Observations placeholder
Mircea Eliade - The Moon as the resting place for the Souls of the Dead
Identifier
010952
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Mircea Eliade – Patterns in Comparative religion
But what we are especially concerned with at the moment is the conception of the moon as the dwelling place of the souls of the dead, which we find expressed iconographically in the carvings of the Assyrians and Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the Hittites and the Anatolians, and which was later used in funeral monuments all over the Roman Empire. Everywhere in Europe the half moon is to be found as a funeral symbol. This does not mean that it came in with the Roman and Eastern religions fashionable under the Empire; for in Gaul for instance, the moon was a local symbol in use long before any contact with the Romans. The fashion merely brought primitive notions up to date by formulating in new language a tradition older than history