Between Sun and Moon: Relational and Substance Ontology in Eastern and Western Forms of Knowledge, Compared in Their Linguistic and Religious Registers

Traditions differ in whether the sun is spoken of as masculine or as feminine, and in the degree to which they individuate it as a person. This paper argues that questions of both kinds have been answered by comparing reports drawn from different levels of description, and it distinguishes five levels at which such an assignment may be fixed: the gender of the noun, the sex of a personified figure, a position within a systematic polarity, the direction of ritual address, and a rank and jurisdiction within an ordered pantheon. A criterion of level-matched comparison follows. Six cases are treated, each admitted because it separates one level from another, among them a Semitic family in which the lexical and personification levels diverge with contact as the specialists' explanation, and an Anatolian pantheon holding solar deities of both sexes at once. On that basis the question of the sun's sex is shown to lack a determinate subject unless a level is specified, and every account deriving a female solar assignment from a property the sun possesses everywhere is set aside as explaining a variable by an invariant. The paper then treats the logical form of polarity terms, arguing that the suppression of a relatum belongs to language generally, that traditions differ in whether they transmit a rule for recovering what is suppressed, and that the passage from a relational position to an essence consists in the loss of that rule. A distinction between a level reading and a phase reading of such a term renders consistent two doctrines that have been read as standing in tension, and yields the passage of a maximum into its opposite as a theorem about bounded quantities. Three structural readings of the degree of individuation are offered with the findings that would tell against them. The paper claims no finding in any specialist field, concedes the relational reading of the polarity terms to the scholars who established it, and asks to be judged by the questions it returns to those fields.