On the gender of the sun and the moon

Sekhmet, an example of a female sun goddess.

Western culture tends to associated the sun with the masculine and the moon with the feminine. They are not alone in this; Asian mysticism attributes masculine qualities to yang (the energy of the sun) and feminine qualities to yin (the energy of the moon), and a few Native American cultures also have male sun gods and female moon goddesses. However, this is not universal: in Germanic, Slavic and Celtic languages the sun is usually female, the moon is embodied by the male god Chandra in Hinduism and Aboriginal Australians almost universally see the moon as male and the sun as female.

So, what gives?

The short answer is: we don’t know

The long answer: no, we really don’t know.

Many assumptions have been. It’s vogue to assume places with female suns are more egalitarian or even feministic than places with male suns; that runs true for say the old norse, but not for Imperial Japan, despiste both sharing sun goddesses. Some times its tied to the ideas of shared cultural memories like Indo-Europeans and descendent cultures; the original PIE sun deity is reconstred as the “sun maiden” whose myths survive in Helen of Troy, Sulis, the sun goddess of Arinna among others, but then you have IE male sun gods like Helios, Surya and Dielli. Meanwhile, the Middle East can’t make its mind on whereas the sun is male (Shamash, Utu) or female (Shapash, Shams).

Some cultures even have both. The Hittites had perhaps the most elegant solution, with the sun being male during the day and female at night, while the Aztec both had stories of a moon god (Tecciztecatl) and a female moon god (Coyolxauhqui). To the Egyptians, the sun was embodied by Ra, but the eye of the sun was embodied by multiple goddesses. Egyptians in general had gods with both male and female aspects, so it was particularly easy for them to reconcile that.

There just seems to be no heads and tails of that. It’s just that the dominant cultural spheres, like the west and China, drown this diversity of personifications.

I for one argue that, if a sun god exists, they’re above gender. Just as I.