Chandra: The Moon God

Chandra — the Moon

Soma's other name, and the story of the bitten moon

Chandra (Soma, Soma Chandra) is the lunar deity, and the two names carry two layers. Sōma is the Rigvedic god of the moon and of the amṛta — he is pressured, in the Soma hymns, and the soma-sacrifice is the rite that presses him; Chandra is the later, Sanskrit, specifically lunar name, and where it appears the god is being characterised as the body's night counterpart to Sūrya, as pratīk — the "counterpart" — of the sun. Chandra is the moon as an object of sky-worship, with his own mansion (chandra-mandira? — the nakṣatra Rohinī), his own wife, and his own characteristic wound.

That wound is the eclipse. The myth is old and it survives in several shapes: the moon is bitten or swallowed by a serpent, by a rākṣasa, or by Rāhu in the Puranic version in which Rāhu is one of the nine graha and is punished for swallowing the moon and is thereby the eclipse-cause. The story is not a metaphor to be decoded but the mechanism by which an agricultural society accounted for the moon's disappearance; and the rākṣasa form in the Atharvaveda and the Puranic Rāhu form are two stages of the same explanation, not the same tale told twice. Its yajña — the eclipse — is a pāpa and a śūdra ritual to be interrupted or performed by a specific cast, and the rahu aspect is one of the ajñā? of the śāstras.

Chandra's Rohiṇī is the manushi form of the story that moralises him: the Moon falls in love with Rohiṇī — both his wife and the nakṣatra — neglects his duties, is punished by fading for a fortnight each month, and is restored only when she intercedes. It is a nakṣatra mythology as much as a moral one, because the eclipse season is the Māgha month. His vehicle is the antelope (mṛga) and also the horse; his usual offering is the white kusa? and milk; and the moon's phases supply the paksha half-month of the whole ritual calendar, which is why a lunar deity is a calendrical deity before he is anything else.

Sources and what is still unverified

• The Rigveda's Soma hymns; the Atharvaveda; the Rākṣasa material in the Brāhmaṇa literature — work level, no hymn cited.
• Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses — for Chandra's modern cultic life in North India, and for the household and śivarātri observances.
• The Sūrya Siddhānta and the Jyotisha treatises for the paksha and nakṣatra framework — work level.
• Unverified: the corpus frontmatter's "VERIFIED" status has been lowered; no specific festival date or shrine in the frontmatter has been checked against a text.