sententia

In this series

1. Breaking the Golden Bough
2. The Myth of Elune
3. The Rituals of Elune
4. The Nature of Elune

What if Sir James George Frazer were alive today? It’s possible he would have written about World of Warcraft’s Night Elves in his classic book, “The Golden Bough”. Frazer was notorious for using fictional stories in his work, misrepresenting those stories, and then treating the whole mish-mash as if it were fact. What follows is the first part of a “lost chapter” from “The Golden Bough” – an analysis of Night Elf religion written in the voice of Frazer.  This work has been reformatted for easier online reading.

Elune and the Night Elves

In the preceding chapters we saw that nothing could be more natural than the worship of tree-spirits in the civilized nations of antiquity. Formerly the humans of Azeroth believed in an ancient race of immortals known as the Kaldorei or Night Elves. This race later lost their immortality and we may conjecture, though we are not told, that the humans of Azeroth consider themselves to be in some way related to these ancients.

The primary goddess of the Kaldorei was the goddess Elune. She is best known from myth as a goddess of the moon. But her character is more properly classed with Osiris and Attis as a tree-spirit, as brought out plainly by the part which the world tree Nordrassil plays in legends and rituals concerning her.

The Story of Elune

The story of Elune borrows upon the attributes and powers of many other gods of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms; it is told in multiple forms by writers whose narratives have not been confirmed, and it is seldom easy to determine which personifications are rightly hers and which have been heaped upon by devoted worshippers.

The legend of the War of the Ancients, so it is called, is told in many books. In other forms the tale of Elune reappears substantially in the Tauren myth of Mu’sha, and her legends and rites are so much like those of Ysera that they are sometimes identified with the Dragon Aspect. Thus in popular religion, the myths of Ysera are also attributed to Elune. But the official religion distinguishes between them.

The Origins of Elune

Among the Kaldorei, the origins of Elune are unknown. But some believed that Elune, or Ysera in this legend, was imbued with power by the life-god Eonar. This was the mythical origin of the Emerald Dream from which the Kaldorei say all life springs. Apart from this, two different accounts of the birth of Elune were current. According to the one of the Trolls, all the Kaldorei descended from Elune; and Elune herself was a certain Troll who colonized the land around the Well of Eternity.

According to the Tauren, Elune or Mu’sha, as she is known, was born as one of two children to the Tauren creator-goddess Earthmother. Mu’sha was born out of the left eye of the Earthmother and An’she out of the right. But the Earthmother grieved the wickedness of her creation and tore out her eyes; Mu’sha became the moon and An’she became the sun. This birth, like that of Attis, is clearly a relic of an age of ignorance when like children men did not realize that offspring was the result of intercourse of the sexes.

Both tales might claim the support of custom, and especially the latter was probably invented as a result of homoeopathic magic among the savagery of Azeroth in antiquity.

Elune and Malorne

Traveling as the moon through the sky, Elune rescued the stag Malorne, received his love and gave birth to Cernarius in a forest. The story that he was born in the forest is only one of those transparent attempts at rationalizing old beliefs in tree-spirits which meet us so frequently in mythology.

Before this time, the Sisters of Elune were the only Kaldorei religious order. But Cernarius founded the Kaldorei order of druids who used the power of nature to utter their powerful spells.

The Emerald Dream

Meantime, Elune fell into an eternal trance. Having been bound to the Emerald Dream, she appeared in the world as the moon at night and slept in a lake called the Well of Eternity during day. But by sleeping in the lake she bound it to the realm of the Eternal Dream and the waters were greatly empowered. Moreover, Elune is said to have allowed the lake to nourish all life in Azeroth. But the Kaldorei priestess Azshara used this power to create or destroy whatever she desired.

This power worked great evil and eventually ripped apart Azeroth, but Cernarius rallied an army of ancient tree-men and druids and destroyed the Well of Eternity. During this time Elune opened her eyes and was able to escape. But some water was saved and poured into another lake and a new Well of Eternity was created.

To keep the malevolent power at bay, Elune enchanted an acorn from the Mother Tree G’Hanir which grew into the World Tree Nordrassil. As it grew, Nordrassil absorbed all of the waters of the Well of Eternity. Elune then went back into her eternal trance.

We may conjecture, though we are not told, that Elune slept within Nordrassil when the waters were absorbed. The devotion of the Kaldorei – and especially Cernarius’ druids – to Elune bound them to Nordrassil and, so it is said, they became immortal.

Elune in Modern Portrayal

Such is the myth or legend of Elune, as told by native peoples of Azeroth. Thus according to what seems to have been the general tradition Elune was a powerful and calming goddess, portrayed as a moon-goddess who slept in water. But then she was absorbed into a great tree and henceforth protected all living beings.

In harmony with this tradition she was typically represented as a female Kaldorei with eyes of pure silver moonlight granting the Sisters of Elune the ability to heal or resurrect any creature.

One city above all others was associated with her myth or memory; Darnassus in Teldrassil where the Sisters of Elune were believed to have lived in the Temple of the Moon; this temple would seem to be to the people of Azeroth what the Vatican is to the Christians.

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