Moon Bible Being Auctioned

If you happen to be both a spiritual book collector and a space enthusiast like me, and also have a lot of extra money to spend, the perfect item for your collection is being auctioned tonight in New Hampshire. It's a King James Bible rendered onto microfilm that was brought to the Moon and safely returned during the Apollo space program. From a magical perspective that makes it one of the few holy texts in the world to have traversed the path from Malkuth to Yesod and back again.

A rare Bible that's been to the moon and back will have a new owner Thursday night - the complete King James version, framed in gold leaf, is under the hammer at an auction house in New Hampshire.

But whoever takes it home won't be able to leaf through it. It's a piece of microfilm, with the text of 1,245 pages shrunken down to the size of a postage stamp.

"It's the whole King James (Bible) on there. It's really cool," says Bobby Livingston, vice president of sales and marketing at RR Auction, which is handling the sale.

The Bible was taken into space three times before it reached the lunar surface, he said - first on Apollo 12, when it was stored in the wrong part of the spaceship and orbited the moon, but didn't land on it, then on the ill-fated Apollo 13, which had an explosion on board that forced it to turn back, and finally on Apollo 14.

If this Bible were in the form of a book that could be paged through it would be especially amazing, but given the expense of shooting something that weighs even a pound or so into space the microfilmed version was really the only way to go. I also find the series of mishaps surrounding this particular Bible interesting from a magical perspective. It's almost as if some spiritual force didn't want it to find its way to the Moon, but what to make of that I have no idea. Perhaps the flow of Mezla was simply more difficult to overcome than anyone expected.