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The sky father is a recurring theme in pagan and neopagan mythology. The sky father is the complement of the earth mother and appears in some creation myths, many of which are European or ancient Near Eastern. Other cultures have quite different myths; Egyptian mythology features a sky mother and an earthly dying and reviving god of vegetation. Shinto gives precedence to a sun goddess. A sky father also relates to a solar deity, a god identified with the sun.
In Maori mythology, Ranginui was the sky father. In this story, the sky father and earth mother Papatuanuku, embraced and had divine children.
In China, the God of the Abrahamic religions is sometimes called 天父 which means the Sky Father or Heavenly Father.
History of the concept
In late nineteenth century opinions on comparative religion, in a line of thinking that begins with Friedrich Engels and J. J. Bachofen, and which received major literary promotion in The Golden Bough by Sir James G. Frazer, it was believed that worship of a sky father was characteristic of nomadic peoples, and that worship of an earth mother similarly characterised farming peoples. According to this body of doctrine, nomads militarily overran farming societies, and replaced goddesses with male gods. During the process, it was believed that the invaders devalued the status of women and replaced a matriarchy with a patriarchy. The religious changes were imagined to reflect this change in the status of the sexes. This belief system was linked to the discovery of the Indo-European languages, and it was fancied that the military conquest underlying this model spread those languages. The sky father was held to be an Indo-European cultural ideal. Aryan and Indo-European were synonymous during this period.
The sky father is frequently invoked in feminist spirituality, which has helped revive the concept even as the notion of earth mothers and sky fathers was rejected as oversimplified and implausible in the world of anthropology, archaeology, and comparative religion.
Reconsideration of theory
The theory of a common sky father is rejected by most archaeologists and anthropologists as an explanation of early European religious life. The archaeological record does not indicate that Indo-European languages spread throughout their area in Europe and Asia by military conquest alone. Many non-Indo-European cultures also have male-dominated pantheons, without being conquered or bent on conquest. There is no direct historical correlation between the worship of goddesses and the social status of women; nor is there a great deal of evidence that the worship of female deities is associated with agriculture, or that male gods accompany nomadism. Nor is there any reason to believe that the Indo-Europeans practiced a religion that was more male-dominated, patriarchal, or wont to promote male gods at the expense of goddesses, than any other polytheistic religion.
It is in fact true that a male sky father, whose name has been reconstructed as *dyēus ph2ter, and who appears in Greek mythology as Zeus, in Roman mythology as Jupiter, in Norse mythology as Tyr, and in Vedic religion as Dyaus Pita, seems to have been shared and inherited from a common stock of Proto-Indo-European religion. Each of these names is cognate to the others. This is not, in fact, the most widespread inherited Indo-European deity. The dawn goddess whose name is reconstructed as *aus-os- is even more widespread; she appears in Greek mythology as Eos, in Rome as Aurora, in Germanic mythology as Eostre, in Baltic mythology as Aušra, in Slavic mythology as Zorya, and in Hinduism as Ushas. These names are all cognate as well. From what we can tell of Indo-European culture, there was neither a systematic bias against goddesses or a religious motivation towards male dominance greater than any other comparable culture.
Influences
The theory about earth goddesses, sky fathers, and patriarchal invaders was a stirring tale that fired various imaginations. The story was important in literature, and was referred to in various ways by important poets and novelists, including T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and most influentially, Robert Graves.
How it worked out in practice depended on which side the believers chose to root for. Belief in the sky father and the military prowess of Aryan supermen was a feature of Nazi racial ideology; the swastika was chosen to embody this belief system because it was a solar symbol. Sympathy with the lost utopia of the matriarchal goddessdom arose later. Established as a recurring theme in important literature, the tale lived on among the literature faculty long after it had been dropped by the anthropology department. Its truth was assumed by several historical novelists and fantasy authors, including Mary Renault, Mary Stewart, and more recently Mercedes Lackey and Marion Zimmer Bradley, among many others.
External links
See also
History of religion | Sky and weather deities | Mythological archetypes
"Sky father"