Moon Mythology

Nanna is the son of Enlil and Ninlil. He is lord of Ur, and the Sun god Utu and Inanna are his children. He fixes the months, the calendar and fate, and the crescent is read as his bull's horns. The cult of Sin at Harran lasted into Roman times. For Babylon the Moon mattered more than the Sun. Nanna in the Mesopotamian family tree →

Selene is the daughter of Hyperion and Theia and the sister of Helios. She crosses the night sky in a two-horse chariot. She falls in love with the shepherd Endymion, asleep on Mount Latmos, and asks Zeus to give him eternal sleep and eternal youth. Selene is the Moon itself as a heavenly body. Selene in the Greek family tree →

Artemis is the daughter of Zeus and Leto and the twin of Apollo. She presides over the hunt, wild nature, virginity and childbirth, and she protects young girls. When Actaeon sees her naked she turns him into a stag. In the Hellenistic age she is identified with the crescent Moon, and Rome worships her as Diana. Her second face is not the virgin huntress but the mistress of animals. In the Iliad Homer calls her potnia theron, mistress of the wild beasts, and the epithet reaches back to the old mother goddess of Anatolia. On the same line stands Cybele, the Phrygian mother goddess who sits among lions, and her priests, the Galli, castrated themselves when they were dedicated to her. The Artemis of Ephesus resembles this Anatolian mother goddess far more than she resembles the Greek huntress. Artemis in the Greek family tree →

Hecate is the daughter of Perses and Asteria. She is the three-faced goddess of crossroads, magic, night and thresholds. When Demeter searches for Persephone, Hecate lights her way with a torch. She is the goddess of the dark Moon, the crone and witchcraft, and the dog and the key are her emblems. Her witch's face is spoken of together with Circe and Medea. In the Odyssey Circe turns the men of Odysseus into swine on her island with drugs and words. Apollonius of Rhodes presents Medea as a priestess of Hecate. In Greek narrative these names hold together the knowledge of night, of drugs and of the threshold, and they belong to the dark phase of the Moon. Hecate in the Greek family tree →

In Egypt the Moon is male. Khonsu means 'the traveller', and he is the Theban god who measures time. Thoth is the lunar scribe and the lord of the calendar and of reckoning. The Egyptians saw the Moon as the left eye of Horus. Seth wounds it, Thoth heals it, and the healed eye is called the wedjat. Khonsu in the Egyptian family tree →

Mani is the son of Mundilfari and the boy who drives the Moon across the sky. The wolf Hati chases him without rest. In the Germanic languages the Moon is male (der Mond), and Monday (Montag) is his day. He takes two children, Bil and Hjuki, up with him, and some scholars trace the nursery rhyme of Jack and Jill and their pail to this story. Mani in the Norse family tree →

Chandra is the Moon as a graha in Vedic astrology, and he stands for the mind (manas), the mother and the feelings. The twenty-seven nakshatras are his wives. Because he favours Rohini among them, he is cursed to wane. The name Soma is both the Moon and the drink of immortality. Monday (Somavara) is his day.

Tsukuyomi is the Moon kami born from Izanagi's right eye. He kills the food goddess Ukemochi because she produces food from her mouth. Amaterasu is offended and never meets him again. This is how the Japanese story explains the separation of day and night. Tsukuyomi in the Japanese family tree →

The crescent corresponds to the maiden Artemis, the full moon to the mother and lover Selene, and the dark moon to the crone and witch Hecate. In this pairing the three phases of the Moon stand for the three ages of a woman's life. Greek sources at times unite the three goddesses in one Moon. Robert Graves later placed this triad at the centre of modern paganism.

In astrology the Moon stands for the mother, the body, habit and need. The tides, the menstrual cycle and pregnancy were once measured by the Moon's rhythm. The Moon's sign in the chart shows how we are nourished and how we nourish others.

The Moon is humanity's first clock and first calendar. The Babylonian month begins with the new crescent, and the Hebrew and Islamic calendars still begin the month with the crescent. Nanna is called the one who 'counts the months' and Thoth the one who 'reckons time'. The twenty-eight lunar mansions form the backbone of Arabic and Indian astrology.

The word lunaticus comes from the Latin luna and means 'moon-struck'. Feelings that overflow at the full moon, sleepwalking and werewolf tales all speak of the Moon's link to the unconscious. Endymion's endless sleep and his dream belong to the Moon as well.

The metal of the Moon is silver. Moonlight is the reflection of the Sun, so the Moon is counted as a mirror with no light of its own. In alchemy Luna is the feminine partner of Sol, and the chemical wedding (coniunctio) is the union of the two. In the body the brain, the stomach, the breast and the left eye are assigned to the Moon.

In the tarot the High Priestess sits between two pillars, with a crescent at her feet and a closed book in her lap. The card speaks of hidden knowledge, intuition and turning inward. In the Golden Dawn system it is the card of the Moon. In Kabbalah it is linked to Yesod (Foundation), the sphere of imagination and the unconscious. Card XVIII, The Moon, speaks of illusion rather than intuition.

Selene sees the shepherd Endymion asleep on Latmos and falls in love with him. Zeus agrees to grant the shepherd whatever he wishes, and Endymion asks for eternal youth in eternal sleep. Selene visits him every night and bears him fifty daughters. In the myth the beloved never changes while the Moon arrives in a different phase each night, and so the story sets the Moon's cycle beside the constancy of passion.

Seth tears out the left eye of Horus, which is the Moon. Thoth gathers the pieces and heals the eye, and the Moon fills again. The healed eye, the wedjat, becomes the amulet of wholeness and healing. Its parts were used as the Egyptian fraction signs (1/2, 1/4, ... 1/64). In this myth the waning and waxing of the Moon are read as wound and healing.

In the Theogony Hesiod presents Gaia as the earth itself and the ancestress of the gods. Demeter is the goddess of ploughed land, of grain and of motherhood. According to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, when her daughter Persephone is taken below the goddess sinks into mourning and the earth bears nothing, and spring returns when the girl comes back. Demeter has no direct counterpart among the seven classical planets, and her link with the Moon is a modern reading made through the archetype of the mother. Demeter in the Greek family tree →

Hera is the guardian of marriage, of the lawful family and of the city, and her largest temples stood at Argos and Samos. In the Astronomica of Hyginus she sends a crab to help the Hydra while Heracles is fighting it. The hero crushes the creature and the goddess sets it in the sky, and that is how the constellation of Cancer comes about. Because the Moon rules Cancer, this small story is read together with the Moon's meanings of home, family and homeland. Hera in the Greek family tree →

In the Book of the Heavenly Cow, Ra sends his Eye down to earth in the form of Hathor-Sekhmet to punish humankind. Once the goddess starts drinking blood she cannot be stopped, so the gods pour beer dyed red across the fields. She takes it for blood and drinks it, and her rage subsides with her drunkenness. In the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Ishtar cries out like a woman in labour on the night of the flood, because the people the water destroys are her own. In both stories the fluid that rises and withdraws is spoken of alongside the tides and cycles assigned to the Moon. Hathor in the Egyptian family tree →

In the chart the Moon stands for the body and for the body's memory. In Christian Astrology Lilly assigns the brain, the stomach, the breast and the bowels to the Moon, that is, the part of the trunk that feeds and digests. In The Ego and the Id Freud writes that the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego, and the term body ego comes from there. Locating feeling in the solar plexus, the belly and the chest describes the same bodily self.

The dark phase of the Moon is described through enclosed places. In Hesiod, Rhea gives birth to Zeus in a cave on Crete and rears the child there. The same shape returns in the grave, since the dead are laid in a hollow cut into the earth. At Eleusis the initiates went down below and came back up counted as born again, which is why womb, cave and grave share one enclosed darkness.

In the Edda Snorri Sturluson describes Yggdrasil as the ash that holds the nine worlds together. The well of Urd lies beneath one of its three roots, and the three Norns draw water from it each day so that the tree does not wither. The dew that falls from its leaves is called honey dew and the bees feed on it. Reading the world tree as the nourishing mother and attaching it to the Moon is the work of later comparative interpretation rather than of the Norse source.

Yesod is the ninth sphere on the tree of the sefirot and its name means foundation. The Zohar describes it as the channel that gathers the flow of the spheres above and passes it downward. Malkuth, the tenth and lowest sphere, means kingdom, and because it is receptive it is identified with the Shekhinah. Kabbalah reads the waning of the moon as the diminishment of the Shekhinah, while the scheme that pairs planets with sefirot attaches the Moon to Yesod, and that second pairing is the work of post-Renaissance occultism.

In the tarot the Empress sits on her throne with a field of grain and a river behind her. The card speaks of fertility, nourishment and material abundance, so it is taken as the card of the mother archetype. In the Golden Dawn system it is attributed not to the Moon but to Venus and to the Hebrew letter Daleth. The card of the Moon is II The High Priestess, and the Empress enters lunar symbolism through the theme of the mother.

In Egypt Nut is the sky goddess who arches her body over the earth, swallowing Ra each evening and giving birth to him each morning. In Rome Fortuna turns her wheel and raises or lowers a person's luck. Tarot card X, the Wheel of Fortune, comes from that Roman image, and in the Golden Dawn system it is attributed not to the Moon but to Jupiter. Because the Moon changes phase on a regular cycle, images of turning and of luck are traditionally spoken of alongside it. Nut in the Egyptian family tree →

In alchemy the stage that follows the blackening (nigredo) is the whitening, called the albedo. In it the matter is washed and purified, which is why it belongs to silver and to Luna. The work proceeds in a closed vessel that the alchemists call the vas hermeticum, and they warn that the work is spoiled if its mouth is not sealed. Jung reads the albedo as the washing of material out of the unconscious until it can be told apart.

The oldest trace of the name Lilith leads back to the night demons of Mesopotamia, and Isaiah 34:14 lists her among the creatures that settle in the desert. The story that she was Adam's first wife and left the garden after demanding equality is found in the medieval Alphabet of Ben Sira. In that account Eve is the second attempt, while Lilith is the one who stays outside and refuses to submit. The point called Black Moon Lilith in astrology is the apogee of the Moon's orbit, defined by orbital geometry rather than by the myth, and joining the two is a modern interpretive tradition.