Re: The Gender of the Sun.

junk

We have several parallels to the Vedic figures Surya and Surya' (long -A- - a feminine ending): The feminine Surya' is notable for being involved with divine twins and horsemen, the Asvins.

In Baltic myth, you have Saule - who is a masculine sun - and "Saule's daughter" who is involved with the twin "Sons of God" (Dievas Deli)

who seem to be cognate with the Vedic Asvins.

In Celtic we have two Solar figures - there is the masculine Sonno(s) known from the calendar of Coligny (though, no inscriptions yet discovered attest to Sonnos' divinity) and we have the feminine Sulis - who is glossed as Minerva - and is the patron of the healing waters at Bath, England. Sonno is from Suelnos and Sulis is from SauelieH (equivalent of Vedic Surya' - the daughter of Surya). The Celtic Minerva is normally paired with the Celtic Apollo - who has a solar nature (cf. Belenos Apollo "shining one" et al.)

Even Greece has a probable femine match to Helios - Helen of Troy, sister to the twins Kastor and Polydeukes.

There exist in Germanic languages two words for the sun: Sol- and Sonn-/Sun-. This seems to parallel the Celtic forms (Sonno(s) and Sulis) - so perhaps there were masculine and feminine aspects of the sun. In traditional Germanic folklore, we have a feminine sun who is opposed to a masculine moon (cf the English "Man in the Moon"). I believe that there were likely originally masculine and feminine aspects to both the moon and the sun.

----- Original Message -----

From: Mark Odegard

To: cybalist@eGroups.com

Sent: Thursday, December 02, 1999 1:59 PM

Subject: [cybalist] The Gender of the Sun.

The PIE word for sun is something like *sawel (the transcriptions from authority to authority vary greatly). A laryngeal of some sort closes the first syllable. The word is very very old indeed; it's often compared to a remarkably similar word appearing in Semitic (is there a Uralic cognate?), and shows up in just about all the daughter languages. English sun and Greek helios are cognates.
What I find interesting is what grammatical gender it takes in the daughter languages. In Germanic, it's feminine, and she is personified as a goddess; compare this to Greek and Latin-Romance where it's masculine and he is personified as a god. Indo-Iranian has mixed evidence; it's either neuter or masculine. In Old Church Slavonic, it's neuter; I don't know about the other Slavic languages, but suspect this is the case too. My source (EIEC at this instant) does not explicitly state the gender in Baltic, but she is a goddess, and I would presume Balto-Slavic had it in the feminine too -- which makes for an interesting shift when we encounter Slavic. The evidence in Celtic is a little harder; the feminine-gender word survives in Old Irish as a term for 'eye'. Presumably, Hittite has it in the animate gender (does it?).
I wonder. Can we speak of an isogloss here? Balto-Slavic, Germanic and Celtic opposed to the other daughters?
My sources are less explicit about the moon, but in Germanic it's masculine as I recall. I don't remember if there is a Germanic moon-god, however.
All of this leads to some interesting comparative Indo-European mythology, but I'll reserve these thoughts for later.
Mark.

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