I'm interested in the different ways people view this.
I've always considered the moon to be feminine and the sun to be masculine but why?
MH mentioned this view only came about during the Romantic period but I understood the Moon to be associated with Hecate and Artemis and the Sun with Apollo and Helios. Was the Romantic view coloured by people's interpretation of older ways?
Has my view just been influenced by reading the Ladybird Book of Greek Myths & Legends?
Which peoples in Europe beleived the Sun to be feminine and the Moon to be masculine? (I'm aware this was the case in Japan and China)
Does anyone know why?
For me the Sun is heat, strength, phallic, open, while the Moon is quiet and closed, just as powerful in her own way, but a more reserved strngth, maybe passive.
So many questions...
Bearing in mind I've not been on here for a while if there's already a thread, please feel freeto point me at it. I did search but my poor little laptop got a headache and fell over.
BM
xx

BM

Many cultures view the moon as masculine and the sun as feminine. I'm away from home ATM so don't have recourse to my normal research tools, but someone else has mentioned these cultures elsewhere. From memory: the North Sea & Celtic cultures, the Semitic one, Japan and a few others.

When I mentioned the Romantics it was because they took the Mediterranean pagan cultures as their base, and those cultures assumed the moon as feminine and the sun as masculine, unlike our native (or early settlement) cultures within the UK.

Hmmmm.

I know very little about the whole history and culture of this sort of thing. I know that like you I view the moon as female. However I just look at the sun as the sun. It doesnt "feel" anything to me, male or female.

I also know that since I have been very small I have talked to the moon and have always refered to her as a her.

Perhaps its just a personal thing for people?

Actually I think I do too. It's more male than female to me, but I don't get as much of a vibe from the sun anyway. Hmmm. I must ponder that properly.
BM
xx

i tend to see the sun as masculine it fire and molten the moon to me is feminine as it controls the tides and water.

i feel very connected to the moon and water hence the name opal moon. my favorite moon is a huge red harvest moon. you know the end of the growing season is coming and the weather is changing when you see that moon.

the sun also heats the earth giving it life. the moon gives it the dark to rest to grow.

these are just my own personal views

The Moon to me has allways been feminine. The Sun? Hmmmm I don't see it as masculine or Feminine it just is.


My Mytholigy is a bit rusty But didn't the Achient Romans see the Sun as Diana where the greeks saw it as Apollo.

From my copy of 777 the Sun is associated with 6 Tipartheh on the treel of life and its other attributes are:
Beauty, the 6's Emperor and Princes of the Tarot,Fire (but notthe root of fire), Ra, Asar,Iacchus, Apollo, Adonis, Buddah, Vishnu-Hari-Krishna-Rama,Phoinix, Lion, Child and Thor.

Of course, as a sceptical and cynical atheist, I don't agree with this anthropomorphisation of celestial bodies. *cough*

(But there is a man in the moon, after all )

Is he the one eating the green cheese?
BM
xx

I am not alone! YES!

Sorry, but I have no idea of Crowley's correspondences. Didn't the ancient Romans view Diana as associated with the moon? (IIRC they called the moon Selena, though that may have been the Greeks).

As to whether Apollo was seen as a 'sun' god - that may have been more to do with later (19th century?) division of gods into 'solar' (or whatever) 'types'.

That must be Aiken Drum, greedy bugger, he must have a bellyache by now

O,h how I believed all of those man in the moon stories and rhymes as a child and spent many a time looking up at it trying to see a face
I remember once feeling quite upset as I thought I could see him and he was stuck, stuck in the moon

And yes xalle and BM, I have a bit of a problem seeing the sun as anything too.I connect with the moon really easily but the sun, not so much but feel I need to to get a balance and more of an understanding.

MM08

It's not green cheese.

I saw a documentary once where a bloke and his dog built a rocket and went to the moon and, if I remeber correctly, the moon was definitely wensleydale.

Sun - male. Moon - female. As far as i know legally it started with the romans however as usual i disagree. Most of the bronze age carvings in the valleys here are most definately male. You could not possibly after seeing a handfull argue that they are anything to do with the female. All the experts agree they are carvings dedicated to the sun not the moon. The few menhirs too are deffo male and again dedicated to the sun. What the other weird cultures did is their problem but as far as i can see prehistoric europe has the sun as male. Menhirs as female??? Bah, humbug. (Yes i know about avebury et al).

*grumbles cos she's about to look like a prat*

Years people have been telling me the moon was female. Years (like all the ones I've had) I've known the Moon was really, really important. Also for years, although less than all of them, I've got the distinct impression that 'someone' was waiting for me to take the bloody hint.
Just recently, finally realised that the moon was Male and was, for want of a better word, my patron - Yes I know it's a ball of rock floating in space, one cannot help which metaphyiscal crutches claim one - since I've stopped acknowledging him as a her, we get on rather famously.

The sun's a girl, from which all life springs but I never did get on with women so well.

*going back under my weak minded, credulous, primitive rock now*

....where you find woozle whose beliefs are the contrary but stem from the same reasons .

Woozle, is that the rock carvings in the whole of Europe or just Southern Europe? When you say Europe, are you including the more Northern nations (inc. Scandinvia)?

Linguistically speaking. I speak both romantic languages (all except from Italian and Romanian and my Catalan isn't too hot nowadays) and some Germanic. The gender assigned in Southern European languages to the sun is always masculine where as the gender assigned to the moon is feminine.

In Northern European countries (excluding the Finno-Ugric bunch), the moon is masculine (in Anglo Saxon too so therefore originally English) and the sun is feminine. We see this in mythology such as 'the man in the moon'.

It has been theorised that this difference occured because of how the sun and moon were seen in those cultures because of their respective climates. In the Northern countries, the sun brings life - a very female attribute whereas in the Southern countries, the sun can kill and is potentially considered more masculine because of that.

It is a bit of a Headf*k at times, I look at the Tarot and see the Sun as a Life giving force-The Sun is associated with Children where the Moon is a more secretive and sinsiter Card? So that turns the genral assumption on its head.

Heres a theory for you

"The Sun genderless where the Moon as it switches through its cylces changes Gender from male to female?"

Just a theory I still see the Moon as Femail because of the Tidal/Cyclic nature of it.

The Moon is a Cat, Aloof secretive and occasianly playfull, Where the Sun is a Dog, "throw my stick" I'm happy.

I always liked the Japanese Sun-Goddess, Ama-Terasu.

European Pagans like to associate the Moon with Females because the Waxing-Full-Waning fits in with the Maiden-Mother-Crone business.

I came across some Native Australian myths which have the Sun and Moon gendered differently from how we Yurpeens view them. There was a rape involved in one of them. I'll look it up.

Souther european carvings specifically, megalithic culture in general britain in particular.
Though i can see how one might think language could reflect the male/female thing but i include scandinavia under weird cultures so don't know anything much about megalithic culture there. I could not possibly agree with the idea of anglosaxon expressing english choice of a male moon having always believed that this idea that anglosaxon is at the root of the language is all ballocks. It would be interesting to ask a handfull of non pagan britons to see what they say. 100 to 1 the sun is a male.

That doesn't work so well for me really. I got the distinct impression he was getting a little pissed off with being referred to as a big girl all the time.

Wouldn't know Tarot is I fell over it but the animals! No! I can't ever see my lovely Moon as a horrible poisonous cat! (don't like the creatures, severely allergic to them ) Those aren't really attributes that I can associate with the Moon at all.

I guess it's possible though that you are right, the Moon is both and the female part shows itself to some and the male part to others and neither have any interest in the people it's other half involves itself with.

Maybe they are both, both.

Ehh.. I mean to say, maybe both the Sun and Moon are both male and female and we see whatever bit we connect with the most.

Oh crikey, we're bac to the hermaphrodites again...
BM
xx

Bloody hermaphrodites they get everywhere!

I use 'Herm-be-gone' ™ spray.

Works a treat!

how about the connection between the moon and menstruation? possibly the connection between the moon and females came about when people became all to aware that both women and the moon run on a roughly monthly cycle. or so im told.

if i had to plump with one or other i would go with sun = male. i dont see the sun as giving all life - merely providing the means to do so whilst the earth does the nurturing and growth side of things. with my mysogynist hat on i might suggest you go back a fair bit in human history and that kind of encapsulates gender roles or percieved gender roles. exceptions of course before.

What connection? Although it is interesting that the average menses cycle is 28 days and the lunar orbit is 29.5 days, there is no correlation between the two. There are many women who don't conform to that timescale anyway.

Not sure about the connection myself. I know my cycle bears no relation to any celestial body unless it be the passing of Haley's COmet...
Mind you I've got a friend who's a midwife and she assures me that midwives dread full moon nights cos generally it all kicks off.
BM
xx

I've heard this too.. must be somfink in it!
I've always thought of the moon as female/sun male.. dunno why really.. just do..

as an after thought moon:.. dark mysterious, has a dark side.. sun:... all bright and out there, bit of a flashy git.. I AM ONLY JOKING!!!!!

Barn

I can only echo the sentiment - it's nice to discover others think the same




Hemaphrodites aside (where can I get some of that spray? )- that's how I've felt about the Sun&Moon for a while now.

Or Rhys Llwyd as we call him over here...

Having said that, I do find that the moon has a feminine feel and the sun a masculine one.

gwyn eich byd

Ffred

For me the moon is definitely female - I feel connected to her in a way I just don't to the sun. I talk to her as Luna, and I see the sun as mighty Apollo racing across the sky

Moon man, man Moon

Maybe and its just a theory fuelled by my lack of Coffee.

Maybe its a 3 way thing the Gender we place on the sun and moon is a reflection of the way we see ourselves.

Someting like this:


SUN MOON MAN
m f m/f in balance (or even at conflict)
f m m/f
m/f f m
m/f m f
f m/f m
m m/f f

or other variations theof maybe the end resuslt should be a m/f balance right accross the board.

Or is it another way that Mankind catergorises eveything we see around us. Into managable forms "Dualities" ect.

Not sure, i'm off to drink some coffee and get the nuerons firing a bit faster

How could language not reflect the male/female thing? And since when was Britain considered a Southern European country?




So what alternative theories about the roots of the English language do you believe in then?

A handful of non pagan britons? I think you might have a fair few more referencing the 'man in the moon' than you think.

On a bit of a side note here-for years I also thought that this was rubbish cos most people I knew did not follow the '28 day' cycle and I certainly don't. However, out of curiosity, last year I decided I would write in my diary dates of menstruation and found to my huge surprise that it does correlate with moon cycles. Came as a bit of a shock actually because I was pretty sceptical about the whole thing.

Statistically it's easy to figure out. The 'cycles' are so close in time and women's cycles usually vary 24 hours here or there (and that's women that ARE 'regular') that the two are bound to coincide at many points in time. A person can also 'set' their cycles to coincide if they are using B.C..

As for the general question, I don't see why (outside of understanding certain myths ) it's even of interest. But that's just me .

Marto

Sorry to spoil a good argument but there was NO English language as such until the first bible was published in English. Until then there were lots of different regional dialects that you would have great difficulty understanding unless you were local. This actually still exists in some places, has anyone tried to understand a broad Wiganer when they talk proper Wiganish, even someone from the other side of Wigan would struggle. "Woss tha gerrun do ferra fez wen kin kon wonziz arzbak?"

First of all, the argument about the chicken or the egg isn't very effective here in discussing the language argument. Secondly, I misread your following comment and that led me to believe that you considered Britain a Southern European country.







Erm...no. I think your theory about being able to speak to and understand a bronze age man using modern English is erroneous. The bronze age peoples were celtic, they spoke a celtic language and you could no more communicate with a person from the bronze age than you could a Welsh person speaking Welsh. As for the Romans, speaking latin was something done out of preference in order to sound cultured. People would switch between the languages. The following article discusses Latin loan words in British:

British

As for the number of Anglo-Saxon invaders, we don't know. However judging from genetic evidence as carried out on the modern day population, I would say that it was more than a handful. The Saxon language became Old English and then that became Middle English and then that eventually became Modern English however as Gawain points out - not in any standard form. There are still massive regional differences. If you look at texts from these different periods of evolution of the English language, it is clear that English has it's roots predominantly in Anglo Saxon/Old English (Compare Beowulf with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight/Plenty/Cleanliness/the Canterbury Tales and then with Shakespeare and then with Modern English and it is pretty clear).



Well no....and the evolution of those languages is just as traceable as our own. With the exception of Icelandic of course which has changed very little since the Viking age to the extent that Icelanders can still read Viking age texts without translations. What is your evidence that the Romans didn't always consider the moon to be female?



Um...no. The problem with sources from the Viking age is that there is a lot of Christian influence in there that needs to be sifted through. Reconstructionalists tend to work with archaelogical evidence too in order to try and build up a more complete picture of the pre-Christian worldview/s in that part of the world. For example, the literature written in the Viking age, says that the dead either go to Valhalla, Hel or to Ran (the sea). However evidence from burial mounds suggests that people believed their ancestors to inhabit the burial mound or else why make offerings there? This in turn suggests a very different belief regarding the soul. The soul as something that separates from the body after death and goes to another place was a foreign idea to those people.

Unfortunately we can only judge language when there is evidence to judge it from. Unfortunately there is no evidence of the language 10,000 years ago or 20,000 years ago. There are pictographs to show ideas and things they considered to be important however no words to attach to those pictures.




You originally specified non pagan britons in your post:



As for the past and references to the man in the moon - it's not a modern idea. The author John Lyly in the prologue to his book Endymion (1591) said: "There liveth none under the sunne, that knows what to make of the man in the moone."

This believing in things without evidence is rather catching on Pagan forums

Woozle, what makes the experts believe they were dedicated to either the sun or the moon?

Are they possibly thinking of the phallic figures with sun wheel bodies? So might this sort of thing be the line of thinking:


From here

For myself, I tend not to assign gender to the sun and moon. However, as this thread has forced me to consider it, I would say the moon is male. Why? Because night is a harsh and unforgiving environment - much more in line with what I might think of as redolent of competitive activities traditionally associated with testosterone. That's forcing my own feelings to take a rational turn - I don't necessarily agree with the rationalisation; I'd rather go with my feelings. I experience the moon as more male than female, and the reverse for the sun. But neither feeling is intense.

Oh, and I don't associate the moon with menstruation. It might work for most women, but never has for me.

MH - Of course it's all guesswork. But from rock art to carve art to megaliths to odds and sods from prehistoric culture I me moi personally feel that all this is sun/male stuff. That is though only me. I see it as blindingly obvious.
Elswyth/Gawain - With language we will never agree. I don't believe the socalled liguists and the like who just seem to pass on knowledge reveived without actually challenging it which is what i do and have always done. What is welsh, what is gaelic, cornish, manx, english? Languages which have evolved separately or did the just appear? Italian now is just like english was in the past, full of dialects. A calabrian cannont understand someone from up here but italian still exists as a language. The languages all evolved separately. Latin was a separate language. Anglo saxon was an influence but a minor one. But hey, again to me this idea of the invaders causing major changes in language is balls. But it is the accepted theory and like most accepted theories nobody bothers to challenge them. Anglosaxon archeology anyone! The various goths, ostro/visi etc, the lombards and the normans who invaded italy in larger numbers than the saxons in england did not modify the language, nor did they in france or spain, Even the bloody vandals had no linguistic influence but strangely the saxons did????WOT??? Even the danes and normans or romans didn't change anything. Just a miniscule tribe of saxons. How very odd!!
All we need i someone with a degree and a brain to start challenging these things in the future and all will become clear. Probably after i'm dead though. Meantime the evidence for me is sun male, moon female but things change i suppose. Now if yuo sleep with a 13 year old you get put into prison, before they married at 13. Things change.

Errr, I have none of Elswyth's knowledge of linguistics but Woozle, the Danes certainly did leave a language legacy. Yorkshire is full of Danish influence on the dialect, the same words occur all the way north to my own area and dialect that stem from the influx of Danes. Kirk, Gate, Bairn, Arse...

It goes on, see this hastily googled list - http://www.viking.no/e/england/e-yorkshire_norse.htm

If the Danes had such an influence over language in their dominant area, why not accept it of the Saxons?

Bit strong isn't it?

You beat me to it Esk. You can tell which parts of England were till British and which parts were English by some of the names. Places with Cumbri-, Cumber-, Camber-, Camb-, Cam- and similar prefixes were British settlements under British control (same root as Cymri). Places with Wal- prefixes were British settlements under English control, that's why there are so many Waltons (Wal from Waela meaning foreigner, hence Wales, cheeky bloody English).

OK, try these quotes from Wiki on the English language:



Mind you, that might simply help to confuse the situation!

Of course they left something Esk, but they didn't totally change it. They modified it. Orthodoxy would have it that our language is saxon not danish. But then is Yorkshire full of norman influence too?? I seem to remember yorksire is in england and the normas invaded england.
We have english words in the local dialect here, with french, italian, german and so on but the language is not english or german or italian in the valleys, it is dialect often based on french.
But in britain how come the welsh/manx/scottish/cornish/irish all stayed as they are?
But to return to the OP as either you see these things or you don't, perhaps we should find out whether the sun and moon are male or female in welsh/manx/scottish/cornish and irish which might give us a clue as to past cultures' ideas on the subject (if, of course, you accept the idea of a celtic nation too which, yawn!, boring old woozle, i don't).
So any celtic language speakers out there who can tell us???

This thread is really interesting because in spite of being presented with various forms of evidence, the person that demands the evidence from others regarding their beliefs the most is firstly not giving any evidence nor listening to evidence that he doesn't like because it doesn't support or back up his belief. Very interesting.

Yes some European cultures consider the sun to be masculine and some to be feminine. In the end, it is all up to us personally to make the decision about what we are going to believe and what makes sense for us. I was only pointing out that how a culture considers the moon and sun is often reflected in the language and is usually dependent on their climate.

Try googling Dia Greine or Sulis.

What are you talking about?
Scottish didn't stay the same, there is no 'Scottish' language! Up in the far north people spoke Norse, as you go south they spoke Pictish down to speaking Cumbrian. The Irish came over and mixed Old Irish in and the result was more or less Gaelic (which incidentally is where Manx came from too) but that wasn't spoken across Scotland either, much of the language away from the West was still pretty much Norse/Pictish for a long time. By the time Gaelic had become the norm for the North, the South were full of Normans and were speaking English and my own corner, the North-East were and largely still are speaking the Doric dialect of English which is heavily based on Norse. The language of Scotland has done nothing but evolve in accordance with the populations of incomers for thousands of years.

To attempt to answer your question though, the Gaelic for Moon is generally accepted as being Gealach which translates literally as 'Brightness' as I understand it and has no gender assigned.

It would be nice to determine why the various cultures thought the way they did but we're never gong to get very far just saying the scandinavians though like this the egyptians like that. We need to go back in time and language cannot help. To say the sun is male because you say il sole rather than la sole is i think stretching it a bit. So apple is maybe female and table is maybe male but if you put an apple and a table in a darkened room they do not produce little apples. Linguistic convenience not cultural indicators. Did primitive man consider the stars which collectively will have one gender or another, male or female simply because they have that name? I think not.
Loosely speaking L'orsa maggiore in italian is the great bear, female, Il grande carro, the plough, is male. Orion is a male constellation, stars are female. How can language possible reflect anything? There has to be another reason for the difference.
sorry, still haven't got the hang of dividing stuff up.

Thank you. I would therefore say, based on this single example that language has no influence over and does not even reflect, the cultural awareness of the gender of the sun or moon.