The Cosmography of Endymion

The Mystery of the Moon

‘It is the very error of the moon; She comes more near the earth than she was wont, And makes men mad.'

—Othello

G F Watts, Endymion, 1872

The moon should not exist; its visage deceives. Such musings emerge in the moon-touched, unsummoned. This strange notion breaches the realms of modern fiction, Fortean research, and the mythos of antiquity. No other facet of the natural world has so thoroughly ensorcelled the psyche, nor sculpted the contours of imagination, as has the moon. Its eclipses are a gateway to inner voids and rarefied states of mind; its folklore, in poxy fractals, propagates across continents; and from its argent rays, a spectrum of lunar conspiracy proliferates. All of this exalts the moon, sovereign of Mystery, upon its seat amidst the host of the air, bathing the firmament in its lustrous arcana.