Speculations on the sex of the Moon

Jun 12, 2009 Alun Politics, Science, The Past 1 Comment Ancient History, Anthropology, Antiscience, Archaeoastronomy, Astrology, Japan, Moon, mythology

I may be busy, but not too busy to point and laugh. You’ve prob­ably seen this story in the Exam­iner about the Japan­ese crash­ing an orbiter into the Moon. If you haven’t then it’s Satya Har­vey com­plain­ing that sci­ent­ists will be pen­et­rat­ing a female moon without first ask­ing her per­mis­sion. Lots of people have found it a remark­able pub­lic dis­play of ignor­ance. In fact she’s elev­ated ignor­ance to an art form, because she is also clearly unaware that, in Japan­ese myth­o­logy, the Moon is male and the Sun is female.

If you live in the West you might think that makes the Japan­ese freaks. I’ve got a book, The Moon: Myth and Image by Jules Cash­ford, which picks up on this. The Second World War alli­ance between Ger­many and Japan was blamed (only in part I hope) on the two nations both per­ceiv­ing the Moon as male. She found Laurens van der Post on one of his off-days writ­ing: “…[S]ome omin­ous per­versity of the abori­ginal urgings of both Ger­mans and Japan­ese, was rendered into a fixed and immut­able mas­culin­ity.” If you’re keen to sample some per­versity then you may not need to travel that far. Cash­ford also has an incom­plete list of cul­tures with male lunar deit­ies which includes, Ainu, Anato­li­ans, Armeni­ans, South­ern Ara­bi­ans, Aus­tralian Abori­gines, Balts, Basques, Canaan­ites, Eski­mos, Finns, Ger­mans, Geor­gi­ans, Green­land­ers, Hindus, Hittites, Hur­ri­ans, Japan­ese, Lithuani­ans, Melane­sians, Mon­go­li­ans, Per­sians, Phrygi­ans, Poles, New Guineans, North Amer­ican Indi­ans of Brit­ish Columbia, the Machiv­anaga of Peru, Scand­inavi­ans, Slavs and Tar­tars. With the Moon being a rock, and the Sun a nuc­lear implo­sion there’s no reason to assume the genders have to be fixed one way or the other.

If you’re after a more adven­ter­ous myth­o­logy you don’t even need the Sun and Moon to be oppos­ite genders. For example the Bororo of South Amer­ica have the Sun and Moon as twin broth­ers who ascen­ded from the Earth. A male Sun and Moon myth­o­logy might be use­ful if you want to have a cos­mic example of Men going out and doing stuff while women… umm… don’t. If you want some­thing more soph­ist­ic­ated, the Aztecs and the Egyp­tians saw the Moon as male or female or both as the mood took them.

In fact it’s the female Moon which may be odder than a male Moon. If you want oppos­ite genders for the two bod­ies, a female Sun might make more sense because it drives life. The reason the Sun is male in astro­logy (and I assume Ms. Har­vey means spe­cific­ally Graeco-Roman Astro­logy) is because it was asso­ci­ated with Apollo in reli­gion. Thanks to the Roman Empire that’s the basis for Astro­logy which sur­vived in the West. Indian Astro­logy is some­what dif­fer­ent. Where does that leave the Sun’s role as a life-force? The Greeks saw the male as the source of life. The womb was where you depos­ited the seed to grow, the credit for the fin­ished product belonged to the man. Did that belief come from the same root as a male Sun? I wouldn’t know; it’s pos­sible one caused the other. In any event it would seem reas­on­able to ask how the gender of celes­tial bod­ies affected the way people saw the universe.

It’s the fact that sci­ent­ists see the Moon as gen­der­less that helps open up new ways of look­ing at the uni­verse. We can ask new ques­tions, find new answers and dis­cover new mys­ter­ies which we couldn’t even just fifty years ago. In con­trast Satya Har­vey offers a narrow-minded and blinkered view of the moon which cas­u­ally dis­misses any­thing which doesn’t fit her own pre­con­cep­tions. A uni­verse where women are tied to 2000 year old gender roles seems a claus­tro­phobic little place. If a Japan­ese probe can help smash a way out of that, I’m all for it.

And while I’m at it, I’ll crow­bar a link into Steven Renshaw’s page on Japan­ese Astro­nomy.