Moon goddesses and sun gods
- From: Martin Phipps <martinphipps2@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2008 11:27:47 -0800 (PST)
I'm here in Taiwan and I came across this legend about Chang'e, the
Chinese moon goddess. In some versions of the story of Chang'e, Houyi
is her husband and he becomes a sun god, having used his arrows to
shoot down nine other suns that were scortching the Earth and
eventually ascending to the last remaining sun to build a palace. In
some versions, Houyi is good and Chang'e is foolish whereas in all
other versions Chang'e is good and Houyi is a vicious tyrant of a
king. Today in China, the yin and the yang represent the moon and the
sun, darkness and light, negative and positive and male and female,
respectively. The Chinese lunar festival which takes place in the
middle of the eighth lunar month was traditionally held in her
honour. (See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang'e_(mythology) )
The story of Chang'e is interesting in and of itself. What I find
intriguing though is the parallel with Egyptian mythology. In
Egyptian mytholgy, Isis is the moon goddess and her son, Horus, is a
sun god. (See http://www.goddessgift.com/goddess-myths/egyptian_goddess_Isis.htm
)
It doesn't end there. Ainu mythology, Aztec mythology, Basque
mythology, Canaanite mythology, Dahomean (African) mythology, Hindu
mythology, Incan mythology, Indonesian mythology, Lusitanian
mythology, Mayan mythology, Philippine mythology, Polynesian
mythology, Roman mythology, Thracian mythology, Urartian mythology and
Greek mythology all have moon goddesses. Other mythologies have moon
gods and in a few cases there is both a moon goddess and a moon god
but there appear to be more moon goddesses than moon gods: Greek
mythology has five different goddesses associated with the moon,
namely Artemis, Hecate, Phoebe, Selene and Rhea. (See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_deity.) German mythology and
Japanese mythology are good counterexamples. The moon is also a
common symbol in Islam, so much so that some have claimed that Allah
is, in fact, the moon god Ilal. (See www.biblebelievers.org.au/moongod.htm
).
The question of whether there are indeed more moon goddesses than moon
gods was tackled by Brian Branston who claimed the opposite, that it
was sun goddesses that were more common than sun gods. In Germanic
mythology, the sun is female and the moon is male. The dualism of sun/
male/light and moon/female/darkness, he claims, is derived from Orphic
and Gnostic philosophies. The most notable sun gods in Egyptian,
Greco-Roman and Norse mythology were Horus / Ra, Apollo, Helios / Sol
and Balder. (See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_deity )
Jesus Christ is also, arguably, a sun god (see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ-kvw1fYXs ) and has been compared to
Horus who was also born to a virgin and resurrected after being
cruxified and buried ( http://www.near-death.com/experiences/origen046.html
), Apollo who was said to be the son of Zeus born in the city of Delos
( http://personal.monm.edu/jmitten/Paper3.htm ), Balder who was
brought back to life after everything in the nine worlds wept for him
( http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/02/20/balder-the-norse-prefiguration-of-jesus/
) and Helios who was depicted with a halo around his head (
http://www.pantheon.org/articles/h/helios.html ). The theme of a god
living amongst us, dying and being resurrected is actually a very
common one in mythology. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-death-rebirth_deity
) Even Dionysus, the Greek god of wine who was born from a mortal
woman and noted for tuning water into wine, died and was resurrected.
( See http://www.christos-mythos.com/Resurrection.htm#dio or
http://www.dhushara.com/book/diochris/dio2.htm ).
The sun is associated with resurrection for two reasons: the sun
disappears every night and reappears in the morning and the sun
returns every spring and brings everything back to life. December
25th, traditionally the birthday of the Roman god Mithras, is only a
few days after the winter solstice and the celebration of Easter
(ultimately named after the Sumerian goddess Ishtar whose husband,
Dumuzi, returned to life every spring) features rabbits and eggs, both
of which symbolize fertility and birth. Either gods who died and came
back to life tended to become sun gods or gun gods were imagined to
die and come back to life.
Also interesting is the Chinese and Greco-Roman associations of the
female aspect with darkness and the male aspect with brightness. It
is particularly interesting in light of the different versions of the
Chang'e story, most of which making her out to be a hero and at least
one of which making her out to be a fool. I would imagine that the
female aspect is associated with darkness in male dominated,
patriarchal societies. We only have to look at the stories of Eve and
Pandora to find Western parallels with the foolish Chang'e story. It
would be disingenuous to suggest that the stories are related beyond
the misogyny of the men who told them.
Perhaps Brian Branston's observation that older myths featured sun
goddesses instead of sun gods has to do with ancient civilisations
being relatively matriarchal: whereas early pagan religions had people
worshiping goddesses, the gods of Christianity, Judaism and Islam are
all thought of as male, as were all of Jesus' disciples and, of
course, Jesus himself. Goddess worship seems to survive to this day
only in the term "Mother Earth", in the Wiccan religion and in
Catholicism, in so far as Catholics will recite "Hail Mary... Mother
of God" as one of their daily prayers. (See http://www.catholicplanet.com/catholic/hail.htm
)
In any case, it certainly does seem as though the worship of moon
goddesses and sun gods is more common today than the reverse (sun
goddesses and moon gods).
Martin
.
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