just saw a post where someone calls Amaterasu “deviation from the usual solar/lunar gender roles” and i’m morbidly curious where do people even get the idea that there’s some transcendent universal idea that moon is female and sun is male since it’s virtually impossible to muster arguments in its favor Arguably the highest profile lunar deity in history of the world, Nanna-Suen was male. Not even the notion that gender of sun and moon deities will inevitably differ from each other within one culture rings true in any capacity, since ex. in ancient Egypt both sun (Ra et al.) and moon (Khonsu, Yah, Thoth) were generally male, same goes for Mesopotamia (Nanna-Suen, Shamash) or for contemporary hinduism (Chandra, Surya)… And the fact that Ugaritic Shapash is female even though Akkadian Shamash is male shows that even within one cultural sphere the gender of celestial bodies is hardly something defined on the deepest most primal level. On top of that female solar deity is hardly an outlier, Hittites had more than one including one residing in the underworld.