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Why is energy gendered?

If the force of Gravity was gendered, what energy would it embody?

  • Male energy

    Votes: 3 37.5%
  • Female energy

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Nonbinary energy

    Votes: 5 62.5%

  • Total voters
    8

Tonstad39

Senior headwriter of the Onstad Mythology Series
I understand that there are two gods in wicca, a god and a goddess but why must energy from the sun and moon have gender? Forces are fundemental to the construction of the universe and acts in ways that make all of life possible, but if it lacks any biology or consiousness than where does Gendered energy stem from?
 

The Kilted Heathen

Crow FreyjasmaðR
Much of what Pagans - Wiccans included - worship as gods and goddesses don't have "biology or consciousness" scientifically speaking. So in the Pagan DIR, that's a sticky statement to make.

Gods and goddesses - including the sun and moon - are perceived as their given genders depending on home culture and the way in which those deities themselves present. While energy is a large part of everything, the gods are more than energy, and are individual beings.
 

Electra

Active Member
From my understanding they are two complementary forces of One.
As per gravity example, gravity be masculine because it pushes, ground force would be feminine because it pulls. They act together as one force even if they may appear seperate.
When it comes to F Gods and M Gods - Same concept. They explain different aspects of a whole, not necessarily two different entities.

I feel someone who knows a gender language (French ect.) that genders words would be able to chip in.

Thanks for putting this forward, nice to explore
 

VioletVortex

Well-Known Member
From a mythological standpoint, considering that þorr (Perkunas, Zeus, Jupiter etc.) is the embodiment of the force of gravity, it is clearly a male form of energy. We associate it's strength and power to protect us (Jupiter, the largest and thus most gravitational planet in our solar system protects us from the effects of the asteroid belt with its gravitational field) with masculinity, and thus gravity is a masculine force.

With that said, the energy of gravity in and of itself, transcends gender as gender is merely biological.

(Edit: My apologies for the DIR issue. I think we do have a few Wiccans here, but they aren't very active.)
 
Last edited:

Quintessence

Consults with Trees
Staff member
Premium Member
I don't think we have any actual Wiccans here to respond to your question, @Tonstad39. Technically, only Wiccans should be replying to this question at all unless they are asking a respectful question (just a reminder). If you want to open up the thread to more diverse respondents, we can move it out to the parent DIR or punt it out to Religions Q&A (which is what that forum is for).
 

Liu

Well-Known Member
I feel someone who knows a gender language (French ect.) that genders words would be able to chip in.
Not exactly my DIR, but since this is a more general question and I see no point in opening a new thread on it:

The history of grammatical gender is a very complicated issue.
In the original Indo-European language, there was no grammatical gender at first, just different suffixes for making new words. However, those suffixes then started to influence the inflections, differentiating first the feminine and later the neuter nouns from the other nouns. But the words in question didn't have any semantic differences at that time that would be associated with gender. It was rather the case that the "feminine" suffixes were most often used to make abstract nouns, and the "neuter" ones to make plural-less nouns (like flour). Only due to the fact that some of the abstract suffixes were also used to make nouns referring explicitely to females, this inflection system became related to actual gender. But most words in these languages have their current gender either due to the suffix by which they were created, or due to later changes of morphological nature and similar (e.g. in German many nouns ending with -e are feminine, and so most of the remaining nouns in -e also changed to feminine in the last couple centuries).

Since there came to be more than one word for sun and moon and different words were retained by different languages we currently have e.g. "le soleil" (mask.) and "la lune" (fem.), but "die Sonne" (fem.) and "der Mond" (mask.).

But it is generally the case that words for sun tend to be masculine and words for moon feminine, i.e. while several words were available, those were chosen more often.

Maybe it's because of the same reasons that also in myths the moon often is associated with women?
For example, due to the menstrual cycle taking about the same amount of time for one lunar month? Or because when men created myths they associated females more with the night because that's when they were at home with them most often?
Also, independent of whether that's actually true, females tend to get associated with being more soft, changing and emotional, whether males get associated with being hard, individualistic and, if emotional then rather like fire. I guess you can see how that then relates to moon and sun.
 
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