New Moons Shining and Karma Chameleons

 Just a short update post following my last one on "Tangled" and Galadriel's Magical Light Hair.

New Moons Shining = Solar Eclipse

In my follow-up post yesterday, I included John Taylor's version of "Water is Wide", because it reminded my of Galadriel's songs and her lament for her home and the wide sea that separated her from it.   The album Taylor's song came from is called "New Moon Shine", which I also mentioned as potentially having to do with the Stones (Ithil and Anor) as well as a drink - both of these ideas coming up together in previous posts I have explored.

I checked WJT's blog and he had written a post called "New moon shine" which reference that post, along with some other "moon shine" references, in addition to another version of the "Water is Wide" song, with some pretty interesting lyrics and stone references.

Anyway, in that post, William begins with a statement about new moons not really shining (which is true):

The new moon doesn't shine, at least not perceptibly. I suppose in theory it provides a bit of double-reflected Earthshine, but in practice a new moon is invisible, indistinguishable from no moon at all. Therefore, references to the light of the new moon tend to be few and far between.

After I read the paragraph, the question immediately formed in my mind of "But when DO new moons shine?".

The answer, I think, was also on James Taylor's album cover in the form of the solar eclipse.  New moons shine when in a total solar eclipse.

Now, everyone who had read these posts may have already figured this out since the imagery has been coming up, and I am late to the game (wouldn't be the first time), but this was the first time I had actually connected new moons, solar eclipses, and this concept of a new moon shining.  My guess is that whoever designed James Taylor's album cover understood this, at least.

Solar eclipses, by definition, can only happen during new moons - it is not possible for any other 'type' of moon to be involved in a solar eclipse.

And, during the solar eclipse is the only time a new moon is both visible, and can be made to look as if it is shining.  Without the light of the sun behind it, the new moon would remain invisible.  Once it begins to cross the sun, we begin to make out its shape, which continues to become clearer as it gets into alignment with the sun.  Once perfectly aligned with the sun, you have what looks to be a black disc or ball which now shines.

Interesting.

Of course my mind goes to the linking of the Anor and Ithil Stones (Sun and Moon) as being analogous to a Solar Eclipse - that linking being perhaps being synonymous with the alignment of the sun and moon in our sky.   Palantiri were said to be black stones (although I have stated that based on Nephi's description, the Anor Stone must either have started out as a different color, or had to have changed at some point... based on recent thinking, this could have been as a result of Galadriel's Light).

Anyway, like I said, everyone else probably already figured that out, but that was a new thought to me, in that New Moon Shine is, in one way, just another term for a total solar eclipse.  Makes sense and seems very simple once I thought of it.

Karma Chameleon

This morning my post involved "Tangled", the movie from Disney which compares Rapunzel's magical glowing hair infused with light of the sun with that of Galadriel's own potentially magic hair that contains the Light of the Two Trees.

It was following Leo's comment yesterday that my mind went down some of what I articulated there, including the similar story element with "Tangled"  In the late afternoon, my son came home with his art project he made at school.  He was pretty excited about, and wanted my full, undivided attention as he walked me through it.  Here is it is:

It is a chameleon.  By it is both a tree and a sun (and by his head is a football - he is a football-playing chameleon, since my son is obsessed with football).  In order to get the sun up in the sky, he had to glue the sun to the tree, making it appear to be a sun-tree.  And one of his appendages came off in his backpack while he was on the bus, so I still need to glue that back on

Anyway, I didn't really think anything of it relating to anything I am writing about here.  That changed today, however.

Unfortunately, I started to feel sick again this morning, and after battling through the morning, I decided I needed to kind of just rest for a few minutes.  Not remembering much else of "Tangled" (it would have probably been a couple years ago at the earliest our kids would have watched it), I decided to turn it on for a few minutes to see if there was anything else interesting following that short intro I included in my earlier post.

Boy, was there ever!

It turns out that Rapunzel's best friend while hanging out alone in the tower, is this guy:

It's a chameleon.  No joke.  His name is Pascal (meaning "relating to Easter").  Like I said, I would have watched this years ago, but I had no recollection that there was a chameleon in this show.  I was only able to watch a few more minutes of it following that intro, so I am not sure how the chameleon will factor into the rest of the story, if at all, but it just struck me as something more than coincidence that yesterday my son brings home a sculpture of a chameleon hanging out next to a sun-tree, and here we have this movie with a chameleon and quite a lot of imagery and symbolism with respect to the sun, its light, and it even being captured in both a plant and in a person's hair.

Crazy, I say.

So, I think there might might be something to this line of thinking that Leo kicked off relative to Galadriel's hair, the light it was said to contain, and these Stones.

And, with all this thinking about Chameleons, I now have Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon" running through my head, so I am going to spread that same joy here.  See if you can spot the character meant to portray good old Omar-Wormtongue-Laban-Noah-Brigham in the video, and the karma that catches up to him.