Moon
MOON
MOON . To observers on earth, the moon appears to be the most changeable of celestial phenomena. In earlier times the appearance of the new crescent was often greeted with joy as a return of the moon from the dead; the full moon was considered an occasion for celebration, the waning a time of anxiety, and the eclipse a cause for dread. In religion and mythology the moon plays a variety of roles. It is personified as a male or female divinity, or, like the sun, thought to be an object thrown up into the sky by some supernatural being. It may be thought of as kindly or malicious, male or female, pursued or pursuer, a god of destruction or of birth and growth.
An early recognition of a connection with menstruation gave rise to the conception of the moon as the guardian of the female cycle and of birth or, alternatively, as a male god who monthly defiles women. In connection with dew, rain, or tides, the moon may promote the growth of vegetation or bring disastrous floods.
The moon has been a measure of time from early times, especially for hunting societies. In tropical climates, where the sun is cruel, the moon is considered beneficent, especially by nomads and caravan drivers. As a male god the moon appears as the Strong Bull of Heaven who cares for his cows, the stars; or as the sacrificed god, the son or lover of the mother goddess.
As a goddess, the moon brings cures and eases childbirth or, on the other hand, helps to rot corpses and receives the dead. The waxing and waning of the moon led to the idea that it dies and is reborn, and thus the moon became a part of funeral ceremonies and rites of resurrection. The discovery that the moon is the closest celestial body to the earth led to the idea that the moon was the "abode of souls," a way station to immortality.
The phases of the moon seem to echo the life cycles of women and therefore connect the moon with the Triple Goddess who presided over birth, initiation, and death. The Moon became part of a triad with Hekate, goddess of the underworld, and with Artemis, the divine huntress, whose hounds were the stars. Sometimes even the Egyptian goddess Isis joined the grouping. In this connection the qualities of the moon are fertility, moisture, change, darkness, and magic. In the ancient Chinese division of the universe into yang (hot, dry, strong, male) and yin (cool, moist, weak, female) the moon is considered yin.
Usually the waxing moon is a fortunate omen and waning moon a dangerous one. In the Andaman Islands the waxing moon is male and the waning moon female. The dark of the moon is the time for gathering herbs to be used in spells and curses. The new or full moon is the time for white magic. In some systems, however, the moon rushes to conjunction with the sun to be refreshed by his light.
In poetry, the dying god, who is related to the divine powers of the plant world, is often compared to the moon. Intoxicating liquors used in many religious ceremonies are said to drip forth from the moon. As spider, spinner, and weaver, the moon is likened to the three Fates, who spin and weave man's destiny.
The moon is often paired with the sun, as either father, son, wife, sister, or daughter. Sometimes the moon and sun are twins, and the weaker one, usually the moon, is doomed to live in the underworld, while the other rides on high. Frequently both are thought of as boats riding through the ether as on the ocean. Often, the sun rides in a chariot pulled by four white horses. The moon is pulled by two white horses, or by a bull, a stag, or a cock.
The moon's animal is often the bull, because of the crescent shape formed by its horns, or the hare, because of its fertility or because the "man in the moon" is thought to resemble a hare. The bear is also associated with the moon, because its hibernation and waking are like death and resurrection; the snail, because it retreats and reappears; or the frog, because it is an aquatic creature.
The Moon as a Measure of Time
Aside from night and day, the moon is the most obvious natural measure of time. The Indo-European root is the same for the moon, month, and measure. There exist what may be notations of the moon's phases in Paleolithic caves in Spain from 7000 bce. Stonehenge in Great Britain (c. 3000 bce) may have been used to measure the movements of the moon as well as those of the sun. There are still primitive peoples who use only the moon to measure time. Before the arrival of Europeans, American Indians counted the lunations as "war month," "month of flowers," and so forth. The dark of the moon was the "naked time"; its first appearance, the "coming to life."
Agricultural people, however, needed to have their times of planting and reaping coincide with the seasons—that is, with the sun. Thus began the long effort to correlate twelve lunations (too few) or thirteen lunations (too many) with the solar year. Accounts from republican Rome show the problems associated with this effort. We are told that from earliest times a pontifex minor would watch for the new moon from the Capitoline Hill, and when it was sighted, call out to Juno, the queen of the gods. The first of the month was called the calends from the verb "to call out." Juno is in this way identified with the new moon, as her husband, Jupiter, is with the ides, or full moon. The priest then announced the series of festivals for the coming month and whether the nones (the half-moon) would fall on the fifth or the seventh. The festivals, sponsored by the state, were instituted as a means of keeping the agricultural, military, and civil activities in order. It was necessary for all farmers to come into the city to learn on what days they could not work but must keep festival. On calendars that have come down to us, festival days are marked nefas, meaning that no work could be done; 109 out of the 355 days of the year were designated nefas.
The priesthoods, like the early magistracies, were in the hands of the patricians. The inconvenience of not knowing the feast days was one of the problems that led to the "struggle of the orders." Eventually the fasti (calendars) were published, in 304 bce. The year began in March, and any time that had to be intercalated to bring the months into line with the seasons was added in February, after the Terminalia (a festival of boundaries and the year's end, celebrated on February 23).
Until the end of the republic the work of intercalation was the duty of the pontifices, who were often inefficient or corrupt. For instance, the date of court cases could be shifted by altering the intercalations. By the end of the republic, the whole calendar was out of harmony with both the sun and the moon. Cicero, writing to his friend Atticus, says he is not sure whether or not there will be an intercalation. There was a clause in contracts that read "si intercalat" ("in case of an intercalation").
Julius Caesar, aided by his Egyptian astronomer, made a clean sweep of the quasi-lunar calendar, extended the year 45 bce from 355 to 445 days, and started anew on January 1, 45 bce, with a cycle of 365 days, adding another day on the fourth year, after the Terminalia. This, with a few adjustments, is the solar calendar under which we live.
The ancient Greeks sent out criers to announce the sighting of the new moon. At some unknown point in history, the Greeks had limited the length of the year to twelve lunations of "full" or "hollow" months (comprised of thirty and twenty-nine days respectively), with an intercalary month every two years. We learn from Geminus that "they sought for a period which should, as to years agree with the Sun, as to months, with the Moon." The first period they constructed was an eight-year cycle called the octaeteris.
A nineteen-year cycle was suggested by the astronomer Meton in 432 bce but was apparently not accepted by the cities, which went their own way, creating their own calendars and even inventing their own names for the months. In The Clouds of Aristophanes, the Moon complains, "You subvert the calendar and fail to observe her days. When the sacred days are unobserved, the gods go hungry, and it is the Moon they threaten." In this confusion, many citizens returned to direct personal observation of the rising moon. Beginning in the second century bce, two sets of dates were recorded, "according to the state and according to the deity [Selene]."
In Mesopotamia the month began with the sighting of the new moon. A letter to the Assyrian king Esarhaddon (r. 680–669 bce) states, "On the thirtieth I saw the moon. It was in a high position. The king should wait for the report from the city of Assur and then may determine the first day of the month." There are indications that in some cities months alternated between thirty and twenty-nine days in a nineteen-year cycle with regular intercalations. By the time of the Seleucids (third century bce), it was possible to calculate the appearance of the new moon and to predict eclipses.
In India, religious festivals are still regulated by the lunar calendar, as are such domestic events as marriages. The moon festivals—two days for the new moon, one for the full moon—are considered important, even by Buddhists. The present names of the months are derived from the nakshatras ("lunar mansions"), twenty-seven or twenty-eight conspicuous stars along the ecliptic through which the moon passes.
The early Hebrews celebrated the new moon with a feast, which was a family gathering at which animals were sacrificed. The months were identified by the agricultural activity taking place at the time. The beginning of the month, after being attested to by observers, was announced to various communities by fire signals at first, and later by messengers. Since messengers could not always reach the outlying groups in a day, festivals often went on for two days. Since Passover, celebrated at the full moon, was originally a feast of the first fruits, it had to occur after the reaping of the grain. Thus it became necessary to add another month after Adar (approximately March). After the exile the calendar followed the Babylonian system, using Babylonian names for the months, counting the days from the evening, and intercalating an extra month on a regular basis. After the third century there was increasing dependence on calculation of the beginning of the month, though some sects from time to time insisted on reverting to direct observation.
The lunar year to which Muslims adhere was not established until 631 ce, when Muhammad made his last pilgrimage to Mecca. There he proclaimed that the year should consist of twelve lunar months and that intercalation should be forbidden. As Arabs before that time had probably had a combination lunar and solar calendar, it is likely that Muhammad intended to discourage old pagan festivals. His system won acceptance by the Arabs, who since ancient times held the moon in special reverence. The festivals now run through the whole year and come back to the same solar season in about thirty-three years. The new month begins when two trustworthy Muslims notify the authorities that they have observed the new moon from a mountaintop or from an open field. The crescent motif (the hilal) has been much used throughout the centuries in Islamic art and in the last two hundred years has appeared on the standard of Islam.
Early Christians attached importance to celebrating Easter at the time of the Jewish Passover but agreed that Easter should fall on a Sunday. In the third century Christians began to frame lunar calculations for themselves. The Easter controversy raged in the early church and still exists between the Western and Eastern churches. The final conditions arrived at in the West are that Easter must be kept on the Sunday after the paschal moon (the calendar moon whose fourteenth day falls on or after the vernal equinox), reckoned from the day of the new moon inclusive.
The Moon as Deity
Only once, so far as is known, did the moon as divinity command political power and an influential priesthood, but it did so for about three thousand years, through changes of race, language, and regime. The place was the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, known as Mesopotamia ("between the rivers"), and the cult spread or grew independently in Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Anatolia.
In the southern part of the Land between the Rivers there appeared around 5000 bce the first urban civilization—a group of cities in which trade, division of labor, metalworking, organized religion, and writing were developed by a people whom history knows as Sumerians. Each of the cities was under the protection of a high god and in the beginning was probably ruled by the priesthood of the god. By the time the first records appear, these gods are all related. An is the creator-sky god. His son, Enlil, the Air, carries on most of the business of controlling the other gods and resides in the holy city of Nippur. The first son of Enlil is Nanna, the Moon, patron of the important city of Ur. His wife is Ningal, daughter of the Lady of the Reeds, a moisture goddess from the marshes. The children of Enlil and Ningal are Utu, the Sun, and Inanna, warrior goddess of love and the Evening Star. The trio of Moon, Sun, and Evening Star are often found together on royal stelae down through Babylonian times.
The Semitic-speaking peoples who succeeded the Sumerians—Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians—took over most of their inventions and adopted the Sumerian pantheon, giving the gods Semitic names. Nanna became Sin; Utu, Shamash; and Inanna, Ishtar.
C. Leonard Woolley, excavating at Ur in 1922–1934, found the famous royal tombs, containing the bodies of mass suicides, royal ladies (who Woolley surmised might have been priestesses of the Moon), and a harp with a bull's head and a lapis lazuli beard, the Strong Bull of Nanna. He also describes the ziggurat of Ur, dedicated to the Moon, the best preserved of its kind in the Near East. At the top of the ziggurat, a high staged tower terraced with trees, was a shrine where the god rested, gave dream oracles, or took part in a sacred marriage. This last is suggested by a hymn in which Ningal addresses Nanna, "In your house on high I will come to you, Nanna. In your perfumed cedar mountain, in your mansion of Ur, I will come to live."
At the base of the ziggurat was a large temple, the real home of the god, where he was fed and clothed daily. Probably the people saw the god only when he was paraded at each phase of the moon—on the first, seventh, and fifteenth days of the month. The temple was a huge complex of storehouses, kitchens, and rooms for priests and slaves. It was a landowner and received rent in kind, which was used for sacrifices and for feeding the enormous staff. Slaves were employed in smelting, weaving, and preparing goods for sale. The high priestess of Nanna was traditionally a king's daughter.
A text describes how Nanna made a pilgrimage to visit his father Enlil at the holy city of Nippur, taking agricultural products and receiving in return Enlil's blessing. Enlil confirmed his son in power as Nanna, the king of Ur. It is likely that the king acted out the life of the god. During the dark days of the moon, called the "days of lying down," the queen conducted the rituals.
The temple complex at Ur was destroyed and reconstructed many times over the centuries, by Assyrians, Babylonians, even by alien Kassites, and finally by Cyrus, the Persian invader. The complex was rebuilt not to conciliate the people but to preserve good relations with the god.
The Assyrians, who took over from the Sumerians the worship of the moon under the name of Sin, built another moon city, Haran, on the Euphrates. The Assyrian kings came to Haran to "take the hand" of Sin after they had been confirmed by their own god, Ashur. In the sanctuary at Haran was a dream oracle, where Esarhaddon (r. 680–669 bce) was told to proceed to the conquest of Egypt, which he did. Moon worship continued at Haran well into Islamic times when it was the center for a planet-worshiping people called the Sabaeans. The emperor Julian worshiped the moon at the temple in Haran in 365 ce.
In the early sixth century bce, Babylon was the area's greatest city. Its founder, Nebuchadrezzar, set about rebuilding Ur. His successor, Nabonidus, was an antiquarian and a devoted worshiper of the moon. His mother (or grandmother) had been governor of Haran, and he was perhaps partly of West Semitic origin. In records of Ur, Nabonidus found the inscription of Ur-Namma, founder of the third dynasty of Ur (2100 bce), whom he called "a king before me." Upon the ancient foundation he rebuilt the ziggurat "as in old times." He also rebuilt the temple at Haran and one in the Arabian city of Tema, where he remained for eleven years. Many critics in Babylon claimed he was putting his god Sin above Marduk.
The name of the moon in Canaan was Yarih. A Canaanite text tells of his wedding to Nikkal (related to Ningal, wife of the Sumerian moon god): "I shall make her field into vineyards, the field of their love an orchard" (Samuel Noah Kramer, Ugaritic Manual, 1955, no. 77). There is no doubt that the golden calf worshiped in Genesis was a figure of the moon and that Mount Sinai was his home.
Throughout Anatolia there are depictions of and inscriptions to the Anatolian moon god, called Men, from the Indo-European root for moon and measure. He was known as Menotyrannus ("lord of the moon"), Men Ouranios ("lord of the sky"), or Katachonios ("lord of the underworld"), suggesting that he was a god of death and rebirth. We cannot be sure whether he arrived along the trade routes from the Near East or was an indigenous deity. Later Men became confused with the "dying and rising god" Attis, the castrated follower, son, or lover of the Great Mother of Phrygia, Cybele, as well as with Dionysos and Sabazios of Thrace, two other dying and rising gods.
The Moon in Mythology
In ancient India, Soma was the deification of a sacred plant that, when pressed, strained, and mixed with milk and barley, became an intoxicating drink for men and gods. The whole ninth book of the Ṛgveda is devoted to the praise of the yellow drink, which it identifies with the yellow moon. There is a marriage hymn in which the god Soma is married to the Sun, Sūrya, and has his head in the laps of the Nakṣatras ("lunar mansions"). Soma is celestial and bright, dispelling darkness and dwelling in the waters. In a later hymn, Soma is said to have married all twenty-seven Nakṣatras, daughters of the creator god, but he prefers one, Rohiṇī (possibly identified with the evening star). The other wives complain to their father, who afflicts the moon with a wasting sickness, causing his waning and disappearance. The Moon promises to reform and then grows back again, but always he relapses. In this problem the Moon is aided by Śiva, like Soma an ancient god of change, fertility, and destruction. Śiva wears the Moon's crest on his head; Soma is known as the "crest of Śiva." In a wheeled chariot drawn by a horse or an antelope, Soma leaves the sky to visit the earth at the new moon to revitalize plants and animals. Soma as an intoxicating drink has been compared to the wine of the Greek Dionysos, which the playwright Euripides described as "a drink that is poured out, a god for a god."
In Iran there is also a ritual of the sacred drink, there called haoma, which is not identified with the moon. In one hymn, the Moon is one of a triad of divinities, the lowest one being the sacred ox, who is sacrificed. The seed of the ox enters the Moon, where it is purified and divides into all the species of plants and animals. Iranians dedicated the right eye of every sacrificed animal to the Moon. They believed that when all things were put in motion by Angra Mainyu, or Evil, the Moon created time, which will run until Angra Mainyu is overthrown.
The ancient Greeks had only one myth concerning the moon, there called Selene, "the bright one." It is the story of how she fell in love with Endymion, a prince of Elis, while he was sleeping on Mount Latmos in Asia Minor. She begged Zeus to give Endymion eternal sleep so that she could visit him every night. In this way she managed to have fifty children by him, the number of the lunations between Olympic games, or equal to one-half of the eight-year cycle. Though there are almost no rituals associated with the moon in Greece, there are traces of moon worship from earlier times and in outlying regions. The Endymion myth connects Asia Minor with western Greece. According to Plato, mothers and nurses in ancient times taught children to bow down to the new moon. Torchlight parades for Selene are mentioned. A dream oracle in the Peloponnese, frequented by ephors from Sparta, was dedicated to Helios (the Sun) and to Pasiphae (the name, meaning "shining on all," is an epithet of the Moon). There was a queen named Pasiphae in Crete, where there are many traces of bull worship. In the myth, this Pasiphae fell in love with a white bull and from their union produced the Minotaur, who was half man and half bull. Another bull brought Europa (whose name, meaning "broad-faced," is another epithet for the Moon) from Phoenicia to Crete.
In Baltic mythology the sun is feminine and the moon masculine. The Balts say that the Sun was once married to the Moon, but he left her for the Morning Star. This so enraged the storm god, the most important Baltic god, that he beat the Moon with his sword, thus reducing the latter's size. The Sun and Moon have many children, the stars, but the Morning Star is a product of a union of the Sun with the storm god himself. The Moon, in shame and anger, avoids his wife, and they never appear together.
In Japan, the Sun, the most important divinity, is feminine; the Moon, her brother, plays only a minor role. Once the Sun ordered the Moon to go down to earth to find out what the goddess of food was doing. When the Moon arrived on earth, the goddess of food, meaning to please him, turned her face toward the land and from her mouth poured out boiled rice; toward the sea, all kinds of fish; and toward the mountains, all kinds of game. The Moon, instead of being pleased, was so enraged that she had offered him things from her mouth that he killed her. Out of her corpse were born the horse, the cow, and the silkworm. Back in Heaven the Sun, angry with her brother for what he had done, said, "I'll see you no more," and so they never meet.
Another myth of plant discovery is told by the Machiganga of Peru. It relates that the Moon gave mortals cultivated plants, giving instructions about them to a mortal girl whom he eventually married. He caused his wife to be fertilized by a fish, and she produced four sons: the daytime Sun, the planet Venus, the Sun Under the Earth (i.e., the sun at night), and the nocturnal Sun, invisible to all but shedding its light on the stars. This fourth child was so hot that he scorched his mother's womb, and she died. The Moon's mother-in-law reproached him, saying that there was nothing left for him to do but to eat the corpse. His wife, disgusted with life on earth, had left her body there and taken her soul to the underworld. The Moon was distressed but obeyed his mother-in-law. Thus the Moon became an eater of corpses and decided to move far away from the earth.
All types of creation myths explain the origin of the moon, usually together with the sun. The cosmic egg motif occurs in the Finnish epic Kalevala: the egg falls from heaven onto the knee of the creator goddess as she floats in the cosmic waters, and from it emerge all the aspects of the universe. The sun was made out of the yellow of the egg and the moon out of the white. In Greenland, the Sun and Moon are a mortal pair, sister and brother. In a house with no light they lay together. When the sister discovered that she had committed incest, she tore off her breasts and threw them at her brother; the holes they left became sunspots. Then she flew away and he after her, both carrying torches. The sister's torch burned brighter so she became the sun, and her brother, the moon.
To the type of myth in which the world is created out of the body of a primal being belongs the Huron story of Ataentsic. She was a creation mother goddess who was thrown down from heaven through the hole in the sky she had made by tearing up the world tree. Landing on earth, she gave birth to twins, one good and one evil. The evil son killed her, but the good one made the sun from her face and the moon from her breasts.
In the Aztec pantheon, Huitzilopochtli is a warrior god, culture hero, and the sun. When Mother Earth became pregnant with him (her last child), her other children, the stars, were angry and pursued her to kill her. But one, called Golden Bells, ran ahead to warn her mother. The sun god sprang fully armed from the womb and beheaded Golden Bells. Learning that she had meant well, in compensation he put her head in the sky as the moon, but he chased the other stars away, as the sun does at rising.
The Greek Hesiod (seventh century bce) describes all creation as the result of sexual union. From the original parents, Earth and Sky, were born twelve Titans, who paired off and produced most of the natural objects as well as the gods. One pair, Theia and Hyperion, become the parents of the Sun (Helios), the Moon (Selene), and the Dawn (Eos). Another pair of Titans became the grandparents of Hekate, goddess of the underworld, and of Artemis, the huntress. Hekate and Artemis later became identified with the moon. In the Homeric Hymn to the Moon (sixth century bce), the Moon has a daughter, Pandia, by Zeus. There was a festival at Athens called the Pandia where round moon cakes were sold and eaten.
In one of the emergence myths characteristic of the southwestern United States, the Pueblo tell how mortals came up in several stages to the surface of the earth. Finding it in darkness, they tossed into the sky the moon and sun, which they had brought with them. A variant of the emergence myth is found in Oceania, in which mankind or the gods are originally enclosed in a shell that they have to pry open. In a Micronesian story, the creator god, Ancient Spider, encased in such a shell, found two snails; after he opened the shell he used the smaller for the moon and the larger for the sun.
In Queensland, the Sun is a woman made by the Moon; although she has two legs, she has a number of arms, which can be seen as the sun's rays. Among the Aranda (Arunta) of Australia, a man of the Opossum totem carried the Moon around with him in a shield, keeping it hidden in a cleft of the rocks all day. One day a man of another totem saw the Moon shining and ran away with it. The Opossum man, unable to catch the thief, called out to the Moon to rise into the sky and shed light on everyone. This it did, and it has remained in the sky ever since.
According to the Pima Indians of North America, the Sun and Moon are parents of Coyote, the famous trickster figure in mythology. In another story, it is Coyote who invents the Sun and Moon. Some Altaic-speaking peoples of Siberia believe that in the beginning there was no sun or moon, but people themselves flew around in the air and gave out light. A high god sent a spirit to help them. Stirring the primeval waters, he found two mirrors, which he set up in the sky as the sun and the moon. Mirrors are often used in rituals by Siberian shamans, and in their out-of-body travels they frequently reach the moon.
The Moon and Death
Because of its monthly disappearance and return, the moon is often connected with the idea of mortal death and rebirth. In the Caroline Islands it is believed that in the beginning men rose from the dead, as did the moon. Every month they fell into a deep sleep when the moon became dark and awoke when the moon returned. An evil spirit disapproved of this and arranged for men to stay dead. In New Zealand, in a similar story, it is the culture hero Maui who wished men to live forever, but the moon said, "No, let them die and become like the soil."
In western Ceram, an island westward of New Guinea, a divine maiden was desired in marriage by the sun god. When her parents, disapproving, put a dead pig in her marriage bed as a substitute for her (perhaps a vestige of a changeover from human to animal sacrifice), the Sun caused her to sink into the ground. The girl called out to her parents, "Slaughter a pig and make a feast. In three days, look into the sky where I will be shining like a light." Thus the feast of the dead was instituted, and mortals for the first time saw the moon rising.
To the Siberian Inuit (Eskimo), death is conceived as loss of one's soul, which travels up to the moon and finally to the sun. This upward flight of the soul through the planets and stars is a widespread motif, found earliest among the Sumerians. It turns up again in Plato's Republic and in Cicero's Somnium scipionis, where the younger Scipio Africanus dreams he visits his grandfather in the heavens and looks down on all the celestial spheres. Below the moon, his grandfather tells him, all is chaos, but up here all is pure and serene.
The fullest account of the moon as the "abode of souls" is found in the essay De facie lunae by Plutarch (second century ce). Pythagorean philosophers had already taught that the Elysian Fields, the Greek isles of the dead, were situated on the sun and moon. In his essay Plutarch describes mortals as consisting of three parts: body, soul, and reason. In death the body is dissolved by Demeter, who stands for Mother Earth. The soul, together with reason, floats upward and, if pure, reaches the moon. If corrupt, it must wander between the earth and the moon until it is purified. The moon is ruled by Persephone, the Greek queen of the underworld, now transferred to the upper spheres. The souls who remain on the moon become beneficent spirits who return to earth to give oracles and help mortals in other ways. Gradually they are dissolved into pure reason and reach the sun.
In one of the earliest Indian Upanisads we are told that there are two roads open to souls after death: the road of flame and the road of smoke. The road of flame leads to the sun and the gods; the road of smoke to the moon, the ancestors, and reincarnation.
In the teaching of Mani, founder of the Manichaeans, the souls of those who have learned the truth during their lives are taken up to the wheel of the sun, where they are purified and passed on to the moon, here described as the superior station. Both of the luminaries are pictured as boats sailing to and fro in the upper atmosphere. When the moon becomes full of souls, it ferries them toward the East to the "aeons of light," who place them in the "pillar of glory," their final resting place. Then the moon, greatly reduced in size, returns for another load of souls.
The Moon and the Occult
Witches' meetings are held at the full moon, but the dark of the moon is the time for black sorcery. A practice known as "drawing down the moon" is pictured on Greek vases. In the Voyage of the Argo (Apollonius Rhodius, third century bce), Medea, the priestess of Hekate, is gathering herbs when the Moon addresses her, saying "How often have you disorbed me, making the nights moonless so you might practice your incantations." In this case the Moon would seem to be guiltless in the magic rites.
The lucky rabbit's foot must be taken in the dark of the moon, perhaps because the hare is one of the Moon's animals and she might protect it. According to Aelianos, a Greek writer of the third century ce, the moon causes epilepsy, which may be cured by a special kind of peony that, like the mandrake root, cannot be seen by day but must be gathered at night by tying to it a dog who pulls up the root and then dies (On Animals 24). This plant also cures afflictions of the eyes "in which moisture congeals and robs the eyes of their sight." Spells to reunite lovers are especially effective when cast by moonlight. In Theocritus (third century bce) a lovesick girl calls on the moon for help in her enchantment. The Roman poet Catullus (first century bce), in his hymn to Diana, calls her Trivia, Lady of the Crossroads (i.e., Hekate), and the "moon with counterfeit light." In the Middle Ages Diana was considered the ruler of witches, together with the "horned god." Pope John XII (tenth century) accused witches of "riding with Diana."
In dream divination, according to Artemidorus (Interpretation of Dreams, second century ce), "Intercourse with the Moon is entirely auspicious for shipmasters, pilots, merchants, astronomers, vagabonds and people fond of travelling. But for others it means dropsy.… Selene the Moon represents both the wife and mother of the dreamer. She also represents prosperity, business ventures and navigation."
Thoth, the Egyptian god of measure and writing, was appointed by the sun god Re to take his place in the underworld as the moon. Thoth is also the god of magic and spells, like the Greek Hermes. In the Hellenistic period, the two were combined as authors of a series of magico-mystical writings under the name of Hermes Trismegistos.
In the astrology that took form in Alexandria around the second century bceas a combination of Near Eastern star lore and Greek mathematics, the moon, "when at its northern or southern limits helps in the direction of greater versatility, resourcefulness and capacity for change; in its rising, toward greater natural endowments, firmness and frankness; in its waning, towards dullness, less fixity of purpose and less renown" (Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, second century ce).
In modern astrology, the moon "stands for the feminine, indrawn, receptive, and imaginative side. It tends toward carefulness, prudence, timidity, shyness, and the secluded life, though the lunar person is shrewd and practical in business" (Charles E. Carter, Principles of Astrology, London, 1969, p. 50).
The Moon in Folklore
Almost universal are cautions and devices to take advantage of the beneficent (and to avoid the unlucky) aspects of the moon, as well as theories to explain the moon spots. It has seemed an obvious ritual to farmers all over the world to plant during the waxing moon and reap during the waning moon, and this is still done in many parts of the United States. In pre-revolutionary France the law required trees to be felled during the waxing moon so that their wood would be drier. Hair, on the other hand, should be cut at the waning moon to make it thick. In England, shingles laid during the waning moon tend to swell. All over Europe, money, especially silver, the moon's metal, is exposed to the waxing moon or turned over in the pocket to make it grow. In Uganda, potters wait for the waxing moon before firing their pots. Warts are everywhere believed to grow as the moon waxes and to decrease at the wane.
Some Muslims in India practice a ritual called "drinking the moon." They fill a silver basin with water, let it reflect the light of the full moon, and drink it at a gulp as a remedy for palpitations and nervous disorders. Mothers in many places present their babies to the full moon so they will grow. In New Guinea, men on a hunting expedition leave their women at home to sing to the new moon for the success of the hunt. Natives of Greenland believe that women can become pregnant from sleeping in the light of the full moon. To prevent this, women wipe their abdomens with spittle. Weddings are variously believed to be lucky if held at the full moon or at the dark of the moon. The latter is explained by Plutarch (De facie lunae ), who claimed that the moon rushed to conjunction with the sun so that she might be refreshed by his light.
There are innumerable explanations for the spots that the West calls the "Man in the Moon." Some South American Indians believe they are ashes or menstrual blood smeared on the (male) Moon when he raped his sister the Sun. The Selk'nam of South America say they are the results of a beating the (female) Moon received when the Sun discovered that she had disclosed her initiation rites. The same spots are often described as a hare, a frog, a snail, or some other animal or as some mortal lured up to the moon. In Scandinavian mythology they are a boy and girl carrying water, supposed to be the prototypes of Jack and Jill. The Shawnee Indians see in the spots their creator goddess bending over a cooking pot. Among the Malay, they are an old man making a fishing line under a banyan tree. At the other end of the line is a rat, who is eating the line as fast as the man can make it. When the old man is finished, he will use the line to catch everything on the earth and reel it up to the moon.
There is widespread belief that the light of the full moon turns humans who are so disposed into werewolves and causes lunacy if one sleeps in its beams. Very common in Europe and America is the idea that, during the night of the full moon, more crimes are committed, more children are born, and more patients committed to mental hospitals than at other times.
See Also
Bibliography
Since there are few books devoted to the religious and mythological aspects of the moon, most information on the subject must be extracted from religious writings and from histories of the religions of different areas. The most important source for ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt is volume 1 of The Ancient Near East, edited by James B. Pritchard (Princeton, 1973). For the origin of the calendar, an excellent account is Elias J. Bickerman's Chronology in the Ancient World (Ithaca, N.Y., 1968). By far the most complete book on the development of astrology is still Auguste Bouché-Leclerq's L'astrologie grecque (Paris, 1899). Franz Cumont's Recherche sur le symbolisme funeraire des Romains contains an unusual amount of data on alien sects of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. An essay by Mircea Eliade entitled "The Moon and Its Mystique," in Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York, 1958), provides many insights into the symbolism and iconography of the moon. The same author's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, rev. & enl. ed. (New York, 1964), gives a background for the religions of Siberia and the American Indians. For folklore on the moon a good source is the Funk and Wagnall's Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend (New York, 1950). Åke Hultkrantz, in Religions of the American Indians (Los Angeles, 1979), gives a concise but thorough summary of the beliefs of the Indians of North and South America. The most recent and fullest account of the religions of the Near East is found in Thorkild Jacobsen's The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion (New Haven, 1976). The best, most complete book on the subject of the moon is La lune: Mythes et rites, edited by Denise Berndt (Paris, 1962), with essays by separate authors on various areas of the world. Some new insights and original research appear in Julius Lewy's "The Late Assyro-Babylonian Cult of the Moon and Its Culmination at the Time of Nabonidus," Hebrew Union College Annual (1945–1946): 405–489. An extremely useful collection of material from all over the world is The Mythology of All Races, 13 vols., edited by Louis Herbert Gray and George Foot Moore (Boston, 1916–1932), under the auspices of the Archaeological Institute of America. Martin P. Nilsson brings to his Geschichte der griechischen Religion (Munich, 1955) a wealth of information on archaeology and comparative religion. Still the most complete collection of mythological material is Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie, 7 vols. in 10, edited by W. H. Roscher (1866–1893; Hildesheim, 1965). The series "Sacred Books of the East" (1879–1910), containing the sacred writings of India and Persia collected by F. Max Müller, was reissued at Delhi in 1965.
New Sources
Beaulieu, Paul-Alain. "The Babylonian Man in the Moon." Journal of Cuneiform Studies 51 (1999): 91–99.
Keel, Othmar. Goddesses and Trees, New Moon and Yahweh: Ancient Near Eastern Art and the Hebrew Bible. Sheffield, U.K., 1998.
Komaroff, Katherine. Sky Gods: The Sun and Moon in Art and Myth. New York, 1974.
López Austin, Alfredo. Rabbit on the Face of the Moon: Mythology in the Mesoamerican Tradition. Salt Lake City, 1996.
Neyrolles, Olivier. Lune (Moon). Paris, 1999.
Ornan, Tallay. "The Bull and Its Two Masters: Moon and Storm Dieties in Relation to the Bull in Ancient Near Eastern Art." Israel Exploration Journal 51/1 (2001): 1–26.
Sermonetti, Giuseppe. Fiabe di luna: simboli lunari nella favola, nel mito, nella scienza (Moon stories: moon symbols in fable, myth and science). Milan, 1986.
Theuer, Gabriele. Der Mondgott in den Religionen Syrien-Palästinas. Freiburg, Switzerland, 2000.
Jean Rhys Bram (1987)
Revised Bibliography