Polydaemonism.

But I'm still prefer to believe Sun was a god among IE, not goddess. But I can't discard the influence of Sumerian. I think the Anatolian Sun-Goddess was the origin (or a strong link) of Greek Hestia.

Sun had a chariot, and was born of Dawn, when she was raped by his father Sky (or brother Waxtnnos, cf. Brahma and Ushas). The Sun-child was raised by sister of Dawn, the Night.

Maybe I'm influenced by the masculine gender of Sun in Portuguese and other Latin languages.

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We, in English, are influenced by the usual male gender of the sun. Germans don't have this problem, but then, this is just their language; they can think of feminine-gender things/persons or male-gender-things/persons without labelling one or the other as intrinsically a matter of sexuality or male-female oppositional gender.  The sun is a male entity in German, nothwithstanding its grammatical gender.

 

We English-speakers have forgotten the implications of female sun and male moon. We've not had grammatical gender as a feature of our language for about 500 years.

 

When you hit college, as an 18 year old Freshman who has never really taken a foreign language course in high school, and take that Intro to Mythology 101 course , and learn about Lady Sun and Lord Moon - well, we monolingual English speakers tend to spazz out. I sure did, when I read Snorri.

 

Then you learn the Julius Wellhausen sequence: animism, polydaemonism, polytheism, henothesism, monotheism, ethical monotheism (and post-modernly, post-modern ethical monotheism, with all sorts of unethical heresies inbetween).

 

So. What did our PIE-speaking linguistic forefathers actually believe? Probably something one bump above animism, something resembling Uralic/American Indian shamanism (polydaemonism), with thoughts towards distinct 'powers' that lead to a primitive polytheism, but only the priestly caste thought of such things. It's when they conquered priestesses into murdering the holy king that their ideas grew.

 

Mark.