Luniolatry: Ancient and Modern

Overview
Gerald Massey's Luniolatry: Ancient and Modern presents a sweeping survey of the worship of the moon across antiquity and its survivals in later traditions. Massey coins and deploys the term "luniolatry" to denote systematic moon-veneration and treats the crescent, phases, and lunar cycles as central symbols around which myths, rites, and calendars were organized. The narrative moves through Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and other cultures, assembling literary, epigraphic, and iconographic evidence to argue for a deep and pervasive lunar substratum beneath many religious forms.
Massey frames the moon not as a peripheral celestial object but as a primary organizing principle for ancient cosmologies. He stresses the moon's role in measuring time, regulating agricultural seasons, and expressing ideas of periodic death and renewal, themes that recur in deity myths, temple rites, and popular observance. His aim is to show continuity between ancient lunar cults and modern customs, suggesting survivals of luniolatrous symbolism in folk rites and ecclesiastical festivals.

Comparative Evidence
The work marshals comparative philology, classical quotations, and visual motifs to link disparate traditions. Egyptian symbols such as the crescent and lunar epithets are read alongside Mesopotamian and Phoenician theologies, while Greek and Roman literature supply myths and cultic practices that, Massey contends, echo a common lunar vocabulary. He pays particular attention to iconography: the crescent-horn, lunar boats, and depictions of deities bearing the moon serve as tangible markers of a shared religious grammar.
Massey also collects folk customs and calendar observances, fasts, feasts, and seasonal rites, that he interprets as diluted or transformed expressions of earlier moon-worship. References to animal symbolism, sacred trees, and ritual gestures recur across regions and periods, and are used to support his thesis that luniolatry formed an enduring layer beneath apparently distinct theological systems.

Themes and Arguments
Central to Massey's argument is the identification of cyclical regeneration as a lunar archetype. He reads myths of dying-and-returning gods, seasonal disappearance and reappearance of divine figures, and stories of sacred marriage through a lunar lens, interpreting narrative motifs as symbolic translations of the moon's phases. The moon's alternation between increase and decline becomes a mythic template for notions of mortality, rebirth, and the agricultural year.
Massey also emphasizes the moon's ambiguous gendering in various cultures, noting that lunar divinities appear as both male and female and often carry attributes associated with fertility, timekeeping, and prophecy. He argues that many later religious symbols and rites, some incorporated into popular Christian practice, retain elements of lunary imagery even where official doctrine denies such origins.

Legacy and Assessment
Luniolatry: Ancient and Modern is characteristic of Victorian comparative mythology: wide-ranging, richly documented, and speculative in equal measure. The book offers a densely compiled repository of references that invites readers to see patterns across ancient religions and to reassess familiar myths from a lunar standpoint. Its insistence on the centrality of lunar symbolism challenged prevailing interpretations that privileged solar or anthropocentric readings of ancient cults.
While some of Massey's linguistic and interpretive leaps have been critiqued by later scholarship, the work remains significant for its ambition and its focus on a neglected vector of ancient religiosity. It stimulated further inquiry into the interplay of astronomy, ritual, and myth, and continues to be of interest to students of comparative religion, folklore, and the history of ideas who seek to understand how celestial phenomena shaped human symbol systems.