the moon, deus lunus, phoebe

“No symbol – the sun included – was more complex in its manifold meanings than the lunar symbol.

 
The sex was, of course, dual. With some it was male, e.g., the Hindu “King Soma”, and the Chaldean Sin; with other nations it was female, the beauteous goddess Diana-Luna, Eileithyia, Lucina.

 
But, we are now concerned chiefly with the most chaste and pure of the virgin goddesses, Luna-Artemis.

 
This Artemis-Lochia, the goddess that presided at conception and childbirth, is, in her functions and as the triple Hecate, the Orphic deity, the predecessor of the God of the Rabbis and the pre-Christian Kabbalists, and his lunar type.

 
The goddess was the personified symbol of the various and successive aspects represented by the moon in each of her three phases.

 
The whole riddle of the solar and lunar worship, as now traced in the churches, hangs indeed on this world-old mystery of lunar phenomena.

 
The correlative forces in the “Queen of the Night”, that lie latent for modern science, but are fully active to the knowledge of Eastern adepts, explain well the thousand and one images under which the moon was represented by the ancients.

 
It also shows how much more profoundly learned in the Selenic mysteries were the ancients than our now modern astronomers.”

 

H. P. Blavatsky