Celestial Myths, Layla & Majnun and Lunar Effect | Notes

For thousands of years, people have studied celestial bodies and generated stories about them. Long before home-entertainment and modern life existed, I think of early people lying on their backs, watching the sky during the night and day, imagining and exchanging stories.

I have had the chance to listen to many myths about the sun and the moon in different geographies. I have realised that most of them are actually very similar to each other; the Sun and the Moon are in love but they cannot be together for some reason.

If I was an early human myself unaware of the scientific facts, what would I think of those two bodies that I keep seeing at the sky? I would probably adopt the belief, which my family/tribe transferred to me or I would try to make up a meaning of my own.

When I read about the story of Layla & Majnun, which is a narrative poem by Nizami a Persian poet based on a semi-historical Arab story, I thought that the story had many resemblances with the love stories of the Sun and the Moon. I reckoned, what if the poem was also telling about the two celestial bodies, one living at night and the other at day, which can never come together...

For theme and narrative of my experimental game project, I am thinking of embracing these two stories as one.

Story of Layla & Majnun:


In Arabic language, Layla name means "night," and is thought to mean "one who works by night" or "worker of the dark." In the Arabic language, the word Majnun means "a crazy person."



The term "lunatic" derives from the Latin word lunaticus ("moonstruck") which originally referred mainly to epilepsy and madness as diseases caused by the moon. By the fourth and fifth centuries astrologers were commonly using the term to refer to neurological and psychiatric diseases. Through at least 1700 it was also a common belief that the Moon influenced fevers, rheumatism, episodes of epilepsy and other diseases.


Lunar effect:

Explores the idea that the Earth's Moon has an influence on human behavior. Surveys have shown that this belief is still commonplace in contemporary society, despite studies which have found that there is no correlation between the Moon and many indicators of human behavior.

It is the very error of the moon; She comes more near the earth than she was wont, And makes men mad.”

—Shakespeare, Othello


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