The concordance 20 witnesses
Orientation
Before there were clocks there were phases, and the being who kept them was a goddess. Erich Neumann derives the Great Mother’s lunar identity from exactly this: governance of time, growth, and the rhythms of the female body makes the moon the foundational temporal symbol of matriarchal consciousness. Liz Greene grounds the goddess’s notorious ambivalence in plain phenomenology, since a light that waxes, wanes, and disappears will be read as a deity of paradox. Kerényi supplies the Greek genealogy, Selene and her sisterhood with Helios, and shows the recurrent triple goddess to be a mythological encoding of the three lunar phases. Jung’s contribution is the most striking: the moon goddess surfaces spontaneously in children’s dreams, without cultural instruction, and appears in his Ishtar material as the archetype of irrational, encompassing opposites that exceed masculine rational consciousness. She is not a museum piece; she is a recurring psychic fact.
That is why she is a moon goddess, for moon and night sky are the visible manifestations of the temporal process in the cosmos, and the moon, not the sun, is the true chronometer of the primordial era.
Neumann argues that the Great Mother’s identity as moon goddess derives necessarily from her governance of time, growth, and feminine biological rhythms, making the moon the foundational temporal symbol of matriarchal consciousness.
, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955thesis
She is dark and she is light; she is good and she is evil; she is source of all the earth and she is destruction of all; she brings health and she causes sickness. As was said of Ishtar, ‘She is the divine Astarte, the strength, the life, the health of men and gods; and at the same time she is Evil, Death, and Destruction.’
Jung presents the moon goddess’s essential duality — identified with Ishtar — as the archetype of those irrational, encompassing opposites that exceed masculine rational consciousness and govern judgment after death.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis
The Moon is a paradox: It is unreliable at the same time that its cycle is utterly reliable… Thus the Moon was viewed as treacherous, and the earliest lunar goddesses who personified it are paradoxical and ambiguous in character.
Greene derives the ambiguous, paradoxical character of the earliest lunar goddesses directly from the moon’s phenomenological behaviour as perceived by pre-modern observers.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992thesis
The moon-goddess also appears in children’s dreams. A girl who grew up in peculiarly difficult psychic circumstances had a recurrent dream between her seventh and tenth years: ‘The moon-lady was always waiting for me down by the water at the landing-stage, to take me to her island.’
Jung documents the spontaneous emergence of the moon goddess archetype in children’s dreams, establishing her as a living psychic reality encountered in the unconscious independently of cultural instruction.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis
The worship of the moon goddess is exceedingly ancient, but I think that Shem may be just as old… The pre-Islamic cult was of the stars and the moon. The nocturnal sky is exceedingly impressive to one who travels by night.
Jung situates moon goddess veneration within comparative religious history, linking it to the primacy of nocturnal sky symbolism among nomadic Semitic peoples and distinguishing it from the parallel antiquity of solar cult.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis
The only famous love-story that was told of our moon/goddess originated from Asia Minor, and was set in a cave… Selene and Endymion.
Kerényi traces the Greek moon goddess Selene — also named Mene — through her mythological relationships, establishing her genealogy, her sisterly bond with Helios, and the restricted geography of her famous erotic narrative.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
Our lunar month was divided into three parts, and our moon had three aspects: as the waxing, the full and the waning sign of a divine presence in the sky.
Kerényi grounds the recurrent triadic structure of Greek goddesses in the tripartite lunar month, demonstrating that the threefold goddess is a mythological encoding of the moon goddess’s three phases.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
The crescent or waxing moon… is the symbol of the moon goddesses, is the form used in the Islamic religions, and also forms the national standard of Turkey and Egypt.
Jung’s survey of the moon’s three iconographic phases identifies the crescent as the primary emblem of moon goddesses across cultures, linking symbolic form to living religious traditions.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
Just above her brow shone a round disc, like a mirror, or like the bright face of the moon, which told me who she was… in the middle beamed a full and fiery moon.
Campbell cites the Apuleian vision of Isis to illustrate how the moon disc functions as the goddess’s defining iconographic attribute, revealing her identity as moon goddess to the devotee.
, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 2013supporting
Hekate [Greek]. Ruler of the underworld, she is also a moon goddess. She is connected with Artemis, the virgin huntress and mistress of beasts. Hekate is also the goddess of witchcraft and magic, and sends demons to earth to torment men.
Greene’s mythological dictionary identifies Hekate as a moon goddess in her chthonic, magical, and terrifying aspect, establishing her functional equivalence with Artemis within the broader lunar goddess complex.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting
Moon and snake have often been closely related because of the moon’s dying and rising and the snake’s capacity to slough its skin in an image of dying and rising. Moon and bull come together in their power to fertilize nature and in their common visage — the cradling crescent taking the shape of bull’s horns.
Moore, following Ficino, explicates the symbolic complex of moon goddess imagery — serpent, bull, horned crescent — as a coherent set of analogies expressing lunar rhythms of death, regeneration, and fertile power.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982supporting
Moon and snake have often been closely related because of the moon’s dying and rising and the snake’s capacity to slough its skin in an image of dying and rising. Moon and bull come together in their power to fertilize nature.
This passage repeats Moore’s Ficinian account of lunar symbolism, reinforcing the snake-bull-moon triad as foundational to imaginal engagement with the moon goddess’s transformative character.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990supporting
Like Lady Artemis herself, the Marseilles Moon does not share her secrets readily… This is the dark of the moon. A time of mystery, wonder, and terror. The witching hour when Hecate haunts the crossroads.
Nichols maps Tarot’s Moon card onto the lunar goddess complex — Artemis and Hecate — reading it as a psychological encounter with the dark moon’s mystery, terror, and resistance to conscious appropriation.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting
The Moon is also a sorceress. Hekate, whom we have met already, is the dark luna…
Greene identifies the sorceress-moon goddess Hekate as the dark face of the astrological Moon, connecting clinical lunar pathology — hysteria, Moon madness — to the underworld goddess’s archetype.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992supporting
The moon symbolizes this aspect of woman which, in spite of its lack of warmth, is so terribly attractive to men… it was known from the most remote times that woman in her actual physical makeup is in some way related to the moon, with her moon-cycles of menstruation.
Jung links the moon goddess symbolically to the cold, calculating, yet magnetically attractive feminine erotic principle, grounding the association in the archaic recognition of the menstrual-lunar connection.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
The two goddesses Eos and Selene, the sisters of Helios, go before him — the moon-goddess often in a chariot that is plunging downwards.
Kerényi situates Selene within the solar family cosmology, noting that the moon goddess characteristically descends in her chariot, iconographically marking the lunar trajectory as opposite and complementary to the solar ascent.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
Bast, although she is a goddess of the east, is goddess not of the sun but of the moon. For the moon as well as the sun is born in the east and dies in the west. The nocturnal cat with eyes that are believed to become roundest at the full moon is an animal of the moon.
Neumann analyses the Egyptian goddess Bast as a lunar deity whose animal embodiment — the cat — encodes the full moon’s cycle, distinguishing her lunar quality from the solar-destructive character of Sekhmet.
, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955supporting
The earth goddess or earth mother is really an image of the animating principle in nature itself… which has been associated since earliest times with the Moon.
Greene equates the earth goddess and moon goddess as mutually reinforcing mythic images of the body’s autonomous animating principle, tracing their ancient identification to the common ground of pre-rational experience.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992supporting
her rays beam clear, whensoever bright Selene having bathed her lovely body in the waters of Ocean, and donned her far-gleaming raiment… drives on her long-maned horses at full speed, at eventime in the mid-month.
Hesiod’s Homeric Hymn to Selene provides the primary poetic source-text for the Greek moon goddess, depicting her as a luminous celestial driver whose fullness at mid-month constitutes a sign and portent for mortals.
, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700aside
This sensitivity and responsiveness gives Moon-dominant people — what I have elsewhere called lunar types — their strong intuition.
Cunningham, drawing on M. Esther Harding’s work on women’s mysteries, transposes the moon goddess’s receptive-radar quality into a practical astrological typology of lunar personality.
, An Astrological Guide to Self-Awareness, 1982aside