![]() New materialism urges us to return to the matter, liberating it as much as possible from the ontological straitjacket of anthropocentric idealism, symbolism, and classification. ULOs: Unidentified Lunar Objects Revealed In NASA Photography is best described as a visual catalog of structural anomalies found in Apollo era photographs taken of the Moon. Contrary to the modern scientific vision of the moon as a “lifeless, rocky satellite,”3 the protagonist of this new materialist tale is no less than a major cosmic actor, a vibrant and powerful god who shaped and safeguarded the everyday life and fate of humanity. Then the tides gradually pushed her far away: the tides that the Moon herself causes in the Earths waters, where the Earth slowly loses energy. In doing so, as an art historian, my biased focus is on the various apparitions of the moon on monuments, works of art, and the artifacts of visual culture, which will help me narrate its story. ![]() For the sake of brevity and coherence, I will focus on the ancient Mesopotamian engagements with the moon during the Bronze and Iron Ages, and pursue the very popular cult of the moon in Hellenistic and Roman Anatolia. ![]() In this essay, I discuss both the veneration and the visualization of the moon in Pre-Islamic (ritual) contexts to provide a visual-historical biography of the moon, which was imagined both as a divine presence and as a cosmic actor. The moon played a major role in the ancient Middle Eastern world as a celestial body, as a material measure of time and temporality, as a site for predicting the future, and as a benevolent god of abundance, prosperity, and in certain places, even healing.
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