agastyaproktaṃ candrastotram

A short hymn spoken by Agastya, preserved inside the Ayodhyā Māhātmya of the Vaiṣṇava Khaṇḍa of the Skanda Purāṇa, and kept here with its original verse numbers running from seventy — it is an extract from a longer chapter rather than a work of its own. It is a pure name-list with no frame and no request: salutation to the cool-rayed one, to Somacandra, to Candra, to Vidhu, to the friend of the night-lotus; to the nectar-rayed, to Soma, to the lord of the herbs; to the one born of water, to the deer-marked, to the treasury of the digits; to the lord of the constellations, to the husband of night, to the giver of long life, to the king of the twice-born. Each name is a different way of saying moon, and the sequence moves from light to plants to time to kingship — the four things the moon governs in this literature.