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.