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Waning Light
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Éduoard Manet, “Le Clair de lune sur le port de Boulogne,” oil on canvas, 1868, Musée d’Orsay (public domain)
Wellbeing

Waning Light

Myths and the Moon
Enis Yucekoralp
Reading
time 20 minutes
Enis Yucekoralp:

is a freelance writer based in London. He has a diverse range of interests and concerns, but his long reads can be found in “The Independent” while his poetry has appeared in “3AM Magazine”. He holds an M.Phil. in English from the University of Cambridge.

Its gravitational pull causes the ocean’s tides to ebb and flow; it has been responsible for a number of musical compositions, paintings, and literary works—as well as the admission of unwell people to mental asylums. The moon has a clear influence on humanity, but how much of what we believe about it is actually true?

The moon is as dreamlike as reality. An argent secret that pulls on the seas and breeds gods; inspires art, empowers nocturnal life, keeps the Earth’s time, counterbalances survival, and whose pale fire History’s eyes have watched ceaselessly.

Sometimes we can even see its faint shape during the day, such is the stubbornness of its reflected light and the peculiarities of the lunar cycle. Like a half-pearl, it hangs neighborly: beyond the Earth’s exosphere in the profoundly sublimated angst of interplanetary space. Treasured as the poetry of light, the moon mediates between dusk and dawn with a kind of refrigerated, fingernail charm.

But it has always been mythologized. As with many traditions, there is always something anthropocentric about it. The ancients solicited the moon for medicine, guessed what its changing phases meant to the body, and narrativized the lives of lunar deities. The mythos of the moon stretches from lunacy to lycanthropy, the menstrual to the tidal.

The Lunar Effect

Faith in the moon’s influence on sickness and health has always persisted in fabular belief and archaic medicine. It has been linked with all manner of human behavior and biology—insomnia, increased violent behavior, changes in mental health, and associations with menstrual cycles. While some of these ideas remain in the annals of history or committed to the realm of superstition, others might have some scientific basis.

Moonlight is not always a source of enlightenment, though. For thousands of years, physicians, scholars, and healers have believed in the bridge between the mind and the moon. Hippocrates, “the father of medicine,” claimed in the fifth century BCE that “one who is seized with terror, fright, and madness during the night is being visited by the goddess of the moon.”

Lunar phases were also used by sixteenth-century physicians to determine how the moon might affect their patients. Because early theories also connected the Earth’s satellite to the movements of tides, early modern doctors believed that it also governed the flow of blood in the veins. Bloodletting was therefore recommended during specific waxing phases, while the full moon exacerbated feverish symptoms. Astrology in Renaissance medicine was closely linked to contemporaneous beliefs in humorism and the imbalance of bodily fluids: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Stars and celestial bodies like the moon could be consulted to diagnose and explain illnesses—or so it was thought.

“It is the very error of the moon. She comes more near the earth than she was wont. And makes men mad,” rails Othello, the eponymous figure in Shakespeare’s tragedy. But how much gravity and truth is in

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Enis Yucekoralp:

is a freelance writer based in London. He has a diverse range of interests and concerns, but his long reads can be found in “The Independent” while his poetry has appeared in “3AM Magazine”. He holds an M.Phil. in English from the University of Cambridge.

Publish date: 11.05.2023

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Sound of Body, Sound of Mind
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“The Lutenist”, Hendrick Martensz Sorgh, 1661. Source: Rijksmuseum
Good Mood

Sound of Body, Sound of Mind

The Science of Music Therapy
Enis Yucekoralp
Enis Yucekoralp:

is a freelance writer based in London. He has a diverse range of interests and concerns, but his long reads can be found in “The Independent” while his poetry has appeared in “3AM Magazine”. He holds an M.Phil. in English from the University of Cambridge.

The well-tempered powers of music are age-old. Whether elegiac in its pathos or buoyantly uplifting, music has always been a euphonic tonic for the body and the soul. From Apollo to Florence Nightingale to the Nordoff-Robbins school of thought, music-as-therapy has a time-hallowed timbre. Music’s remarkable link to our emotions and the mind, to our synapses and somatic signals, makes it a natural remedial instrument. As a modern practice, however, music therapy can be understood as a goal-oriented psychological clinical intervention that can involve making, listening, discussing and largely engaging with music. In its active form, it entails playing instruments or wider forms of music-making; receptive music therapy involves a client listening and responding to music to alter mental states and bodily chemistry. Using the innate mood-influencing qualities of music, its therapeutic methodologies can help with improving emotional expression, as well as having empirically-proven physical and mental benefits. Under the right conditions, music therapy can improve heart rate and stimulate the brain, mute anxiety, muffle mental health conditions and silence stress.

Music has been used in the treatment of range of neurological conditions, including dementia. Globally, around 50 million people suffer with its deteriorating effects on memory, cognition, and emotional and social behaviour. In 2020, an interdisciplinary research team at the University of Castilla-La Mancha conducted a review into the therapeutic efficacy of music in the treatment of dementia. Promising results in the meta-analysis allowed them to conclude that passive music therapy improved the quality of life of people suffering with the syndrome by improving patients’ emotional wellbeing and cognitive functions. Combined with pharmacological and other psychosocial therapies, the positive neurological effects of listening to music allowed the Spanish research team to suggest that “music could be a powerful treatment strategy” for dementia.

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