Among Sufi poets, the Moon actually stands in for the Divine himself. The Persian poet Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (1207-1273) identifies the Moon with the Divine. In one of Rūmī’s poems, the speaker talks about seeing moonlight on a wall. But, the speaker says, we should not then worship the wall simply because of the light we see there. Instead,... See more

For ʿAṭṭār, the Moon itself is part of a cosmos that is in a state of profound yearning for the Divine. Such is the Moon’s desperate personified longing that it even changes shape – moving through gibbous and crescent forms – in its love. In ʿAṭṭār’s image, humanity becomes associated with the Moon, the entire cosmos caught in this inescapable... See more

the Moon does not show Divine creativity only within the cosmos. Instead, it has an urgent and very Earthly significance, used to demonstrate and navigate intricate power relations: on the one hand, between papacy and state; and on the other, between the Church and the Divine. In both cases, the Moon’s supposed inferiority to the Sun conveys the... See more

The Church Father Augustine of Hippo puts forward two possible ways in which the Church can appropriately be understood as the Moon, depending on whether people believed the Moon generated its own light, or whether they believed it reflected the light of the Sun. If the Moon generates its own light, says Augustine, then like the Church it has both... See more