Twelve Moons- Chinese GroupCollective"Daughters of Di Jun"
Also known as: 十二月 and Shí'èr Yuè
Description
The twelve daughters of Di Jun and the moon goddess Changxi, each governing one month of the lunar calendar. Their brothers, the Ten Suns, nearly burned the world by rising together. The Twelve Moons kept their rotation, cycling from crescent to full and back again, one sister at a time.
Mythology & Lore
Children of Changxi
The Shanhaijing names the Twelve Moons as daughters of Di Jun, the primordial sky god, and his wife Changxi, the goddess who bathes the moons. Di Jun fathered both the sources of day and night: ten suns through Xihe and twelve moons through Changxi. Where the suns structured the ten-day week, the moons gave shape to the twelve months. Each sister takes her turn in the sky, waxing from a sliver to full brilliance and waning back again before yielding to the next.
Their mother Changxi bathes them through these monthly transformations, as Xihe bathes the suns. But where the Ten Suns famously broke their rotation and all ten rose at once, scorching the earth until Houyi shot nine from the sky, the Twelve Moons kept their order. No archer was needed. The moons rose one at a time, as they were meant to.
Before Chang'e
In later mythology, the moon belongs to Chang'e, the goddess who stole the elixir of immortality and fled to the lunar palace. The Twelve Moons belong to an older layer. They are not a single figure living on the moon but the moons themselves: twelve celestial bodies born at the beginning of time, each one a month made visible.