Also called once in a blue moon, seasonal blue moon, calendar blue moon
What a blue moon really is, where the meaning came from, and how modern witches use it: as a rare extra full moon for long-term wishes. The popular rule of the second full moon in a month comes from a 1946 magazine mistake.
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The 1937 Maine Farmers' Almanac called the third full moon in a season with four full moons a blue moon, so the other full moon names stayed in their proper seasons. Folklorist Philip Hiscock traced the calendar sense to this almanac in 1999.
Amateur astronomer James Hugh Pruett misread the almanac in a March 1946 Sky & Telescope article and defined a blue moon as the second full moon in a month. The radio show StarDate repeated it in 1980 and Trivial Pursuit in 1986, and the magazine admitted the error in 1999. Both meanings are now in use.
After the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, the Royal Society recorded blue and green suns and moons for months around the world. Large forest fires and volcanic ash can still, rarely, tint the moon blue.
The phrase is old. A satire of 1528 joked that if the clergy said the moon was blue, people had to believe it, meaning an absurdity. By the 1830s once in a blue moon meant very rarely. The calendar meaning appeared in the Maine Farmers' Almanac in 1937, whose editor may have coined it, and the Oxford English Dictionary has found no earlier use.
James Hugh Pruett's 1946 misreading gave the world the easier rule of two full moons in a month, which happens seven times in every nineteen years. Historians and Wikipedia's sources describe the blue moon as modern American folklore rather than an old lunar tradition, and it is not a Native American moon name. Modern witches adopted it as an extra full moon for rare wishes and long goals.
How people have answered eclipses: Chinese courts and villagers beat drums and pots to drive off the creature eating the sun or moon, Hindu tradition tells of the demon Rahu swallowing them, and modern witches treat eclipses as charged times for endings and resets.
A full-moon rite in which a priestess calls the Goddess of the moon into herself and speaks with her voice. Central to Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca, named after the old Thessalian witches' boast.
A Wiccan working gathering held on the full moon, separate from the eight seasonal sabbats, for magic, healing work and honoring the Goddess.
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