The Origin of the Moon

In the comments on one of my elemental work articles, I was asked why I traced the sigils of the Kings onto the lunar kamea, rather than onto that of a planet harmonious with the element. My answer was that the Moon rules the entire elemental realm, and therefore it is more appropriate to use the lunar kamea than that of any other planet. Likewise, the Moon is the final dispositor of magical energy flowing into the material world, and plays an important role in electional timing.

I recently came across this article that offers an additional explanation - the Earth and the Moon are formed of the same stuff. This is not a new concept - that the Moon is the result of a collision between two planets that happened during the early days of the solar system. But there are a number of problems with the idea. Planetary physicist Sarah Stewart has now published a new version of the "Giant Impact Hypothesis" that explains more of the data than the previous model could.

This week in the journal Nature, she, postdoctoral fellow Matija Ćuk (now a researcher at the SETI Institute) and two other colleagues propose a new theory, one that Stewart argues offers a solid explanation for the chemistry and tilt of the moon based on a single, high-energy collision.

“You have the one event and then you stand back and just watch and everything will happen on its own,” she said of the new scenario. But just because it's set off by one event doesn't mean it's not a complicated process, so buckle up.

Stewart and Ćuk have been working on their model — call it Giant Impact With a Twist — for a few years. It starts with a crash. But instead of striking Earth at an angle, they argue that the collider, which scientists call Theia, smashed into our planet head on. The high-energy impact would have melted the collider and the Earth and mixed them together, explaining how the planet and the moon could condense from the same swirl of material and take on the same chemical signatures.


“A more violent impact … that vaporized a good part of the Earth as well as the projectile would homogenize the isotope ratios,” Jay Melosh, a planetary scientist at Purdue University, said in an interview. He noted that this model solves the moon's chemistry problem, but it creates a physics problem: “Those impacts would leave the moon and the Earth spinning too fast with too much angular momentum.”

The article goes on to explain how angular momentum from the collision could be preserved between the Earth and the Moon, and explains how, according to this new model, gravitational forces could have interacted with the movements of the two resulting bodies to produce the Moon's current orbit. It's a good read, especially if you're into physics or astronomy.

But from a magical perspective, the matching isotope ratios between the Earth and the Moon is key. It shows that when the two planets collided, they merged into one body - the Earth - and cast off an enormous amount of the combined debris, which formed into the second - the Moon. From a quantum information standpoint, that would imply that the connection between Earth and Moon is not just stronger than those between the Earth and other heavenly bodies, but much stronger.

And this is exactly what we see when we looking into things like electional timing for rituals. The Moon's aspects are key, and those of the other planets can have an effect, but those effects are much weaker. It also shows why it is completely reasonable to use the lunar kamea for the elemental Kings, and why the Moon rules the elemental realm.