Moon, goddess of the night

The Moon has always held a place of particular fascination in our lives. Myths, as Carl Jung has described, bring us back in touch with ourselves and, to that effect, can never be replaced by science. The mythological images of the moon mirror our fascination.  If we think about Mars, Venus and Mercury then those mythological figures of sexy Aphrodite, of the brute warrior Mars or the swift herald Mercury are rushing in, but what comes to mind for most of us in association with the Moon is not a mythological figure but an idyllic image of the ever-changing illuminator of the night itself. The image might be enchanting, romantic or melancholic, as there are many different moods attached to this satellite, but those mythological figures like Diana, Phoebe or Selene, Artemis or Hecate, Ishtar or Astarte are no household names, and thus not easily associated with the moon. Even Luna, the Latin word for moon, does not evoke for the common folk an image of a goddess but it leads us rather to the word lunacy, a well known moon sickness.
• Like a moonwalker, a lunatic is a person that at night in its nightie is balancing on the roof-top, with eyes closed and arms stretched out towards the full moon, obviously not knowing what it is doing; someone not in command of its mind and thus not aware about the danger one is in. Early psychologists had no doubt about the Moon's effect on our mental states. The lunatic was separated from the chronically insane, and extra staff were called into the asylums on the occasion of a full Moon. Special allowances were often made before the full Moon. The English labourer Charles Hyde was acquitted on murder charges on the grounds that he was under the spell of the full moon. The American Institute for Climatology concluded, “Crimes with a strong psychotic motivation, such as arson, kleptomania, destructive driving, and homicidal alcoholism, all showed peaks when the Moon was full and that cloudy nights offered no protection against this trend.” 

  We might call a person a loony who believes in werewolves, so called shape-shifters, another well-known image associated with the full moon. The words lunacy, lunatic, and loony are derived from Luna because of the folk belief in the moon as a cause of periodic insanity. It is a feature of modern belief that shape-shifters such as werewolves drew their power from the moon and would change into their bestial form during the full moon.

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