Crescent moon
The moon as a thin curve of light, just after the new moon or just before it. It was the emblem of the moon god in ancient Mesopotamia, lies under the Virgin Mary’s feet in Christian art, is worn in Shiva’s hair, and is widely taken as a sign of Islam, though Islam has no official symbol.
Meaning
What makes a crescent is light. The moon only shows the part the sun lights, so its horns always point away from the sun, as the Madison school district’s planetarium explains. The waxing crescent, the new moon’s first appearance, rises in the morning after the sun and sets in the evening after it, NASA notes, so it is seen in the evening after sunset. The Qur’an says of the new moons: “They are periods fixed for man’s service and for the Pilgrimage” (2:189, in Rodwell’s translation). The crescent is a symbol for many peoples, each with its own meaning: the horned crown of the Mesopotamian moon god, the moon under the feet of the woman in the Book of Revelation, a mark of the god Shiva in Hindu images, the emblem of the Ottoman Empire and of the Red Crescent, and, on devices, the sign for sleep. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s proposal for power controls, which became the standard IEEE 1621, recommended “the moon symbol” for sleep, and the IEEE standard gave a sleep switch a crescent moon. The laboratory’s report says the crescent’s link with Islam was the one cultural question it studied in depth; it concluded that the symbol was no problem if a few guidelines were followed “in order not to make crescent moons look too Islamic”.
Origin and history
In ancient Mesopotamia the moon god Nannar was the crescent. Morris Jastrow, writing in 1898, explains that the horn the moon shows at one phase was his crown: he was often shown on seal cylinders “with a crescent over his head, and with a long flowing beard”, a hymn calls him “lord of the brilliant crescent”, and early rulers of Ur called him “the powerful bull of Anu”, the god of heaven, an epithet Jastrow explains from the likeness of the crescent to a bull’s horn. The Babylonians, Jastrow adds, reckoned time by the moon.
In Christian art the crescent belongs to the Virgin Mary. Revelation 12:1 describes “a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars”, and the Church applied the passage to Mary. Anna Jameson, in Legends of the Madonna, traces from it the radiance of the sun above her head and the crescent beneath her feet, the approved form for paintings of the Immaculate Conception. She noted that the crescent might also suggest chastity, but that in that sense it would be “a pagan rather than a Christian attribute”, and that Murillo sometimes painted a full moon instead, or a crescent with its horns pointing up rather than down.
In Hindu images of Shiva the crescent sits in his hair. T. A. Gopinatha Rao, in Elements of Hindu Iconography (1914), quotes the rule for the god’s crown of matted hair: a crescent of the moon is to be attached to it on the left or the right, and a cobra on the left.
Is the crescent moon a symbol of Islam?
Not officially: Islam has no symbol of its own, though the crescent, with or without a star, has come to stand for it. Radio Islam, a Muslim broadcaster, writes that the early Muslim community had no acknowledged symbol and that its leaders flew plain black, white or green flags. The Federal Territories Mufti’s Office in Malaysia agrees that Islam has no official symbol, and quotes the scholar al-Kattani calling the crescent on minarets an innovation that the Ottoman Empire used as its official sign; yet the Mufti’s Office accepts the crescent and star on Malaysia’s flag, where the government gazetted them as the symbol of Islam as the official religion. The Qur’an mentions the new moons only as markers of time. The emblem’s history, from Ottoman flags to the flags of several Muslim countries, is on the star and crescent page.
The Red Crescent
The crescent became a humanitarian sign in 1876, as the Hong Kong Red Cross dates it. During the Russo-Turkish war, the International Committee of the Red Cross explains, the Ottoman Empire adopted the red crescent as its protective sign, while still recognising and respecting the red cross. Governments formally recognised it in 1929, and since 2005 a third sign, the red crystal, has had the same status. The protective emblems are on the Red Cross emblem page.
Why is the crescent sometimes on its back?
Because of where you stand. The tilt of the crescent changes with latitude and season: from Madison, Wisconsin, the evening crescent looks like a backwards C in September and lies on its back like a U in March, while at the equator it looks like a U in both December and June, the Madison planetarium explains.
Where you’ll see it today
whatdoesthissymbolmean.comSleep symbolThe crescent moon is the sleep symbol of IEEE 1621 whatdoesthissymbolmean.comFlag of BruneiBrunei’s flag is yellow, crossed diagonally by a white and a black band, with the national emblem in red in the centre. Brunei’s State Customs Department (Jabatan Adat Istiadat Negara) says the yellow stands for the Sultan and the black and white bands for Brunei’s chief wazirs, the ministers responsible for governing the country.Read next
- Next in Symbols across culturesSpiralA line that winds outward from a centre. It is among the oldest carved signs: spirals cover the entrance stone of Newgrange in Ireland, built about 3200 BC, ancestral Pueblo people in the American Southwest carved spirals that sunlight marks at the solstices, and in Māori art the koru spiral is a symbol of creation.
- The crescent with a star, taken as an emblem of IslamStar and crescentA crescent moon with a star, widely taken as an emblem of Islam and of Muslim countries, though many Muslims do not accept it as a symbol of their faith.
See also
Artemis, Osram ne Nsoromma (moon and star), Moon gods and goddesses, Triple moon (triple goddess), Tree of life, Labyrinth.
Sources
- Crescent Moon Tilt, Madison Metropolitan School District Planetarium, Moon FAQ, Madison Metropolitan School District Planetarium, Introduction; short answer
- Moon Phases (NASA Science), NASA, When to see each phase
- The Koran (Rodwell translation), J. M. Rodwell (trans.), The Koran, Project Gutenberg, Sura 2 (Al-Baqara) 189
- The Power Control User Interface Standard, Consultant report P500-03-012F (Alan K. Meier and Bruce Nordman), December 2002, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the California Energy Commission (Internet Archive copy), Executive summary; section 3.3.3
- Save Energy at Your PC: Energy Scientists Propose Color-Coding Standard for PC Sleep Mode, 1 June 2005, American Institute of Physics, Discoveries and Breakthroughs Inside Science (Internet Archive copy), The solution
- The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, Morris Jastrow, Jr. (Ginn, 1898), Project Gutenberg, Chapters V and XI
- The Holy Bible, King James Version, Project Gutenberg eBook #10, Project Gutenberg, Revelation 12:1
- Legends of the Madonna as Represented in the Fine Arts, Anna Jameson, Project Gutenberg, Introduction (attributes); The Immaculate Conception
- Elements of Hindu Iconography, Vol. I, Part I, T. A. Gopinatha Rao, 1914, Law Printing House, Madras (Internet Archive, Cornell University Library copy), Introduction: jata-makuta
- History of the Crescent Moon as a Symbol of Islam, Radio Islam, article
- Al-Afkar #36: Are crescent and star the symbols of Islam?, Mohammad Izzhar Faizzy Osman, 11 January 2019, Federal Territories Mufti’s Office (Pejabat Mufti Wilayah Persekutuan), Malaysia (archived copy, Internet Archive)
- Our emblems, International Committee of the Red Cross, history of the emblems
- History of the Emblem, Hong Kong Red Cross, 1876; 2007
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research
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