Grandmother the Moon
Osage · deity · Osage traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Grandmother the Moon is the luminary of the night, the 'night sun,' honored in Osage ritual as an elder woman of the sky. In the account of the tribe's origin the sky-dwelling ancestors turned to her as the god of Night, and she counseled them and gave her body as a token of the enduring life they desired. She stands beside the Sun as mother of the ancestral Celestial Family, from whom the star people are descended. Like the Sun she is understood as an aspect of the one creative power, Wakonda.
Children
Domains
- moon
- night
Powers
- gives the night and its measure of time
Epithets
- Iⁿ'-koⁿ Miⁿ-oⁿ-ba — Grandmother the MoonGarrick A. Bailey, The Osage and the Invisible World (1995). (secondary)
Relations
- spouse: Grandfather the SunDuncan & Diaz-Granados, 'The Cosmology of the Osage' (2004) — the ancestral Celestial Family. (secondary)
Sources
- The Moon is a personified grandmother, the god of Night, consort of the Sun in the Celestial Family.: Francis La Flesche, The Osage Tribe: Two Versions of the Child-Naming Rite, 43rd Annual Report BAE (1928). (primary); Duncan & Diaz-Granados, 'The Cosmology of the Osage' (2004). (secondary)