Chapter 6 - Selēnoskopia

Summary

In the previous chapter, we explored the semiotics of the lunar world in ancient fictions, especially Lucian’s works. In this chapter, we leave Earth and consider – with ancient thinkers and modern astronauts – what our reality looks like when viewed from the Moon. Selēnoskopia or the ‘view from the Moon’ became a reality for the first time in the first year of the Apollo missions in 1968, but the imaginative tradition of gazing at the Earth from outer space has a far more ancient pedigree, stretching back to the earliest Greek literature over two-and-a-half millennia ago. In Lucian’s hands, the Moon became our first extra-terrestrial viewing-platform and the focus for an extraordinary continuum of thought that links ancient imagined experience with modern reality.