While perusing The A to Z of Fantasy Literature today my eyes came to rest on an entry for "The Moon." My own stories are set in a world with two moons—just because I wanted it and think it would be wondrous to see a landscape with two moons. One is Big Brother and tends to shine yellowish orange and the other is Little Sister, which shines a pinkish orange.
It turns out that the moon features in fantasy in a number of ways according to A to Z. Female deities are often associated with the moon. Even when the connection is not explicit, lunar imagery attends them (I think of Galadriel, for example). The A to Z says authors Greer Gilman and Elizabeth Hand have works with female deities associated with the moon.
The connection between the moon and the female side of the human race is tied, of course, to menstruation. But the moon is associated with many other things as well. Its soft light has a beauty that stands apart from the harsher light of the sun. Of course, the moon is associated with lunacy (get it lune-acy?) and lycanthropy (you know, werewolves and such). A to Z mentions a book by Steven Millhauser (Enchanted Night) as an example of lycanthropy in fantastic fiction.
There exists another lunar theme I was unaware of: a place for the souls of the dead. Could the moon be the resting place of the dead? John Cowper Powys writes along these lines in "The Mountains of the Moon."
I imagine myself, on the next full moon under a clear sky, looking at the moon as something perhaps more than a ball of rock tied by gravity to our planet. Is it the chariot of Khonsu, the Egyptian moon-god? Or are there invisible spirits living on its gently illuminated surface? Is it the feminine counterpart of the sun's masculinity? I do know this: I am not alone in wanting to think of the moon as "magical." It feels that way to me and perhaps to you too.
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