The Full Moon's Effect on Madness

 

The Full Moon’s Effect on Madness

 

The moon has long been associated with rising instances of violence, impulsive and animalistic behavior in mankind. It is considered by many to be a natural force that controls not only the tide’s push and pull, but the rise and fall of people’s sanity.

The moon is, in fact, the root of our word lunacy, in reference to a period of instability believed to have been initially caused by the moon’s cycle. During the full moon, many were thought to grow unstable, or go through bouts of insanity. Likely, this is related to myths of lycanthropy, that men would turn in to beasts under the light of the full moon. Many beliefs about lycanthropy involve the bite being the cause of the infection, but there are also beliefs that sleeping outside under the light of a full moon can turn a person into a werewolf on its own.  

But these beliefs about a causal link between the full moon and instability in human’s psyche are not regulated just to myth and more archaic times. There are still many prevalent beliefs about the moon effecting people’s behavior in a negative way. Today this idea that the moon increases violent behaviors in both people and animals is known as “The Lunar Effect.”  Some police officers, doctors, and nurses claim that there is a correlation between the full moon and incidents of wild, violent, and disruptive events, to the extent that some police departments will even add extra officers to patrol neighborhoods on nights of the full moon.

This is supported by mythos surrounding notorious killers. Albert Fish was originally referred to as the “Moon Maniac” and “The Werewolf of Wysteria.” The origin of these nicknames some claim is because most of his crimes took place around the full moon while others claim that it was based off of the brutality of his crimes. But Fish’s association with the moon, and the moon’s further association with strange, animalistic behavior, was sealed by the testimony given by his son, Albert Fish Jr, when he claimed that “Fish only ate raw steak during a full moon.”

Ed Gein, the inspiration for many a horror icon and American Killer Tropes, is another killer heavily associated with odd behavior and the full moon. According to much of the lore surrounding Gein, he claimed to do his grave-robbing only by the light of the full moon, that the full moon influenced him into a frenzy, and he would find himself digging in the dirt, or that when the full moon was shining, he would then feel the need to don his skin-suit and go outside to dance. This image of Gein is so prevalent, popular, and stirring that Chuck Parello’s movie focused on Gein’s was originally set to be titled “Dancing in the Moonlight” before the more straight-forward and less colorful Ed Gein was settled on. Still, the image makes its way into the film as one of its most stirring and surreal moments:

 

In the above clip from Parello we see moon belief at play. First, there is Gein in the day; awkward, meek, too shy to even look in the eye of the woman he is asking out. He seems restrained and sheepish. Then we have a cut to Gein’s house, the blue light of the moon shining down, and Gein, dressed in a ghoulish skin suit, banging a pot above his head and howling like a wild animal at the moon as he dances. As if at night, in the light of the moon, something he keeps caged inside of him has been released.  These beliefs are not only regulated to mankind, either. The full moon is said to also cause animals to go mad, with a common belief being that "animals become rabid (mad) if they go out under a full moon (Lawrence S. Thompson, 9). 

These beliefs about the moon are prevalent enough that scientists have run studies to find out if there is a correlation between a rise and crime and the moon’s cycle. In 1984, C P Thakur and Dilip Sharma published their study on the correlation of rising crime rates on nights of the full moon and found that the “incidence of crimes committed on full moon days was much higher than on all other days, new moon days, and seventh days after the full moon and new moon. A small peak in the incidence of crimes was observed on new moon days, but this was not significant when compared with crimes committed on other days” (1789). The hypothesis behind explaining the “Lunar Effect” positioned by Thakur, Sharma, and others was that the moon affected, through gravitational pull on the water contained within the human body. They state that “The water content of the human body exceeds 50-60% and some tidal wave is generated by the gravitational pull of the moon. These human tidal waves may cause physical, physiological, and biochemical changes in the body resulting in an increased tendency to take poisons. The same hypothesis might help explain the results of [increased crime]” (1790). Scott O. Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz, however, disagree with this theory and these findings. They state that “the gravitational effects of the moon are far too minuscule to generate any meaningful effects on brain activity, let alone behavior” (64). They also state that there is no real scientific link or evidence between the full moon and crime statistics; that while some studies such as Thakur and Sharma’s exist, the majority of other studies conducted about such correlations have yielded no such results, and those that do usually fall apart under further investigation.  Rather, Lilienfeld and Arkowitz position that the link between crime and the full moon exists all in our minds; that the media portrayals of the full moon are likely to make us associate it with horror, and we may “perceive an association between full moons and myriad bizarre events”(65) because our brains have been trained to but relent that it may have once held a “kernel of truth” when the light of the full moon may have disrupted the sleep of people before the invention of electric lighting came to do so constantly (65).

However, even if it is not the moon’s gravitational pull upsetting humankind’s internal tides, and the idea of the full moon’s effect on our behavior may be one conditioned into us through myth and media, does that potentially make the link any less true? If people believe the full moon summons wildness from within them, may that not be enough to do so? With this idea so heavily ingrained in our movies, our songs,  and our stories, our very belief in the full moon being a captivating mischief-maker that boggles and stirs our minds may create the space for us to become lunatics, may encourage us to look up at the moon and feel a desire, seeing it so large and luminous, to howl and run and dance, and let loose in ways we can’t under the light of the sun.

For ages and ages, the full moon has stood opposite the sun as a symbol of the mysterious, occult; that which goes bump in the dark, which would naturally align it in our minds with an increase in the wild, the terrifying, and even the criminal. For more information on this association, check out of exploration on the Full Moon and theOccult.