Note on the effect of the moonlight

Note: this text is extracted from Book XII, chapter 73

“And as he was going along with his friends Śrutadhi, and Vimalabuddhi, and Guṇākara, and Bhīmaparākrama, and searching for his other friends in that Vindhya forest, it happened that he slept one day on the road with his ministers at the foot of a certain tree. And he suddenly awoke, and got up, and looked about him, and beheld there another man asleep. And when he uncovered his face, he recognised him as his own minister Vicitrakatha, who had arrived there. And Vicitrakatha too woke up, and saw his master Mṛgāṅkadatta, and joyfully embraced his feet”

His face was covered during sleep, not merely as a protection against insects, etc., but very possibly because of the ill-effects of moonshine. In an interesting note on the subject (Nights, vol. ii, p. 4n⁴) Burton quotes Psalm cxxi, 6, “The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night,” and adds,

“Easterners still believe in the blighting effect of the moon’s rays,, which the Northerners of Europe, who view it under different conditions, are pleased to deny. I have seen a hale and hearty Arab, after sitting an hour in the moonlight, look like a man fresh from a sickbed; and I knew an Englishman in India whose face was temporarily paralysed by sleeping with it exposed to the moon.”

Cf. also the following passage from J. Came, Letters from the East, p. 77: " The effect of the moonlight on the eyes in this country [Egypt] is singularly injurious; the natives tell you, as I found they also afterwards did in Arabia,, always to cover your eyes when you sleep in the open air. The moon here really strikes and affects the sight, when you sleep exposed to it, much more than the sun; indeed the sight of a person who should sleep with his face exposed at night would soon be utterly impaired and destroyed.” (See T. Harley, Moon-Lore, p. 207.)

It is strange that Frazer fails to record these facts, for after quoting (Golden Bough ( Adonis, Attis, Osiris), vol. ii, p. 148) examples from Greece, Armenia and Brazil of the belief in the baneful effects of the moon’s rays on children, he adds, that they might certainly be thought to “peak and pine” with the moon’s dwindling light. “But,” he continues,

“it is less easy to see why the same deleterious influence on children should be ascribed to moonlight in general.”

In the case of half-witted children, the effect on their health immediately after the full moon has often been noticed. I had first-hand information as to this fact from institutions, both in England and France, as recently as February 1926. Cf. the use of the English moonstruck, or lunatic, and the German mondsüchtig.—n.m.p.