Predicting Weather By The Moon - Xavier University Libraries

The Moon in Ancient History
Indo-European root word es meant ‘all that there is’ and
‘that which is true’. Among modern derivations are is,
sooth-sayer, entity, essence, and present. Etymology is
never fixed in stone, and perhaps what was considered
abnormal, for example, lefthandedness, came to represent
a darker side of life, and a Moon symbol (the word
‘sin’)became a label for heresy because of the changing
religious power structures.
Standing in Ur is the Ziggurat of Nanna, a temple and
center of worship to Sin, built around 2100 B.C. Sin had
several different names that referred to different phases
of the Moon. The name ‘Sin’ itself indicated the ‘crescent’
Moon, (Ceres, later became the name of the Roman goddess
of agriculture, hence the words crescent, kernel, create
and increase) Nanna the name during Full Moon, and
Asimbabbar which meant the beginning of each lunar cycle.
Sin was said to be the descendant of the sky god An,
and was born from the rape of the grain goddess Ninlil by
the air god Enlil. For this crime, Enlil was banished by the
assembly of the gods to live in the underworld. When Ninlil
realized she was pregnant, she decided to follow Enlil to
the world of the dead to let him witness the birth of his
child. But the birth of a child in the underworld would have
imprisoned him forever in the Hades, the kingdom of the
Dead. As an appeasement, Enlil offered the next three
children who were going to be born to the infernal deities.
This allowed their first child Sin to ascend to the Heavens
to light the night sky.
This myth related to Sin’s birth explains why
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