What do we actually see when we look up at the Moon with the naked eye? We make out a configuration of irregular bright and dark markings – not a close representation of any familiar object. But, almost irresistibly, our eyes connect the markings, emphasizing some, ignoring others. We seek a pattern and we find one. In world myth and folklore, many images are seen: a woman weaving, stands of laurel trees, an elephant jumping off a cliff, a girl with a basket on her back, a rabbit, the lunar intestines spilled out on its surface after evisceration by an irritable flightless bird, a woman pounding tapa cloth, a four-eyed jaguar. People of one culture have trouble understanding how such bizarre things could be seen by the people of another.
The most common image is the Man in the Moon. Of course, it doesn’t really look like a man. Its features are lopsided, warped, drooping. There’s a beefsteak or something over the left eye. And what expression does that mouth convey? An ‘O’ of surprise? A hint of sadness, even lamentation? Doleful recognition of the travails of life on Earth? Certainly the face is too round. The ears are missing. 1 guess he’s bald on top. Nevertheless, every time I look at it, I see a human face.
World folklore depicts the Moon as something prosaic. In the pre-Apollo generation, children were told that the Moon was made of green (that is, smelly) cheese, and for some reason this was thought not marvellous but hilarious. In children’s books and editorial cartoons, the Man in the Moon is often drawn simply as a face set in a circle, not too different from the bland ‘happy face’ of a pair of dots and an upturned arc. Benignly, he looks down on the nocturnal frolics of animals and children, of the knife and the spoon.
Consider again the two categories of terrain we recognize when we examine the Moon with the naked eye: the brighter forehead, cheeks and chin, and the darker eyes and mouth. Through a telescope, the bright features are revealed to be ancient cratered highlands, dating back, we now know (from the radioactive dating of samples returned by the Apollo astronauts), to almost 4.5 billion years ago. The dark features are somewhat younger flows of basaltic lava called maria (singular, mare – both from the Latin word for ocean, although the Moon, we now know, is dry as a bone). The maria welled up in the first few hundred million years of lunar history, partly induced by the high-speed impact of enormous asteroids and comets. The right eye is Mare Imbrium, the beefsteak drooping over the left eye is the combination of Mare Serenitatis and Mare Tranquilitatis (where Apollo 11 landed), and the off-centre open mouth is Mare Humorum. (No craters can be made out by ordinary, unaided human vision.)
The Man in the Moon is in fact a record of ancient catastrophes, most of which took place before humans, before mammals, before vertebrates, before multicelled organisms, and probably even before life arose on Earth. It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put a human face on random cosmic violence.
Humans, like other primates, are a gregarious lot. We enjoy one another’s company. We’re mammals and parental care of the young is essential for the continuance of the hereditary lines. The parent smiles at the child, the child smiles back, and a bond is forged or strengthened. As soon as the infant can see, it recognizes faces, and we now know that this skill is hardwired in our brains. Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents and less likely to prosper. These days, nearly every infant is quick to identify a human face and to respond with a goony grin.
As an inadvertent side effect, the pattern-recognition machinery in our brains is so efficient in extracting a face from a clutter of other detail that we sometimes see faces where there are none. We assemble disconnected patches of light and dark and unconsciously try to see a face. The Man in the Moon is one result. Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blowup describes another. There are many other examples.
Sometimes it’s a geological formation, such as the Old Man of the Mountain at Franconia Notch, New Hampshire. We recognize that, rather than some supernatural agency or an otherwise undiscovered ancient civilization in New Hampshire, this is the product of erosion and collapse of a rock face. Anyway, it doesn’t look much like a face anymore. There’s the Devil’s Head in North Carolina, the Sphinx Rock in Wast Water, Cumbria, England, the Old Woman in France, the Vartan Rock in Armenia. Sometimes it’s a reclining woman, as Mt Ixtaccihuatl in Mexico. Sometimes it’s other body parts, as the Grand Tetons in Wyoming -approached from the West, a pair of mountain peaks named by French explorers. (Actually there are three.) Sometimes it’s changing patterns in the clouds. In late medieval and renaissance Spain, visions of the Virgin Mary were ‘confirmed’ by people seeing saints in cloud forms. (While sailing out of Suva, Fiji, I once saw the head of a truly terrifying monster, jaws agape, set in a brooding storm cloud.)
Occasionally, a vegetable or a pattern of wood grain or the hide of a cow resembles a human face. There was a celebrated eggplant that closely resembled Richard M. Nixon. What shall we deduce from this fact? Divine or extraterrestrial intervention? Republican meddling in eggplant genetics? No. We recognize that there are large numbers of eggplants in the world and that, given enough of them, sooner or later we’ll come upon one that looks like a human face, even a very particular human face.
When the face is of a religious personage – as, for example, a tortilla purported to exhibit the face of Jesus – believers tend quickly to deduce the hand of God. In an age more sceptical than most, they crave reassurance. Still, it seems unlikely that a miracle is being worked on so evanescent a medium. Considering how many tortillas have been pounded out since the beginning of the world, it would be surprising if a few didn’t have at least vaguely familiar features.*
[* These cases are very different from that of the so-called Shroud of Turin, which shows something too close to a human form to be a misapprehended natural pattern and which is now suggested by carbon-14 dating to be not the death shroud of Jesus, but a pious hoax from the fourteenth century – a time when the manufacture of fraudulent religious relics was a thriving and profitable home handicraft industry.]
Magical properties have been ascribed to ginseng and mandrake roots, in part because of vague resemblances to the human form. Some chestnut shoots show smiling faces. Some corals look like hands. The ear fungus (also unpleasantly called ‘Jew’s ear’) indeed looks like an ear, and something rather like enormous eyes can be seen on the wings of certain moths. Some of this may not be mere coincidence; plants and animals that suggest a face may be less likely to be gobbled up by creatures with faces – or creatures who are afraid of predators with faces. A ‘walking stick’ is an insect spectacularly well disguised as a twig. Naturally, it tends to live on and around trees. Its mimicry of the plant world saves it from birds and other predators, and is almost certainly the reason that its extraordinary form was slowly moulded by Darwinian natural selection. Such crossings of the boundaries between kingdoms of life are unnerving. A young child viewing a walking stick can easily imagine an army of sticks, branches and trees marching for some ominous planty purpose.
Many instances of this sort are described and illustrated in a 1979 book called Natural Likeness by John Michell, a British enthusiast of the occult. He takes seriously the claims of Richard Shaver, who – as described below – played a role in the origin of the UFO excitement in America. Shaver cut open rocks on his Wisconsin farm and discovered, written in a pictographic language that only he could see, much less understand, a comprehensive history of the world. Michell also accepts at face value the claims of the dramatist and surrealist theoretician Antonin Artaud, who, in part under the influence of peyote, saw in the patterns on the outsides of rocks erotic images, a man being tortured, ferocious animals and the like. ‘The whole landscape revealed itself,’ Michell says, ‘as the creation of a single thought.’ But a key question: was that thought inside or outside Artaud’s head? Artaud concluded, and Michell agrees, that the patterns so apparent in the rocks were manufactured by an ancient civilization, rather than by Artaud’s partly hallucinogen-induced altered state of consciousness. When Artaud returned from Mexico to Europe, he was diagnosed as mad. Michell decries the ‘materialist outlook’ that greeted Artaud’s patterns sceptically.