Origin of triple moon symbol?

September 4, 2013 9:03 AM

I'm just curious: where did the neopagan "triple moon" symbol come from? I have yet to find an origin for it after much googling and peering into reference books.
posted by Nyx to Religion & Philosophy (2 answers total)

Best answer: I think it's gonna be one of those "hard to prove" things, because everything about the history of Neopaganism is gonna have about ten different origin stories, ranging from "it was derived from a doodle someone made during a feminist spirituality conference in 1968" to "it was found etched on the tomb of a shamanistic priestess from circa 200 B.C. in the middle of a field outside Munich". Scholarship in this field is a little murky, and is further complicated by a few parties who have a bit of an, er, agenda (not critical of the agenda as such - just in how it may have put a certain spin on the scholarship).

My money is on a more recent derivation, though, as a good deal of the details of NeoPagan spirituality are indeed "neo".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:11 AM on September 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

The concept behind the symbol is attributed to Robert Graves and the school of Cambridge Ritualists in the 1940s. Perhaps that will help narrow down the search for the actual symbol's history.
posted by instamatic at 2:00 AM on October 29, 2013