There is a strait on the Moon, opening between mountains and connecting two large “seas,” the Mare Imbrium or Sea of Rains and the Mare Serenitatis or Sea of Serenity.
This conspicuous strait has no official name, but might be called the Strait of Autolycus, that being the impact crater just outside it. Autolycus, “self-wolf,” was in Greek legends the trickster, the cunning thief, son of flighty god Hermes and ancestor of “Odysseus of many wiles,” able like a conjurer or pickpocket to make the things he filched invisible; he corresponds to the wily Coyote or Fox or Jackal in the myths of other cultures. But, rather surprisingly, a Greek astronomer of around 300 BC bore the name – or nickname? – Autolycus, which is why it was approved for the crater by a nomenclature committee of the International Astronomical Union in 1935.
They didn’t know how apt it would become in 2026. The “mischief-maker’s” bomb crater is clearly a relic of the war between lunar civilizations to exterminate each other.
Hormuz and Hormos
You’ve probably seen plenty of maps of this strategic pinch-point of geography.
By contrast with “Autolycus,” the name of the strait of “Hormuz” evokes benign serenity, sharply at odds with the violence now focused on it, the mines and airstrikes.
In Zoroastrianism, the native religion of Iran before the conquest by Islam (and, I think, an influence that persisted into Iran’s Shi’a form of Islam), the deities of good and evil are Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, “lord of wisdom” and “destructive mind,” or, in a later stage of the Persian language, Ormuzd and Ahriman. Neither is stronger or will necessarily win; whether good or evil prevails depends on how many people throw themselves into the balance, and how earnestly, on each side.
The name of the Strait of Hormuz, and the town on its northern coast, do they derive from the good spirit Ormuzd? It is natural for Iranians to think so.
Others point out that the town could be a “harbor,” hormos in Greek, founded during the parallel withdrawal of Alexander the Great’s forces from India by land and sea along the southern Persian coast in 324 BC.
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