The older I get it seems the less I truly know. I prove this to myself on a regular basis. I’ve seen tee shirts that say, ‘In my defense, the moon was full and I was left unsupervised.’ If I had a shirt like that, I would have been wearing it the other night—on the occasion of my most recent foray into the murky depths of my own ignorance.

Despite this being the age of information, rarely do we see any evidence of either wisdom or humanity resulting from such a plethora of knowledge. If it did, I would think we’d have long ago figured out how to feed everyone and achieve some semblance of world peace.

But I digress…

If, like me, you stayed up past 10:30 last Sunday night, and happened to look out your window, you might have seen the lunar eclipse—the occasion when Earth passes between the sun and the moon, casting its shadow over the moon. It’s also called a blood moon due to the reddish color the moon takes on during the eclipse. Though ominous looking, it’s simply a result of the scattering of sunlight through the earth’s atmosphere, similar to what happens during sunsets that appear red.

On average, there are three lunar eclipses every year. Total eclipses come roughly twice every three years. We know this today, and can predict, down to the minute, when they occur, in which continents they will be visible and for how long. Such are the advantages of modern science.

I’ve always loved history. Not necessarily the stuff from high school history class, where it seemed I was always just memorizing battle dates and generals’ names and time spans of different wars. My curiosity with the past usually points me more in the direction of life rather than death—how people of certain times lived; the habits and traditions of a particular era; the beliefs and customs then.

So as I gazed up at that glowing carnelian orb Sunday night, I wondered what people of long ago—without the benefit of our common understandings of modern science—thought when they witnessed the same sight. With this curiosity still pressing me when the spectacle was all over, I went looking for answers.

I didn’t have to journey across a desert on a camel to consult with some old astronomer with a long beard and curry on his breath. I didn’t have to write a message and send it by runner or tie it to a pigeon and wait for months, maybe years, for an answer. I didn’t even need to take down a dusty Britannica volume and thumb through its tissuey pages. I went where most people of this modern, technological age go when seeking answers—a few innocent clicks and I was deeply entangled in the world wide web.

Turns out the blood moon has held significant meaning for people for thousands of years—most quite odious. The Vikings believed a blood moon was caused by the wolf-gods Skill and Hati ‘eating’ the moon. The ancient Inca people interpreted the deep red coloring as a jaguar attacking and eating the moon. In ancient Mesopotamia, a lunar eclipse was considered a direct assault on the king and a proxy king would be propped up in the ruler’s place for the duration of the eclipse (and later killed when it was all over.)

Thankfully, blood moon meaning isn’t all guts and gore. There are other cultures that spin a better yarn. In ancient Ireland, for instance, there are stories about Rhiannon, the Celtic goddess of the moon, with the blood moon representing a time of great opportunity, power, and fertility. The blood moon for the Druids and ancient Celts was a profound time that encouraged prophetic dreams and heightened intuition. Certain Native tribes believed the blood moon indicated the moon was injured and needed to be healed, so rituals of forgiveness were performed, and old feuds and grudges laid to rest.

They say history is “written by the victors” but the untold truth is it’s always being written, continuously. And the stories do change, based on belief systems of the time. But as foreign as those outdated beliefs and traditions can sometimes seem to us, the common denominator is: as a human species, we have always needed our traditions. We’ve always had them, and they play an important role in our identity as a culture, or an ethnicity, or a belief system. We’re herd animals; we like to belong. Our traditions give us a reason and occasion to connect with our group, hang with our peeps.

Beyond our primitive need for belonging, there’s something reassuring about the predictable nature of tradition, a comfort in the cyclical. It’s as though we all have a basal need to stay in touch with, and track, the passage of time—the seasons of our lives, the infinite march of time our own mortality presses against. Tradition offers a sense of—if not control over—at least participation in this procession, a personal involvement in predictable rituals in the otherwise unpredictable nature of life.

So this is where I ended up when my inquiry into myths and meanings of the blood moon led me down a rabbit hole into ancient belief systems and traditions. Back where I started, gazing up at the moon and stars, ever much as lost in my wondering of the world and this life upon it.