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714 SKY AND STABS.
boys at the full, probably to give the one a slim elegant figure,
and the other a stout and strong. Healing herbs and pure dew
are to be gathered at new- moon (tou an des manen niwi gelesen,
N. Cap. 100, conf. 25), for then they are fresh and unalloyed.
When it says in I, 764 that weddings should take place at full-
moon, and in 238 that a new dwelling should be entered with the
waxing or full moon, this full-moon seems to denote simply the
utmost of the growing light, without the accessory notion of
incipient decline. If our ancestors as a rule fought their battles
at new-moon, they must have had in their eye the springing
up of victory to themselves, not the defeat and downfall of
the enemy. 1
At full-moon (as opposed to new), i.e. by a waning light, you
were to perform operations involving severance or dissolution,
cutting down or levelling. Thus, if I understand it rightly, a
marriage would have to be annulled, a house pulled down, a
pestilence stamped out, when the moon is on the wane. Under
this head comes in the rule to cut wood in the forest when it is
wadel, apparently that the timber felled may dry.
In a Calendar
Strasb. 1511 : with the moon s wedel tis
printed by Hupfuff,
good to begin the hewing of wood. The same precept is still
given in many modern forest-books, and full-moon is therefore
called hoh-wadel : in the bad wadel (crescent moon) fell no
timber/ Sup. I, 973. In Keisersperg s Menschl. bauin, Strasb.
1521, 19 : Alway in wedel are trees to be hewn, and game to be
shot/ 2 Grass is not to be mown at new, but at full moon (Lith.
Sup. 7) ; that the hay may dry quickly ? and treasures must be
lifted at full-moon. If a bed be stuffed when the moon is grow
ing, the feathers will not lie (I, 372. 914) ; this operation too
requires a waning light, as if to kill the new-plucked feathers
completely, and bring them to rest. If you open trenches by
a waxing moon, they will soon grow together again; if by a
waning, they keep on getting deeper and wider. To open a vein
with the moon declining, makes the blood press downwards and
1 The Esthonians say to the new-moon : Hail, moon! may you grow old, and
I keep young ! Thorn. Hiarne p. 40.
2 In Demerara grows a tree like the mahogany, called \valala if cut down at
;
new-moon, the wood is tough and hard to split, if at full, it is soft and splits easily.
Bamboo planks cut at new-moon last ten years, those cut at full-moon rot within
the year.