Selene

Selene was born to Hyperion, the Titan of light, and Theia, the goddess of sight and the shining blue of the sky, in the generation before the Olympian gods rose to power on Olympus, the sacred mountain where the twelve great Olympian gods made their eternal home. Her brother Helios drove the chariot of the sun, a blazing golden cart drawn by four fire-breathing horses that rose from the eastern Ocean each dawn and sank into the western waves each evening, crossing the sky in a arc of unbearable brightness. Her sister Eos opened the gates of heaven each morning, her rosy fingers scattering the darkness and announcing the sun's arrival. Selene's task was the opposite: she rose when Helios descended, taking the night watch from her brother, and her chariot was of silver rather than gold, her horses white rather than fire-colored, her light cool and gentle rather than searing and bright. She wore a crown shaped like the crescent moon, and her robes flowed behind her like pale mist, and her beauty was said to be so great that the stars themselves dimmed when she passed.

The most famous story of Selene is her love for Endymion, a youth of Caria, a region in western Asia Minor, who was either a shepherd tending his flocks on Mount Latmus or a prince of Elis in the Peloponnese, depending on the telling. In the most beautiful version of the myth, Selene was driving her chariot across the sky one night when she looked down and saw Endymion sleeping in a cave on the mountainside. He was young and beautiful, his face peaceful in the moonlight, and Selene felt a love she had never known, a desire that pulled her from her divine path. She descended from the sky, stepped from her chariot, and approached the sleeping youth. She bent and kissed him, and he stirred but did not wake, for the gods had already granted him eternal sleep, either as a blessing or a curse, depending on the source. Some said that Zeus had given him the choice of death or eternal youth in endless slumber, and Endymion had chosen the latter. Others said that Selene herself had begged Zeus to preserve her lover's beauty forever, and the king of the gods had granted her request in the only way immortality could be given to a mortal: by freezing him in sleep, so that he would never age, never change, and never die. Selene accepted the bargain, and from that night forward, she left her chariot each month when the moon was full, descended to the cave on Mount Latmus, and lay beside her sleeping lover, watching his face in the silver light, while the world below turned without her.

From this union, strange and one-sided as it was, came the Menae, the fifty daughters of Selene and Endymion, who represented the fifty months of the four-year Olympiad cycle, the period by which the Greeks measured their calendar. The Menae were minor goddesses, nymphs of the months, and they were worshipped in connection with their mother's cult. Selene was also associated with other lunar deities across the Greek world, particularly with Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, who was often called "Artemis-Selene" or "Phoebe" in her lunar aspect, and with Hecate, the goddess of crossroads and magic, who was sometimes depicted with a crescent moon above her head. The three goddesses, Selene of the full moon, Artemis of the crescent, and Hecate of the dark moon, formed a triad that governed all phases of the lunar cycle, and their worship was intertwined in the mystery cults of the night.

Selene played a role in the story of the Nemean Lion, the first of the twelve labors of Heracles, the hero forced to complete impossible tasks as punishment for a fit of madness in which he had killed his own wife and children. The Nemean Lion was a beast of monstrous strength, born to Orthrus, the two-headed dog, and the Chimera, or to Typhon, the hundred-headed monster, and Echidna, the half-woman half-serpent mother of monsters. Its hide was impenetrable, and it terrorized the region of Nemea in the northern Peloponnese. Heracles, armed with his bow and his club, tried to kill the lion but found that no weapon could pierce its skin. The lion retreated to a cave with two entrances, and Heracles blocked one and entered the other. But the cave was sacred to Selene, and the goddess, angered that the hero would disturb her nighttime sanctuary, sent a blinding light that made Heracles stumble. The hero, enraged, shot an arrow at the light, and Selene, surprised by his audacity, laughed and withdrew, allowing Heracles to strangle the lion with his bare hands and to skin it using its own claws, the only thing sharp enough to cut its hide. The lion's pelt became Heracles's iconic armor, and the cave remained sacred to Selene.

Selene was worshipped across the Greek world, but her cult was never as dominant as those of the Olympian gods. She had temples and altars in connection with Artemis, particularly at Ephesus, the great city in Ionia where the Artemision, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, stood. The crescent moon was her primary symbol, and it appeared on coins, in sculpture, and in the crowns of queens who claimed her protection. The Greeks believed that the moon influenced the growth of plants, the behavior of animals, and the minds of men, and Selene was invoked in agricultural rituals and in love magic. Her light was thought to reveal hidden things, to make the invisible visible, and to grant prophetic dreams to those who slept beneath her beams. In later centuries, as Greek religion gave way to Roman, Selene was identified with Luna, the Roman moon goddess, and her chariot and her story were absorbed into the Roman pantheon. But the image of the moon as a beautiful woman, driving her chariot across the night, watching over the sleeping world, and descending to kiss her eternal lover, has never faded from the human imagination. Every full moon that rises over a mountain, every silver path that stretches across the sea, every lover who has ever gazed at the moon and thought of someone far away, has felt the presence of Selene, the goddess whose light is the memory of the sun, and whose love is the patience of the night.