In honor of the Solstice, Happy Solstice to Everyone (A post in another class of mine that mentioned Grandfather Sun made me wonder-in some languages sun is masculine and in others feminine...) Why the Sun is Feminine and the Moon Masculine In many religions there are male sun gods, but they actually appeared quite late on the scene, when male priesthoods became dominant over the older priestesshoods of the Sun Goddess. They tried to downgrade the power of the feminine by assigning it to the Moon of lesser light, claiming the power and brightness of the Sun for themselves. That is why later Sanskrit-related languages (e.g. Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Portuguese), assign a masculine gender to the Sun and a feminine to the Moon. Whereas in older languages of the same Indo-European family (e.g. Sanskrit, German and old Goidelic) the Moon is masculine and the Sun feminine. Similarly, in the very ancient, pre-Babylonian Sumerian tongue, the word for moon is explicitly masculine, as it is in Arabic, in which the word for sun is feminine. Thus, underneath the surface of later male-dominant cults, there is a worldwide wealth of evidence of a much older and puissant Sun Goddess, as well as of a Moon God. The Tuvan shamans agree, as witness the following two excerpts from the rich manuscript collection of Mongush Kenin-Lopsan, the shaman scholar of Tuva, who single-handedly revived shamanism there after it had almost been persecuted to death in the Stalinist era. The excerpts were related respectively by Kertek Okaan and Mongush Senden in 1990 and recorded by Kenin-Lopsan: My Mother the Sun This story is from ancient times. The Sun is my Mother, one says. If there is no sun, then there will be nothing on earth [and] if there is no mother, there will be no children. As the sun and mother have the same duties, they began calling the Sun My Mother. Father Moon There is reason why Tuvans of ancient times used to call the moon Father. The sun is called Mother because as soon as dawn breaks the sun rises in the east, and likewise a Tuvan mother is always the mistress of her yurt for she takes care of the children. The moon is called Father because a father is always away and does not stay long in the yurt. Likewise, the moon does not appear in the sky every day too: it either appears or disappears. The Sun resembles the Ovum, the Moon resembles the Sperm. Modern observations support assigning the Sun to the feminine and the Moon to the masculine. Under the microscope the non-mobile ovum (propelled through the fallopian tubes but not by its own motion) looks like a sun with its many rays of living protoplasm emanating from its spherical surface. The motile sperm reflects the swift motion of the Moon as it propels itself in successive crescent-shaped waves. Also, under the micro-scope, the ovum appears more red and the sperm more white, confirming the old tradi-tions of tantric Hinduism as these are the two colours of the solar Kali and the lunar Shiva. They are also the colours of their pair of yogic channels pingala and ida, not to mention the pair of red and white tinctures in the central doctrine of the transformation of the soul in alchemy. Affirming the assignation of the Moon to the male, it is the impregnation cycle in the human female which is controlled by the Moon, the directing of impregnation being a male function. That not obvious but straightforward relation of the male lunar power with the female menstrual cycle often led to the understandable error of taking the Moon to be female. That error is further pointed up by the fact that in cultures like those of the Buriats of Western Mongolia, the Greenlanders, Maori and Nigerians, it is believed that the Moon could impregnate women. Thus women of the Greenlanders had the custom that they would not sleep outside under the moonlight unless they had rubbed spittle on their bellies beforehand to prevent the Moons impregnation. The Maori held that the Moon was the true and permanent husband of all women, more important than the mortal spouse. The Moon is the initiating or fertilizing power of impregnation. It thus directs the tides of womens menstrual or monthly (the latin mens means month) cycle because the lunar force determines the peaks of fertility - the crests of most likely impregnation and the troughs of its least likelihood. Thus the lunar power of impregnation orbits around the solar egg. These ancient truths reappeared in the age of chivalry, when the entire adventurous journeying of a knight revolved around his fealty to his lady.... lionpath.net/zwoelf.html
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 21:43:02 +0000
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