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It’s easy to imagine how many things received their names. I doubt if the anteater or trouser-press have many scratching their heads, and even the less obvious words, their etymologies buried in the past tend to be pretty accessible with some instruction in old languages, but what about those elements of the cosmos that have always been known to us? Since before we were even human? Some things are so perennially present and always-already known that it seems strange to think that names ever had to be “thought up” for them.
Specifically, those phenomena that stand in the sky address our consciousness in a way quite unlike things down on earth, and always have done. This is not to say that sublime and sacred qualities cannot be found in the earth - the earth itself has always been seen as living and imbued with divinity - but the very fact of being celestial, removed from the “middle-earth”, and standing in the inviolable space of the heavens, which does not appear to us to suffer change, has always and inevitably filled those objects that occupy the sky (or that fall from it, in the case of meteorites) with limitless holiness. Even besides the objects seen in it, the sky itself is witness to a “hierophany”, that is, an appearance of the sacred in the terms of Mircea Eliade,1 that requires no imagination to conjure up.
Merely contemplating the vault of heaven produces a religious experience in the primitive mind [...] The sky shows itself as it really is: infinite, transcendent.2
The sky and its objects, sun, moon and stars embody utter permanence; “Being”, not “Becoming”. Except, the sun rises and falls to rise again every day, the stars wheel about in the heavens and the moon wanes away to nothing before our eyes. But far from detracting from its sacrality, this is the very quality that marks the moon apart and gives it its unique modality of the sacred. The “death” that the moon undergoes is in a way sympathised with by man. The sun, by contrast;
[…] is always the same, always itself, never in any sense “becoming”. The moon, on the other hand, is a body which waxes, wanes and disappears, a body whose existence is subject to the universal law of becoming, of birth and death.
Man saw himself reflected in the “life” of the moon; [...] his hopes of a “rebirth”, gained confirmation from the fact of there being always a new moon.”3
Unlike our Gregorian solar calendar, many cultures have traditionally a lunar or lunisolar calendar, where the months correspond to the phases of the moon. The word “month” from Old English mōnaþ comes fairly intuitively from the word “moon”. It is equivalent to the word moon + the suffix -th, like we see in the word “depth”, from deep. -th forms a noun of the “quality” of an adjective (or in the case of “moon”, a noun). A month is one “moonth”, hence the stock phrases like “many moons ago” etc.
This -th suffix is no longer “productive”, linguistically. You couldn’t tack it onto the end of a word without it just sounding funny; it’s become fossilised onto the words to which it was added. It’s a bit of a shame, really, I rather like the sound of sunth as an alternative to “year”.
This suffix is directly related to the Latin -itas which is where we get our -y and -ity from, in words like “mystery” and “generosity”. Is month in Latin, therefore, “lūnitas”?
Instead, no. The Romance languages have words like Italian mese for “month”, directly from the same route as Germanic words like English month and German monat. The Modern Romance words for moon, from the Latin lūna originate from a word meaning “bright”: The Proto-Indo-European root *lewk-, which is also the (possible) ancestor of the word “look”, having connotations originally of “to see”.4
The Romance words for “month” have outlasted the word for “moon” that they originally came from. This goes some way to demonstrate how bound up these two phenomena are cross-linguistically. To go a level further, seeing the month as being named after the moon is arguably the opposite of the ultimate source of these words. While lūna replaced earlier words from the same root as moon, in reference to a secondary quality of “brightness”, the original Proto-Indo-European root is in fact not itself some axiom that simply means “moon” with no reference to any quality or concept besides.
The PIE root *meh₁-, far from a dated internet expression of apathy and indifference, meant “to measure”. Hence we get the word *mḗh₁n̥s, which meant both “month” and “moon”.5 The word moon stems ultimately from a word meaning “to measure”.
So this most ancient of celestial phenomena has a very earthly name, almost pragmatic. A “secondary” name, applied to it in relation to other concepts, like phenomena that are its inferior. This fits in perfectly with what Eliade had to say about religious notions surrounding the moon. In its impermanence but constant return, in which man sees himself reflected, the moon is an object against which man “measures” his own existence. That is, the phases of the moon’s waxing and waning form a portion of the cosmic life that can provide a context to our own position in it with more precision and structure than the sun’s relentless rise and fall each day. It is one to which we can relate. Like the profane, mortal objects of the lower world, the moon was named for its function.
And what of the sun? Does its name, like the moon come in reference to other concepts? Well, I think that’s a story for another time.
Romanian historian of religion, most known as the author of The Sacred and the Profane, a life-changing read.
Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, p38.
Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, p154/8.
Scholarship seems divided on this. The Sanskrit लोक्, “lok”, “to see/behold” supports this. Monier Monier Williams (1899), A Sanskrit–English Dictionary, p906.
Again I must stress that this etymology is only thought “probable” by linguists.