From: Mark Odegard
Message: 3347
Date: 2000-08-21
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.
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.