Cock o’ the Moon

“Cock o’ the Moon” was the name of a phallic image associated with Septon Moon, whose followers turned his sexual reputation into a material emblem of fertility, prosperity, and good fortune. The expression captures the uneasy mixture of religious fervor, sexual license, and popular superstition surrounding his movement.

Origin in Septon Moon’s Preaching

Septon Moon began each sermon with the confession “I am a sinner,” and the narrative makes his conduct an emphatic contradiction of any appearance of piety. He was described as a glutton and drunkard, notorious for his lechery, and lay with a different woman each night. His followers claimed that his seed could make a barren woman fertile; the tale spread widely enough that husbands offered him their wives and mothers their daughters. Moon accepted these offers, giving the belief an apparent basis in his behavior even as it remained a credulous and extravagant claim.

Emblem and Popular Belief

Some hedge knights and men-at-arms among Moon’s followers painted the “Cock o’ the Moon” on their shields. The image also became a commodity: clubs, pendants, and staffs carved to resemble his member were traded briskly. These objects were treated not merely as depictions but as talismans, whose touch was believed to bestow prosperity and good fortune. The expression thus named both a recognizable sign and the range of charms through which the sign circulated.

Meaning and Contradiction

The emblem transforms Moon’s sexual notoriety into a promise of fertility and luck. Its power within the movement rests on the contrast between the sermon’s language of sin and the followers’ reverence for the preacher’s appetites: behavior that might undermine religious authority instead becomes the basis of a popular cult of potency. The name’s comic vulgarity is inseparable from its serious social consequence, since belief in Moon’s fertility was strong enough to prompt families to offer him women and to sustain a market in protective charms.