The Moon
Luna
The light of the night, waning and returning.
The Moon: what does it mean in analytical psychology?
Luna is the partner of Sol in alchemy: silver, the queen, the feminine, the waters, the light by which one sees in the dark. Jung associated her with a diffuse, reflective kind of awareness, unlike the sun’s sharp focus, and with the unconscious that waxes and wanes.
The moon dies and returns every month, and so carries the idea of rebirth.
Jung’s chapter on Luna in Mysterium Coniunctionis follows her through the alchemists: she is the moist, cold, receptive principle, the vas that receives the sun’s light, the mother and the bride of Sol, and her dark side the nigredo; her union with the sun at the new moon is the conjunction, and the eclipse its black form. Jung read Luna as the feminine, unconscious counterpart of consciousness, a light that does not blind.
Esther Harding’s Woman’s Mysteries (1935), with a preface by Jung, followed the moon-goddesses as images of the feminine in its own right, not as the sun’s reflection.
The Moon: where does it appear in myth and tradition?
Selene, Artemis, three-faced Hecate, Isis, the Virgin standing on the crescent, Sin of Babylon, and the moon’s old rule over tides, months, and madness. The moon-hare and the man in the moon; Endymion asleep; the moon as the first calendar, the month; lunatic; the moon-tree of the alchemists, with Luna picking its fruit.
From the Sources
Jung writes that the naive man of antiquity saw in the sun the great Father of heaven and earth, and in the moon the fruitful good Mother.
“The naïve man of antiquity saw in the sun the great Father of the heaven and the earth, and in the moon the fruitful good Mother.”
Dr. C. G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, Part I, Chapter I, 'Concerning the Two Kinds of Thinking'. Authorized translation, with introduction, by Beatrice M. Hinkle, M.D.; New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1916 (Project Gutenberg eBook #65903). The text, read in part
Frazer suggests that even the waning moon, its sickle thinner every night, may have made early man fear that once it had wholly vanished there would be moons no more.
“Even the waning moon, whose pale sickle rose thinner and thinner every night over the rim of the eastern horizon, may have excited in his mind a fear lest, when it had wholly vanished, there should be moons no more.”
Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion, Chapter XXVIII, section 9, 'The Magic Spring'. Project Gutenberg eBook #3623 (the one-volume abridged edition). The text, read in part
Each passage is quoted from the text named, which the press fetched and read, and was checked word for word against a fresh copy of it; the link opens that copy. Passages are given as printed, without the editors’ footnote numbers, and with words broken across lines joined.
Where to Read
- “Luna,” in Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14
- “Luna,” in Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, ¶¶ 154–233
- M. Esther Harding, Woman’s Mysteries, Ancient and Modern (1935)
Jung’s writings are cited by the volume of the Collected Works (CW), Bollingen Series / Princeton, 1953–79.
Related Symbols
Also among The Heavens
“Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it all when you are analysing a dream.”
Cite This Entry
“The Moon.” In Symbols of the Psyche, the Symbolarium. The Thinking Press, 2026. https://thethinkingpress.org/symbolarium/psyche/moon.
Nearby in the alphabet: The Miraculous Birth: Born another way, and so not wholly of this world. The Mirror: Reflection, and the truth one would rather not see. Mortificatio: The killing of what has ruled too long. The Mountain: The height to be climbed, where heaven and earth meet.