Very different is another aspect of the moon goddess, and well might the Mexicans paint her with two colors. The beneficent dispenser of harvests and offspring, she nevertheless has a portentous and terrific phase. She is also the goddess of the night, the dampness, and the cold; she engenders the miasmatic poisons that rack our bones; she conceals in her mantle the foe who takes us unawares; she rules those vague shapes which fright us in the dim light; the causeless sounds of night or its more oppressive silence are familiar to her; she it is who sends dreams wherein gods and devils have their sport with man, and slumber, the twin brother of the grave. In the occult philosophy of the middle ages she was "Chief over the Night, Darkness, Rest, Death, and the Waters;"[133-1] in the language of the Algonkins, her name is identical with the words for night, death, cold, sleep, and water.[133-2]
She is the evil minded woman who thus brings diseases upon men, who at the outset introduced pain and death in the world--our common mother, yet the cruel cause of our present woes. Sometimes it is the moon, sometimes water, of whom this is said: "We are all of us under the power of evil and sin, _because_ we are children of the Water," says the Mexican baptismal formula. That Unktahe, spirit of water, is the master of dreams and witchcraft, is the belief of the Dakotas.[133-3] A female spirit, wife of the great manito whose heart is the sun, the ancient Algonkins believed brought death and disease to the race; "it is she who kills men, otherwise they would never die; she eats their flesh and knaws[TN-4] their vitals, till they fall away and miserably perish."[134-1] Who is this woman? In the legend of the Muyscas it is Chia, the moon, who was also goddess of water and flooded the earth out of spite.[134-2] Her reputation was notoriously bad. The Brazilian mother carefully shielded her infant from the lunar rays, believing that they would produce sickness;[134-3] the hunting tribes of our own country will not sleep in its light, nor leave their game exposed to its action. We ourselves have not outgrown such words as lunatic, moon-struck, and the like. Where did we get these ideas? The philosophical historian of medicine, Kurt Sprengel, traces them to the primitive and popular medical theories of ancient Egypt, in accordance with which all maladies were the effects of the anger of the goddess Isis, the Moisture, the Moon.[134-4]