Cross-pantheon comparison
Moon gods compared across eight traditions
The moon is masculine in about as many of these traditions as it is feminine, which is the first thing to know.
Lunar deities, and the calendars that were kept by watching them.
Tap any two names to compare them. 7 figures across 5 traditions hold this office on this site.
Greek mythology
Egyptian mythology
Roman mythology
- readthe moon · also the hunt, the wild grove, slaves and the poor
Japanese mythology
- readthe moon, the count of months · also night
Mesopotamian mythology
- readthe moon · also the calendar, cattle, divination
No figure in this encyclopedia holds that office in Norse mythology, Celtic mythology, Classical Hindu mythology. That is a statement about these eight bodies of material, not a gap: several traditions genuinely have no god of this thing, and saying so is more useful than promoting the nearest approximation.
Tap two names above to see what they actually share, what only one of them holds, and whether anybody in antiquity ever equated them.
What this office actually is, tradition by tradition
Popular writing treats a moon goddess as the default and a moon god as an oddity, and the evidence does not support that at all. Nanna, later Sin, is one of the great gods of Mesopotamia, father of the sun, whose crescent standard flies over Ur and whose priestess at that city was the king's own daughter — Enheduanna, the first author in the world whose name we know. Thoth is lunar and male. Tsukuyomi is male, born from Izanagi's right eye, and separates permanently from his sister the sun after killing the food deity. Chandra is male. The feminine moon is the Greco-Roman pattern generalised to everybody, which is a habit rather than a finding.
The second correction the grid forces is about Artemis and Diana. Neither is a moon goddess in the classical period; Selene is the moon and Luna is the moon, and the identification of the huntress with the moon is a later syncretism that this encyclopedia keeps separate on the entity pages. It matters, because once Artemis is a moon goddess she is also, by a chain of Victorian reasoning, a maiden of a maiden-mother-crone triad that no ancient source anywhere describes.
What the lunar office does reliably carry is calendrical authority, and that is worth more than the symbolism. A lunar month is observable by anyone; a solar year is not. So the moon gods in this column are repeatedly the gods of counting time, of when festivals fall and when debts are due — Nanna's Ur produced eclipse records that ran for centuries, and the Coligny calendar is the single most substantial piece of pre-Christian Gaulish text we have precisely because somebody needed to reconcile lunar months with a solar year.
How the grid above was built
Nobody decided by hand who belongs on this page. Each figure’s entry carries a list of what the ancient sources named on that page record them as governing, and a figure appears here when one of those phrases falls inside this office. Their own wording is printed beside the name, so you can check the filing rather than trust it. Tapping any two names computes what the two figures actually share — and whether any ancient writer ever equated them, which is a different question and usually has a different answer.
Where a tradition is absent from the grid, no figure in this encyclopedia holds this office in it. That is a statement about eight bodies of surviving material rather than a gap in the research: several traditions genuinely have no god of a given thing, and saying so is more useful than promoting the nearest approximation into a column so the table looks complete.
The other eleven offices with a page of their own: Sea gods, War gods, Gods of wisdom and writing, Smith gods, Love and desire gods, Harvest and fertility gods, Healing gods, Messenger gods, Gods of justice and the oath, Gods of magic and prophecy, Fire gods. The full tool, with all 29 offices, is at the cross-pantheon comparison, and the pairings argued out at length in prose are in the written comparisons.