moon is the full moon nearest the autumn equinox, called that in English agricultural speech because the bright early evenings once stretched the harvest work. Hunter's Moon is a name for the full moon after it. Those are seasonal nicknames tied to a temperate farming year, still regional, still not a law for the tropics or the southern hemisphere, but they are not the same artifact as a January 'Wolf Moon' presented as pan-Indigenous or pan-pagan. Even these two drift with the equinox. They are not the property of a month number.

What the names are not

They are not universal Indigenous names. North America alone holds hundreds of nations, with their own languages, calendars, and lunar or seasonal counts. A name written down by a colonist, translated into English, and assigned to a Gregorian month is not a license for everyone else to wear it as aesthetic. Some recorded names do refer to real local events: a fish run, a berry, a hard snow. Lifted to California, Scotland, Lagos, or Sydney, the same word becomes nonsense or theft. Do not decorate a coven poster with a nation's moon name because it sounds wild. If you are not of that people, and you were not taught the name inside a relationship that includes responsibility, leave it. Appreciation that takes sacred or seasonal language as decor is still taking.

They are also not the ancient moon names of Europe. Germanic, Celtic, Romance, and Slavic languages have their own month-names, feast-names, and occasional lunar nicknames, and they do not line up with the Almanac's wolves and sturgeon. 'Celtic Wolf Moon' is a modern mash. So is any claim that Wicca inherited these twelve from time immemorial. Wicca is a twentieth-century religion. The Almanac list is an American publishing tradition. They met on the internet. You may use a name from the list if you say where it came from: 'the Almanac's name for a January full moon in that colonial list,' not 'the moon's true name.' Honesty is the price of borrowing even a settler almanac. The price of borrowing Indigenous ceremonial language is higher, and often the answer is simply no.

A few names, with the frame left on

Wolf Moon, in the Almanac list, is attached to January. It is often vaguely explained by hungry wolves in a hard northern winter. That explanation is a story about the list, not a documented rite shared by all northern peoples, and it is a bad description of January in many climates. Snow Moon, usually February in the same list, assumes snow. Worm Moon, often March, is sometimes linked to thawing ground and worm-castings or to grubs, depending on which reprint you read. Notice the uncertainty. When a tradition cannot agree on its own gloss, do not carve the gloss in stone. Pink Moon, often April, is commonly tied to a wildflower, Phlox, in eastern North America. That is a regional plant calendar. It is lovely where that flower blooms then. It is not a lunar law.

Strawberry Moon, often June in the Almanac, points at strawberry season in a temperate eastern climate. In another landscape June is dry, or midwinter, or monsoon. Flower Moon has the same problem with extra perfume. Sturgeon Moon, often August, refers to a Great Lakes fish. If you do not live in a sturgeon relationship, the name is a postcard from someone else's watershed. Use it as a lesson in specificity, not as your August personality. Harvest Moon and Hunter's Moon, as said, follow the northern autumn equinox rather than a fixed month, and in the southern hemisphere the bright harvest evenings, if you use that logic at all, belong to the local autumn. A March Harvest Moon in Aotearoa can be honest. A March Wolf Moon copied from a January list is just a costume.

Name the moon outside your door

The repair is local naming. Step outside, or to the window, or into your memory of the week if you are on nights and the sky is a rumor. What is the land doing? First cold that actually chilled you. Jacaranda litter on the windshield. Smoke from a fire season. Exam month. The rent due. Mangos. Flood. Dust. A strike. The week the streetlights were repaired. Name the moon from that, in your own language, and expect the name to be a little silly and very clear. 'Bus-delay moon' may be truer than 'Sturgeon.' A city is a land. A flat is a land. You do not need a rural childhood to have the right to describe your own sky.

Keep a private list for a year if you like, and do not publish other people's seasonal names as your brand. If you belong to a living tradition that already names moons, use those names in the way that tradition teaches, including the rule about what is public. If you are building a house practice, write the name in pencil. Next year the weather may disagree, and the pencil is the point. The Moon does not require a title. We name it so we can talk about time. Talk about the time you are in.

Correspondences, labeled as such

An original rite

Materials. A window, a doorstep, or a memory of the week's weather if you cannot go out · Paper and a pencil, or the back of an envelope and a pencil stub. Use pencil rather than a permanent pen, because the name may change · Optional: the Almanac list on paper or a screen, only so you can set it aside, or your memory of that list if you refuse to open it tonight · A lamp or daylight · A cup of potable water or tea, drunk because naming things is not a reason to forget thirst

1. 1Look out, or recall the last walk you took. Write five plain facts: temperature, plant, street, work, and one thing people around you are dealing with. No poetry yet.
2. 2If you had a borrowed name ready, write it on a corner of the page and label it: Almanac, or someone's nation, or 'I do not know the source.' If you do not know the source, you do not use the name tonight.
3. 3Choose one local fact and turn it into a moon name in your own language. It may be modest. Speak the words of the rite, then speak the name once.
4. 4Write, in one sentence, who the name belongs to: this household, this year. Not 'the ancients.' Not a people you are not part of.
5. 5If last month's name no longer fits, erase it or strike it. Say thank you to it for being last month's tool.
6. 6Put the pencil down. Do not post the name as folklore. If you share it, share the weather with it so nobody can mistake it for a universal.
7. 7Drink the water. The rite ends without a chant. A name is a handle, and the handle is already on the cup.

I will not wear a moon name I cannot source. This sky has weather of its own. I name what I see, in pencil. The list in the almanac can stay in the almanac.

Close. Close the notebook. Say the local name once more if you want it to stick, then leave the moon unnamed in your mouth until someone asks what the night is like. Describe the night.

A practical action. When a friend uses 'Worm Moon' or 'Wolf Moon' as if it were universal, you may say, kindly, that it is an almanac name and offer your local one. You do not have to police strangers on the internet for peace of mind.

Questions

• Which moon name do you use, and can you say in one sentence whose tradition it is?
• What is the land outside your door doing that no imported list predicted?
• Which name have you been borrowing as a mood rather than as a relationship?

Sources and further reading

• The Old Farmer's Almanac, full moon names. Read this as Almanac tradition. Do not promote the list as universal Indigenous names or as ancient European paganism.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, for checking lunar and seasonal facts separately from almanac nicknames.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A wide look at night skies in art is a cure for the idea that one colonial list is the moon's authentic costume.