St. Luna?

Short answer: No. But it’s an okay name.

According to a list of the top twenty baby names from the UK baby name site Nameberry, “Luna” is the #1 baby name for girls in 2020, so far. In the US, the Social Security Administration says that in 2018, Luna was up to #23 for girls.

Of course we know why. It’s the character Luna Lovegood, from the Harry Potter books. (And possibly, just a little influence from Luna the cat in Sailor Moon.) Two popular UK celebrities apparently named their daughter Luna last year, and this pushed it over the top in the UK.

So let’s look on the bright side. It’s a real name, with history and everything, and it sounds pretty and feminine. But it’s also a name of the Roman goddess of the Moon. Is it a suitable baptismal name?

Weeeell, lots of early Christian saints and martyrs were converted pagans with pagan names. Their conversion made their names Christian. So there is precedent.

The funny thing is that, at the time of big Roman conversions, most of the Gentiles turned martyrs were either Roman women bearing Roman clan names, or slaves bearing fashionable Greek names. You do get some ethnic names (St. Monica’s name was Punic, ie, Phoenician/Carthaginian), but you don’t usually get “given names” like we have, until later Christian times. Also, the moon goddesses were pretty popular, so people may have avoided giving moon-related names.

But nowadays, there’s no real reason not to name your kid Luna, if you feel like it. Lu- names like Lucy and Louise are getting popular. Probably more of a middle name, though.

Lunicia is a name today, although an uncommon one. There’s a saint named that in North Africa, on June 7. Lunicie is another spelling. (And yeah, avoid your kid being called Lunacy.)

That said, there’s also a St. Luna Mista listed on April 6 in some old martyrologies, but she’s also listed as “Summista.” Either way, nobody knows more about her (or him) than that.

The more common name is Diana, or in France, Diane. Diana is an Italian name and just means “goddess.” She was originally a rural goddess of the hunt, but got tacked onto all the Greek stuff with Artemis, Selene, and Hecate.

Diana was not popular with early Christians for the same Roman reasons; but it came back big as a Christian name in the high Middle Ages.

Blessed Diana d’Andalo was a real character. She came from a rich family in Bologna, but wanted to join the Dominican order of nuns and build a convent. So she first made a private vow of virginity, witnessed by St. Dominic and other Dominicans. Then she took a field trip with friends to a Benedictine convent of nuns, who had agreed beforehand to keep her until the Dominicans could get a convent going, and help her learn the nun business.

But as with St. Clare, her family showed up. They kidnapped her away from the nuns. When she got away, she joined some Augustinian nuns with their prior permission (you have to admire this girl’s letterwriting and plotting skills), and got kidnapped again. The family broke her rib and she was confined to her bed, but she managed to write St. Dominic while he was on his deathbed. She escaped again to the Augustinians. Finally, Blessed Jordan of Saxony (and his 24 charisma points) visited her family, and persuaded them to build a Dominican convent close to their home, so that the family could just visit, like normal people. This worked out, and the convent also produced Bl. Cecilia and Bl. Amata of Bologna. She died on Jan. 9, 1236. Her day is June 10, or June 8, or June 9 (depending on the calendar).

There’s also Bl. Diana, the first prioress of Sobrives in Provence. She was the aunt of St. Rosseline de Villeneuve, the patron saint of the Carthusians and the Order of Malta.

On the Greek name side, of course there is Phoebe from the Bible. Phoebe, “shining” or “bright one,” was one of the titles of Artemis. (And there’s a Phoebe in Harry Potter, too.)

There doesn’t appear to be any saint named Selene. There are several saints named Artemia, after Artemis. There’s the martyrs Ss. Artemia and Attica, on February 18, and the abbess of Cuteclara in Spain, St. Artemia.

The widow and abbess St. Artemia was not a martyr of Cordoba, but she taught one, St. Maria, in her convent. Maria was deeply impressed by St. Artemia’s description of how her sons were martyred by the Muslims, which was why she sought the religious life; and that’s part of why St. Maria went to Cordoba with St. Flora and formally denounced Islam in front of a qadi. They were executed on Nov. 24, 851.

(Another Cuteclara martyr nun was St. Aurea or Aura, who was born and raised Muslim but converted, and who stayed a nun for twenty years after being widowed. Her convert brothers, Ss. Adolphus and John, died martyrs on Sept. 27, 822. During the Cordoba persecutions, her relatives found her and dragged her out of the convent to face an Islamic judge. She renounced Christianity under duress and was stuck back in her relatives’ household. Secretly, she went back to practicing Christianity, but eventually the relatives found out. She refused to go back to Islam and was executed for apostasy on July 19, 856.)

(A few years later, another widow, St. Laura, was the abbess of Cuteclara, when she was martyred on October 19, 864 by being plunged into a cauldron of boiling pitch.)

The most famous St. Artemia was a misnomer for the Emperor Diocletian’s daughter, who was harried during his lifetime for being a Christian or Christian-friendly, and then was killed by a mob in Thessaloniki. (Her name was actually Valeria, after her dad’s clan name, and her married name was Galeria Valeria.) It’s not entirely clear whether she was technically killed as a martyr, or because she refused to marry, or because she was a convenient target. Either way, she went through plenty of hell on earth. Her bones are supposedly in Rome, in the Church of St. Sylvester, and her feast is August 8 or August 16. (Similarly, her Christian mother Prisca is sometimes miscalled Serena or Alexandra.)

There’s a town in Brittany named “Saint-Lunaire,” for St. Lunarius or Leonor, a male Breton saint who worked and was buried there.

There is a Castillo de Luna in Rota, Spain, and “Santa Luna” is a placename that occasionally comes up. De Luna was the name of a powerful Spanish family that conquered the town of Luna in Zaragoza. There’s also an Italian town named Luni, which was called Luna in Etruscan and Roman times. So in classical times, Carrara marble was called Luna marble. The town was once a notable port, but it got sacked by both Vikings and Muslims, until the port silted up. So the town was eventually abandoned, but has been excavated now.

The Moon gets mentioned in the Bible, of course, but Middle Eastern folks thought of the Moon as male, not female. The god of Ur of the Chaldaeans was Sin the moon god, and later the Babylonians worshipped him as Nebo or Nebu. Funnily enough, King Nectanebo, who was probably the Bible’s Nebuchadnezzar, started out as a commoner from Ur; and he notoriously put his god Nebo ahead of Babylon’s god Marduk. (Sometimes the Sun was thought of as female, but usually Shamash was pictured as also a guy.) So when you see the Beloved in the Song of Songs compared to the Sun, the Moon, and an army, it’s all masculine images. (Yeah, not very intuitive to us, but the Moon is also masculine in Japan.)

There was once a part of the Divine Office called the “Luna,” just like Lauds and Matins and Vespers. It came after Prime, and it was basically some readings from the martyrology. The little round window in a monstrance is also called a “luna.”

Lovegood or Love-God, btw, were Puritan names for girls. Love-Well was a boy’s name.

During Puritan times, it was pretty common for Royalists or Catholics to give their kids classical Roman or Greek names, as a sort of protest. So there were lots of guys named Hercules, Paris, Neptune, etc., and a fair number of women named Venus, Cassandra, Diana….

Oh, and the surname Moon is usually the Norman surname De Mohun, which comes from the town of Moyon or Moion in Normandy.

UPDATE: Delia is Greek for “Delian, person from Delos.” Artemis and Apollo were twins and both born on Delos, so Delia and Delios are also their titles. “Phoebus” is one of Apollo’s titles, too.

I also forgot Cynthia (“woman from Mount Kynthos”), which is a title of both Artemis and Aphrodite. Again, nobody thinks of it as a pagan name anymore.