The Moon Across Civilizations

About The Moon Across Civilizations

The Moon is a rock 3,474 kilometers across, locked in synchronous rotation so that it turns once on its axis in exactly the time it takes to circle Earth — roughly 27.32 days, the sidereal month measured against the fixed stars (NASA lunar fact sheet). Because that rotation is tidally locked, one hemisphere faces Earth permanently; the far side was never seen by human eyes until the Soviet Luna 3 probe photographed it in 1959. To an observer in Ur, Thebes, Cusco, or Kyoto, none of that mechanics was visible. What was visible was a single body that changes shape on a fixed schedule — a thin crescent thickening to a full disk and thinning back to nothing across 29.53 days, the synodic month from one new moon to the next — that rises later each night, that drags the sea up and down twice a day, and that vanishes entirely for a night or two each cycle before returning. That rhythmic, countable, dying-and-reborn visibility is what made the Moon the second most universally deified celestial body in the written religious record, and the one most consistently tied to time-reckoning, the mind, emotion, and cyclical renewal.

This page maps the convergence. Chandra and Soma in Vedic Jyotish. Sin (Sumerian Nanna) in Mesopotamia. Khonsu and Thoth in Egypt. Selene, Artemis, and Hecate in Greece. Luna and Diana in Rome. Máni in Norse cosmology. Chang'e and the lunar rabbit in China. Tsukuyomi in Shinto. Mama Killa in the Inca state cult. Coyolxauhqui and Metztli in Mexica theology. The deities differ in gender, lineage, and ritual surface more than the solar gods do — and that difference is itself instructive. The shared substrate — measurer of time, governor of the mind and emotion, marker of the menstrual and tidal cycle, the body that dies and is reborn each month, and in many but not all traditions the feminine counterpart to a solar masculine — recurs with a regularity that is not adequately explained by borrowing.

The argument here, anchored to the Vedic framework Satyori teaches, is that the convergence is evidence rather than coincidence. The same observable body, watched independently across millennia, generated the same archetypal structure because the structure is encoded in what the body does. Chandra as karaka of manas — the receptive, fluctuating mind — is not an arbitrary Sanskrit metaphor; the way the Moon behaves, reflecting borrowed light, waxing and waning, governing the tides and the menstrual month, is the source from which the category of the changeable, reflective, emotional mind was abstracted. Cross-cultural lunar deities are independent cultural readings of the same astronomical text. This is the same analysis applied to the Sun across civilizations and Venus across civilizations, turned now to the second light.

Before deity, before priesthood, there was a counting problem. The Moon is the second-brightest object in the sky after the Sun — about 14 magnitudes fainter than the Sun yet roughly 400,000 times brighter than the next-brightest nighttime object — and unlike every other celestial body it visibly changes shape. That single fact gave humanity its first natural unit of time longer than a day and shorter than a year. The phases recur with such regularity that lunar calendars predate solar ones across most early literate cultures, and the English word month shares a root with moon, as do cognates across the Indo-European languages.

Four observational facts shaped every lunar theology. First, the phase cycle. The synodic month — new moon to new moon — averages 29.53059 days (29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes), the visible cycle of waxing and waning produced by the changing geometry between Sun, Moon, and Earth. The sidereal month — the Moon's return to the same position against the fixed stars — is shorter, 27.32166 days, because the Earth-Moon system advances along its solar orbit while the Moon circles. The roughly 2.2-day gap between the two is the reason a lunar calendar drifts against the seasons and requires intercalation, a problem solved in Babylon by the Metonic cycle of 19 years.

Second, the tides. The Moon's gravity raises two tidal bulges in Earth's oceans, producing two high tides and two low tides per day. When the Moon, Earth, and Sun align at new and full moon, the solar and lunar pulls combine into the higher-amplitude spring tides; when the Moon is at first or last quarter, the Sun pulls at right angles and partly cancels the lunar pull, producing the weaker neap tides (NOAA National Ocean Service). The tidal link between Moon and sea is observable on any coast and grounds the lunar association with water, the feminine, and rhythmic flow.

Third, libration and the hidden face. The Moon's synchronous rotation keeps one hemisphere always turned toward Earth, but the orbit is elliptical and tilted, so the Moon appears to rock slightly — a wobble called libration that lets an observer over a full cycle see about 59 percent of the surface rather than exactly half. The remaining far side stayed unseen until 1959. The permanently turned face reinforced the Moon's archetypal role as the keeper of a hidden, inward, or secret aspect.

Fourth, eclipses. A lunar eclipse occurs only at full moon, when Earth's shadow falls across the Moon; a solar eclipse occurs only at new moon, when the Moon's shadow falls on Earth. Because the lunar orbit is tilted about 5 degrees to the ecliptic, eclipses do not happen every month but only when a syzygy occurs near one of the two nodes where the orbits cross — twice-yearly eclipse seasons. The Babylonians reduced this to the Saros cycle of about 18 years, after which the eclipse pattern repeats. The temporary swallowing and return of the Moon during an eclipse fed directly into the dying-and-reborn motif, and into the Inca and South Asian image of a beast devouring the Moon. Satyori treats the eclipse layer in depth in eclipse mythology across civilizations.

The Rig Veda — composed between roughly 1500 and 1200 BCE — treats the Moon under two names that the later tradition keeps distinct in emphasis. Chandra ("shining," "bright") is the luminous disk. Soma is both the Moon and the sacred plant-derived ritual draught of the Vedic sacrifice, and the entire ninth Mandala of the Rig Veda — over a hundred hymns — is devoted to Soma Pavamana, the purifying Soma. The identification of the ritual Soma with the Moon develops across the Vedic and Brahmana literature into a single complex in which the Moon is the cup of soma drunk down by the gods and the ancestors across the waning fortnight and refilled across the waxing — an explanation of the phases as the draining and refilling of the lunar vessel.

In the developed Jyotish system, Chandra is one of the nine grahas, exalted in Vrishabha (Taurus) to a peak at 3 degrees, debilitated in the opposite point in Vrishchika (Scorpio), and ruler of Karka (Cancer). His karaka significations center on manas — the receptive, sensory, emotional, fluctuating mind, distinct from buddhi (intellect, signified by Mercury) — together with the mother, emotional disposition, the breasts and the chest cavity, bodily fluids and blood plasma, the public and the common people, and water. Where Surya signifies the atman, the steady soul, Chandra signifies the moving mind that reflects the soul's light the way the lunar disk reflects the Sun's — a structural distinction that maps directly onto the astronomy: the Moon is not self-luminous; it returns borrowed light.

Chandra governs three nakshatras — Rohini, Hasta, and Shravana — and is married, in the Puranic mythology, to all twenty-seven nakshatras, the lunar mansions described as the daughters of Daksha Prajapati. The myth is an astronomical fact dressed as a marriage: the sidereal month divides into 27 segments of about one day each, so the Moon "visits" one nakshatra per night and completes the full circuit of all twenty-seven in a sidereal month. The same mythology explains the phases through Daksha's curse: because Chandra favored Rohini above his other wives, Daksha cursed him to wane and die, and the curse was softened to a cycle of waning and renewal rather than permanent death — a narrative encoding of the observable waxing-waning rhythm. In the cycle-tracking tradition the Moon also anchors the Vimshottari Dasha system: Chandra rules a ten-year mahadasha, and the nakshatra the Moon occupies at birth sets the starting point of the entire 120-year dasha sequence — the Moon's position is the hinge of the whole predictive calendar.

Two structural features distinguish the Vedic reading. First, the Moon is the karaka of mind and mother, not of sovereignty — the Vedic Moon is receptive and nourishing rather than ruling. Second, the day named for the Moon, Somavara (Monday), preserves the Soma identification in the planetary week, the same scheme that gives Latin dies Lunae, French lundi, and English Monday (Old English Mōnandæg, "Moon's day").

The Sumerian moon god is Nanna, known in Akkadian as Su'en or Sin, one of the oldest deities in the Mesopotamian pantheon and attested from the dawn of writing around 3500 BCE. His principal cult center was the great ziggurat at Ur, and in the Ur III period (c. 2112-2004 BCE) he was honored as a chief god of the pantheon, bearing the epithet that the later tradition glossed as lord of wisdom. In the Mesopotamian astral order Sin is the father of the sun god Shamash (Sumerian Utu) and, in several traditions, of Inanna-Ishtar, the Venus goddess — the three forming the standard luminary triad of Moon, Sun, and Venus, with the Moon as the parent of the other two. That genealogy reverses the later European intuition: here the Moon is senior, the Sun his child.

Sin's signature symbol is the crescent, frequently drawn lying horizontal so that its two points resemble the horns of a bull — and the bull itself became his sacred animal, the waxing crescent read as the horns of the celestial herd-lord. The bull-crescent identification gave the Moon a fertility and cattle-herding association, reinforced by the rough match between the synodic month and the menstrual cycle. Sin's role was also calendrical and mantic: the Mesopotamian month began with the first sighting of the new crescent, and the appearance, color, and horns of the Moon were systematically read for omens in the Enuma Anu Enlil celestial-omen series and recorded alongside the planets in the MUL.APIN compendium. Babylonian lunar observation produced the eclipse and intercalation cycles that traveled westward into Hellenistic astronomy.

Egypt split the lunar function between two gods. Thoth — ibis-headed, god of writing, knowledge, and measurement — was the earlier lunar deity, the Moon serving as the natural emblem of the divine reckoner because its phases are what is counted. As Thoth's portfolio broadened into a general god of wisdom and time, the specifically lunar role passed to Khonsu, whose name means "traveller" — a title for the body that journeys nightly across the sky. Khonsu is attested from the Old Kingdom (c. 2686-2181 BCE) and rose to prominence in the New Kingdom (c. 1550-1070 BCE), where at Thebes he formed the Theban Triad as the son of Amun and Mut. He carried the epithets of the chronographer and the divider of the months, since the Egyptian lunar calendar partitioned the year by his cycle.

The Egyptian division of labor is itself a piece of evidence. The two lunar functions that recur worldwide — measurement of time and night-journey across the sky — were here distributed across two named gods, Thoth the reckoner and Khonsu the traveller, making explicit the conceptual joints that other traditions fuse into a single figure. Khonsu was also invoked for healing, the waxing Moon read as a restorative force, and a famous stele records his cult-image sent abroad to heal a foreign princess.

The Greek personification of the Moon is Selene (also Mene), daughter of the Titans Hyperion and Theia and sister of Helios the Sun and Eos the Dawn — the same Titan parentage as her solar brother, the genealogy itself asserting the Sun-Moon kinship. Selene drives a chariot across the night sky and is the lover of the sleeping shepherd Endymion. Alongside Selene, two Olympian-era goddesses absorbed lunar associations: Artemis, virgin huntress of the wild and protector of women in childbirth, and Hecate, goddess of crossroads, night, and the liminal. By the later tradition the three were read together as a lunar triad keyed to the Moon's phases — Selene the full Moon in the sky, Artemis the bright waxing Moon on earth, Hecate the dark Moon of the underworld — a tripartition that maps the phase cycle onto a single feminine complex.

Rome inherited the set under Latin names: Luna for Selene, Diana for Artemis, and Trivia ("of the three ways") for Hecate, worshipped together as a triad. Luna held an old place in the Roman calendar with a temple on the Aventine, and the planetary week preserved her in dies Lunae, the source of Romance lunedì / lundi / lunes and, through the Germanic calque, of English Monday. The Greco-Roman lunar complex is overwhelmingly feminine — the structural counterweight to the masculine Helios-Sol — and it is this Mediterranean gendering, inherited by European astrology, that makes the male moon gods of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Norse, and Japan look surprising to a Western eye. The cross-cultural record shows lunar gender is not fixed.

The Norse Moon is male: Máni ("Moon"), attested in the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (c. 1220 CE) as the son of Mundilfari and the brother of the Sun-goddess Sól. In the Prose Edda (Gylfaginning 11), Mundilfari named his children Moon and Sun for their beauty, and the gods, taking the naming as arrogance, set the two in the heavens to drive the chariots of the lights. Máni is chased across the sky by the wolf Hati Hróðvitnisson, the mirror of the wolf Sköll that pursues Sól (Grímnismál 39), and at Ragnarök one of the wolves is foretold to catch and swallow the Moon — the eclipse-and-renewal motif cast as cosmic pursuit. Máni also guides two children, Hjúki and Bil, taken up from Earth as they fetched water from a well, a detail some folklorists connect to the "man in the moon" and the markings of the lunar maria.

The Norse pairing keeps the Sun-Moon sibling structure of the Greek Helios-Selene while inverting the genders — feminine Sun, masculine Moon — a reminder that the gendered reading is a cultural overlay on a fixed astronomical pair. The day name Monday (Old English Mōnandæg, German Montag) carries the Germanic Moon into the same planetary week as the Latin and Sanskrit forms.

The Chinese Moon is the goddess Chang'e, whose story is bound to her husband Houyi, the archer who shot down nine of ten suns to save the scorched earth and was rewarded with an elixir of immortality. In the most widespread version Chang'e drinks the elixir — to keep it from a thief, or out of her own longing — and floats up to the Moon, where she remains, separated from Houyi who can never follow. Her companion is the Jade Rabbit (the lunar rabbit), seen in the dark markings of the Moon's face, pounding the herbs of the elixir of immortality with a mortar and pestle. The Mid-Autumn Festival, observed at the full moon of the eighth lunar month, centers on Chang'e and the full Moon. The lunar-rabbit motif recurs across East and South Asia — the markings of the maria read as a rabbit rather than a face — and the immortality association ties the Moon to deathlessness and renewal, the inverse of the dying-Moon reading found elsewhere.

The Japanese Moon god is Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto, born — in the Kojiki (712 CE) and Nihon Shoki (720 CE) — from the right eye of the primordial god Izanagi during his purification, while the Sun-goddess Amaterasu's sibling Amaterasu emerged from the left eye and the storm-god Susanoo from the nose. Tsukuyomi is the rare male Moon paired with a senior female Sun. The defining myth, in the Nihon Shoki, has Tsukuyomi kill the food-goddess Ukemochi in disgust at the manner in which she produced a feast; Amaterasu, appalled, refuses ever to face him again — and this is the mythic account of why Sun and Moon are separated into day and night, never sharing the sky. The killing of Ukemochi by sword is one of the textual markers cited for Tsukuyomi's male identity.

The Andean and Mesoamerican lunar traditions developed without contact with the Old World, and their structural agreement with it is part of the convergence argument. Mama Killa ("Mother Moon" in Quechua) is the Inca Moon goddess, sister and wife of the Sun-god Inti and generally ranked third in the state pantheon. Her temple stood within the Coricancha complex in Cusco — the lunar counterpart to Inti's gold-sheathed sanctuary — with walls plated in silver, the metal the Inca matched to the Moon's pale light, the same Moon-silver / Sun-gold correspondence found independently across the Old World. Mama Killa governed the calendar and the festival cycle and was the protector of women and of marriage; her tears were said to be silver. A lunar eclipse was read as a jaguar or serpent attacking the goddess, and the Inca would make noise and hurl weapons to drive the beast off — the same eclipse-as-devouring image attested in South Asia and in the Norse wolf, arising independently from the same observed event.

In central Mexico the Mexica (Aztec) Moon appears as Coyolxauhqui, "the one adorned with bells," daughter of the earth-goddess Coatlicue and leader of the four hundred star-brothers, the Centzon Huitznahua. In the foundational myth she leads her brothers against their mother and is killed and dismembered by her newborn brother Huitzilopochtli, the Sun-and-war god, who casts her head into the sky as the Moon and scatters her body — the dismemberment read as the nightly defeat of the Moon and stars by the rising Sun, the phases or the lunar disk as her severed head. The great circular Coyolxauhqui Stone, unearthed at the Templo Mayor in Mexico City in 1978, depicts her dismembered body. Metztli is the Nahuatl word for the Moon and the name of the older Mexica lunar deity, partly merged with Coyolxauhqui and likely inherited from earlier Mesoamerican lunar figures.

Across the traditions surveyed — Vedic, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Norse, Chinese, Shinto, Inca, Mexica — the same structural roles cluster around the lunar deity with a regularity that resists explanation by diffusion alone.

Measurer of time. The Moon's phase cycle is the first natural calendar unit between day and year, and almost every tradition makes its Moon the reckoner of the month: Khonsu the divider of months and Thoth the divine measurer in Egypt; Sin whose new crescent opens the Mesopotamian month; Chandra married to the twenty-seven nakshatras, one per night of the sidereal month; the lunar Mid-Autumn reckoning in China. The word month is the word moon across the Indo-European languages. The role is inseparable from the single observable fact that the Moon, alone among the lights, visibly counts.

Mind, emotion, and reflection. Chandra is the karaka of manas, the fluctuating reflective mind, in Jyotish — distinct from the steady soul signified by the Sun. The same intuition surfaces in the Western inheritance, where the Moon governs mood, instinct, and the changeable temper, and in the very word lunatic from Latin luna. The metaphor is grounded in observation: the Moon does not generate its own light but reflects the Sun's, and it changes shape continually — the natural emblem of a mind that reflects rather than originates and that waxes and wanes in mood.

Cycle, death, and renewal. The Moon disappears at the dark of each month and returns; it is swallowed in eclipse and released. Daksha's curse softened from death to waning-and-renewal in the Vedic myth; Máni swallowed by the wolf at Ragnarök; Mama Killa attacked by the eclipse-beast and rescued; Coyolxauhqui dismembered and cast into the sky; Chang'e crossing into deathless immortality on the Moon. The dying-and-reborn structure is read directly off the phase and eclipse cycle, and it recurs on continents with no contact.

The feminine — and its exceptions. The Moon is feminine in the Greek, Roman, Inca, Aztec, and Chinese readings, paired against a masculine Sun, and tied to the menstrual month, fertility, childbirth, and the protection of women. But the gendering is not universal, and the exceptions are the strongest evidence that it is a cultural overlay rather than a property of the body: Sin in Mesopotamia, Máni in the Norse, Khonsu in Egypt, and Tsukuyomi in Japan are all male Moon gods, and in the Mesopotamian, Norse, and Japanese cases the Sun they are paired with is female. The fixed fact is the Sun-Moon pair and the phase cycle; the gender assigned to each is the variable a culture supplies.

Tides, water, and the sea. The lunar pull on the oceans is observable on any coast, and the Moon-water link recurs widely: Chandra as karaka of water and bodily fluids, the Moon's governance of menstrual and tidal rhythm, the silver-as-Moon and water associations across traditions. The role rests on the single mechanical fact that the Moon raises the tides.

Satyori's working hypothesis, anchored to the Vedic Jyotish framework, is that the cross-cultural convergence on these lunar archetypes is evidence that planetary archetypes are real psychological and karmic structures rather than arbitrary cultural projections. The argument runs in two stages.

First, if ten or more literate civilizations on four continents, with limited or no contact between many of them, independently arrived at a Moon who measures time, governs the changeable mind and emotion, marks the cycle of death and renewal, and rules the tides and the menstrual month, then explanation by cultural borrowing alone fails. The Andean and Mesoamerican lunar traditions developed without Old World contact and still produced the silver-Moon, the eclipse-beast, and the lunar feminine. The convergence is independent.

Second, the simplest explanation for independent convergence on the same archetype is that the archetype is encoded in the observable phenomenon. The Moon reflects borrowed light, changes shape on a fixed count, pulls the sea, and dies and returns each month. These are facts before they are metaphors, and each tradition that watched the Moon carefully read those facts into theology. The theologies converge because the facts are the same. The gender disagreements are precisely where the cultures supplied their own variable on top of the fixed astronomy — which is why the gender splits and the time-keeping, mind, and cycle roles do not.

For chart-reading, the implication is concrete. When a Jyotishi reads Chandra's placement in a horoscope — sign, house, nakshatra, phase (waxing or waning), conjunctions, dignity, dasha — the karaka significations being applied (manas, the mother, emotional disposition, the receptive and reflective mind, the public, water) are not Vedic-cultural curiosities. They are the Vedic articulation of an archetype the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Andean traditions also articulated under different names and surfaces. The Moon's nakshatra at birth is also the hinge of the entire predictive dasha calendar, which is why the Vedic tradition weights the Moon as heavily as the rising sign — the changeable mind is where a life is most readably lived out.

This is also why Satyori treats the Vedic system as the practical framework without presenting it as the only valid reading. The Western Moon in its tropical placement and the Vedic Chandra in its sidereal placement are not competing accounts of incompatible objects; they are differently calibrated readings of the same archetype. The convergence is the evidence; the chart is the application.

The Moon is the second most universally deified celestial body in the historical record because it is the second most observationally salient — and it is the most universally tied to time, mind, and cycle because it is the body that visibly counts. Every literate civilization that recorded its sky independently reached the same family of descriptions: measurer of the month, governor of the changeable mind and emotion, marker of the menstrual and tidal rhythm, the light that dies and is reborn. The convergence is documented in primary sources from the Sumerian hymns to Nanna through the Eddic Máni and the Mexica Coyolxauhqui Stone.

Where the lunar record diverges from the solar is in gender — feminine in the Mediterranean and the Americas, masculine in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Norse, and Japan — and that divergence is the clean demonstration of the whole thesis: the astronomy is fixed and the convergent roles follow from it, while the gender is the free variable each culture supplies. The same analysis runs across the Sun, Venus, and the other visible bodies surveyed across the archaeoastronomy collection. The Moon is the case where the evidence is sharpest, because the exceptions prove the rule.

Purpose

Lunar deity cosmology + archetypal continuity argument

Modern Verification

Moon is observationally verifiable: tidally locked natural satellite ~3,474 km across, ~27.32-day sidereal month, ~29.53-day synodic (phase) month, two daily tidal cycles, ~59% of surface visible via libration, eclipses at syzygy near the nodes.

Significance

The cross-cultural convergence on the lunar archetype is one of the strongest cases in the comparative-religion record for the thesis that planetary archetypes are observationally grounded rather than culturally arbitrary. Ten or more literate civilizations on four continents — many without plausible diffusion routes — independently arrive at a Moon who measures the month, governs the changeable mind and emotion, marks the cycle of death and renewal, and rules the tides. The lunar case is sharper than the solar one because of its disagreements: the Moon is feminine in Greece, Rome, the Inca and Mexica worlds, and China, but masculine in Mesopotamia (Sin), Egypt (Khonsu), the Norse (Máni), and Japan (Tsukuyomi). The gender split is the clean demonstration of the whole argument — the astronomy is fixed, the time-keeping and mind and cycle roles follow from it, and the gender is the one free variable each culture supplies.

For Vedic Jyotish, the implication is that Chandra's karaka significations — manas, the mother, emotional disposition, water, the public — are not Sanskrit-cultural artifacts but the Vedic vocabulary for an archetype that surfaces under different names from the Sumerian Sin to the Inca Mama Killa.

Connections

Chandra (Vedic) — The Moon as graha and karaka of manas, the mother, and emotion in Jyotish; the practical Vedic application of every archetype surveyed on this page, and the hinge of the Vimshottari dasha calendar.

Moon (Western) — The Western planet-deity inheritance, derived from the Greco-Roman Selene-Luna complex and tied to mood, instinct, and the mother in the European astrological tradition.

The Sun across civilizations — The companion page applying the same convergence analysis to the solar deity; the Moon is consistently read as the Sun's pair, sibling, or child across the traditions.

Venus across civilizations — The third member of the Mesopotamian luminary triad (Sin-Shamash-Ishtar); same cross-tradition deity-convergence method applied to the morning-and-evening star.

Eclipse mythology across civilizations — The devouring-beast and swallowed-Moon motif (Mama Killa's jaguar, Máni's wolf, the South Asian Rahu) treated in depth; the lunar death-and-return read off the eclipse cycle.

Saros cycle — The ~18-year Babylonian eclipse-repetition period that made the Moon's eclipses predictable; the mechanism behind the eclipse-season structure described on this page.

Metonic cycle — The 19-year reconciliation of lunar months with the solar year; the Babylonian solution to the drift between the 29.53-day synodic month and the seasons.

MUL.APIN — The Mesopotamian observational compendium recording the Moon's motion and omens alongside the planets; primary source for Sin's calendrical and mantic role.

Surya (Vedic) — The Sun as karaka of atman, the steady soul; the structural counterpart to Chandra's manas, the moving mind that reflects the soul's light.

Karka (Cancer) — Chandra's own sign, the cardinal-water rashi whose receptive, nourishing, home-and-mother significations carry the lunar archetype into the zodiac.

Vrishabha (Taurus) — The sign of Chandra's exaltation, peaking at 3 degrees; the lunar archetype at its most stable and nourishing.

The nakshatras — The twenty-seven lunar mansions, mythologized as the Moon's wives and as Daksha's daughters; the Moon visits one per night across the sidereal month.

Rohini — The nakshatra Chandra favored above all his wives in the Daksha myth, the cause of the curse that explains the waxing and waning; one of three Moon-ruled mansions.

Khonsu — The Egyptian lunar traveller, divider of the months; the deity page for the New Kingdom Theban moon god discussed here.

Thoth — The earlier Egyptian lunar deity and divine reckoner; the Moon as the emblem of measurement before the role passed to Khonsu.

Artemis — The Olympian huntress read as the waxing-Moon member of the Greek lunar triad with Selene and Hecate.

Hecate — Goddess of crossroads and the dark Moon; the underworld member of the Greek lunar triad.

Inanna — The Venus goddess and, in several Mesopotamian traditions, daughter of the moon-god Sin; her genealogy makes the Moon the parent of the Venus light.

Tsukuyomi — The male Shinto Moon god born from Izanagi's right eye, estranged from the Sun-goddess Amaterasu; the deity page for the Japanese case discussed here.

Further Reading