The moon is often personified in different ways and worshiped with ritual customs; nevertheless, in contrast to the sun, the moon is less frequently viewed as a powerful deity. It appears to be of great importance as the basis of a lunar calendar but not in more advanced agrarian civilizations. The moon, infrequently associated with the highest god, is usually placed below heaven and the sun. When the moon with the sun together (instead of “heaven and earth”) constitute an important pair of gods (world parents), it frequently assumes the features of an earth deity. In tropical South America, the sun and moon are usually purely mythical figures.
Between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer, the moon is predominantly female. Only some remainders of ancient hunting peoples view the moon as a male being. In the few significant male moon gods, such as both Khons and Thoth in Egypt, Sin-Nanna in Babylonia, and Chandra in India—in contrast with the female Selene and Luna in the Greek and Roman culture—a more ancient substratum may be present. Where the moon is considered as male, he often determines the sexual life of the woman, especially among the indigenous people of Australia.
The phenomenon of the moon that attracts all people is the sequence of its phases. The waxing and waning of the moon crescent is often interpreted as gaining or losing weight (eating, dieting). Thus, the Taulipang in Brazil believe that the moon is first nourished well and then inadequately by his two wives, Venus and Jupiter. Where the moon is viewed as female, the phases represent pregnancy and delivery. Elsewhere, people see childhood, maturity, and dying as the phases of the moon: the first crescent is thus the rebirth or the replacement of the old by a new moon.
The appearance of the crescent or the full moon is sometimes celebrated by a rest from work, and some attempt to participate in the waxing and waning of the moon by analogous magical rites. Girls with small breasts stand in the full moonlight (in the Salzburg, Austria, area); persons who desire the shrinking of a tumor point to the waning moon; and newborn children often are exposed to the waning moonlight, or they (and anything else needing health or permanence) are symbolically dyed white (as if washed by moonlight). Nearly everywhere connections between the moon phases and the rhythms of nature (the tides) and humans (menstruation) are recognized.
The three dark days of the “death” of the moon are believed by many to be dangerous. During this period the moon is believed to be defeated in a battle with monsters who eat and later regurgitate the moon; or the moon is viewed as having been killed by other heavenly beings and later revived. The period is a time in which people, if possible, do not engage in a new enterprise.
The halo of the moon is also viewed as a bad omen among many peoples. Moon spots are regarded as testimonies of a battle with heavenly opponents. In addition to “the man in the moon,” the moon’s appearance has suggested “the woman with the basket on her back,” “the spinning woman,” or “the weaving woman” (in Polynesia, “the woman who pounds tapa”). The most popular animal figure recognized in the features of the moon, the rabbit (from Europe to America), presumably earned this role because of its fertility.
Eclipses of the sun and moon
An eclipse of the sun or moon—usually interpreted as a battle between the two heavenly bodies or as the dying or the devouring of one of the two—in many religions is met with anxiety, shouting, drum beating, shooting, and other noises. Many Native Americans, the Khoisan in Africa, the Ainu in Japan, and the Minangkabau in Sumatra interpret the eclipse as the fainting, sickness, or death of the darkened heavenly body. In Arctic North America, Eskimos, Aleuts, and Tlingit believe that the sun and moon have moved from their places in order to see that things are going right on earth. The explanation that heavenly monsters and beasts pursue the stars and attempt to injure and to kill them, however, is a view found over a larger area. Noise and shooting are believed to deter the monsters from their pursuit or to force them to return the celestial bodies if they have already been captured. In parts of China and in Thailand the monster is the heavenly dragon; in other Chinese regions and among the Germanic tribes and northern American Indians the culprits are dogs and wolves (coyotes); in Africa and Indonesia they are snakes; in India they are the star monsters Rahu and Ketu; and in South America the beast is the jaguar. The belief in the darkening of one star by the other in a battle—e.g., between the sun god Lisa and the moon goddess Gleti in Benin—is about as widespread. An eclipse may also be interpreted (as in Tahiti) as the lovemaking of sun and moon, who thus beget the stars and obscure each other in the process.
Stars and constellations
Worship of the stars and constellations in the modern world survives only in a very corrupt or hidden manner. True star worship existed only among some ancient civilizations of and associated with Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia, where both astronomy and astrology reached a high degree of refinement—especially after a Hellenizing renaissance of astronomy—was the origin of astral religions and myths that affected religions all over the world. Though the view is controversial, Mesopotamian astral worship and influence may have reached as far as Central and Andean America (by way of China or Polynesia). Sumerian, Elamite, and Hurrian contemplation of the stars influenced not only Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Egypt, Iran, and India but also other areas. Knowledge of the zodiac and the planets and observation of precession extended from the West to South Asia—e.g., the Pythagoreans and Orphics (mystical philosophers) in the Mediterranean area and astrological mystics in India, Indonesia, China, and Polynesia. The western Sudan, for example, was deeply influenced by the spirit of ancient Mediterranean and Oriental knowledge of the stars.
Apart from areas in the Sudan, northeast Africa, and what is now Zimbabwe (Mwene Matapa), not much of Africa has had any considerable knowledge of the stars. Unless old hunting cultures have survived, knowledge of the stars is relatively limited among forest peoples, explained by an Ekoi man in southeast Nigeria as follows: “Ekoi people do not trouble themselves about the stars, because the trees always hide them.” The hunters of the Ituri Forest likewise have never achieved the significant knowledge of the stars that is possessed by the African steppe dwellers.
Knowledge of the stars rarely leads to a worship of the stars. True star gods are rare, for example, in large parts of Africa. In Polynesia, where significant knowledge of the stars by the seafaring people and fishermen was learned in regular schools of astronomy, there seldom occurred what can be called true religious worship of the stars. Knowledge of the stars is still relatively significant among the hunting peoples in the Southern Hemisphere. Economic considerations connected with the rising and setting of the stars, however, surpass their mythological significance by far. The stars are usually considered to be living beings, particularly animals that have been transferred to the sky. They evidently are taken seriously primarily because they indicate by their rising and setting the appearance of game to be hunted or fruits to be collected.
The widespread African interpretation of the constellation sometimes known by the name of Orion as a hunter, as game, or as a dog (from East Africa to the lower Congo and in the area of the Niger) is most likely a vestige from an earlier hunting period that has survived in agricultural civilizations. In a different form, Orion is still known in Europe as a hunter, in northern Asia as a hunter of reindeer and elk, and in North America as a hunter of bears. In South America—outside the Andean empires—a whole series of astral beliefs of the ancient hunting culture has been preserved: the concepts of stars and constellations as lords of the animals, as helpers of the hunter, or as animals themselves.
The planet Venus has probably experienced its most significant personification in the figure of the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna-Ishtar. She was viewed sometimes as female and at other times as having aspects of both genders. Through her identification with the Greek Aphrodite and the Roman Venus, Inanna-Ishtar, the queen of heaven, still survives in Roman Catholic iconography—e.g., as the Virgin Mary with the moon under her feet. African cultures also have been significantly impressed by this planet, not only in the rare figure of a Zulu heavenly goddess who determines the agricultural work of the women but even more as the evening star and the morning star, who are the wives of the moon. In the royal culture of Mwene Matapa (Zimbabwe) and its influences in Buganda (Uganda) and southern Congo, the king is related to the moon, and his wedding with the Venus women is a type of hieros gamos (Greek: “sacred marriage”). In large areas of Africa the concept of “Venus wives of the moon” is preserved, although the moon is usually considered as the wife (or sister) of the sun. This concept was most likely prevalent at a time when the moon-king ideology was widespread in the eastern half of Africa from the Nile to South Africa, perhaps indicating South Arabian influences.
The cluster of stars sometimes known as the Pleiades, six or seven adjacent stars in the constellation of Taurus, is viewed in many parts of the world as maidens pursued by men. The Pleiades are also interpreted as a mother hen with her chicks, especially in Eurasia, where the star Aldebaran, which is located close to the Pleiades, is often included as a part of the constellation. In Africa the appearance of the Pleiades designates the beginning of the agricultural year. Therefore, in many Bantu languages the verb kulima (“to hoe”) furnishes the basis for their designation kilimia, the Pleiades. In addition to eastern and southern Africa there is still a smaller area in the western Sudan that retains this belief.
Polaris (the North Star) enjoys a central significance among the Finno-Ugric and Turkish Tatars as “nail of the world” or “pillar of heaven.” Among Altai Tatars, Polaris is viewed as the negotiator of the god of heaven Ülgan; in Japan, Polaris is a god of heaven above the ninth layer of clouds.
The Milky Way Galaxy, depending on a group’s economy and lifestyle, was often simply named after hunting or domestic animals: way of the tapir, the donkey, or the camel. It also is called the seam of the heavenly tent or a water stream. As the footsteps of God or the way of God, as the way of the dead, or as a deserted way of the gods, the Milky Way reveals older mythical conceptions, among which is that of the world (cosmic) tree.
The luminous phenomenon called aurora borealis, the “northern lights” of the north polar regions, is frequently interpreted by Arctic and subarctic peoples (e.g., Eskimo, Athabascan, Tlingit) as the reflection of the dance fire of the ghosts or of the peoples farther north, as the “cooking of meat” or the ball game of these peoples. Northern Germanic tribes saw in it the splendour of the shields of Valkyrie (warrior women).
