Sun and moon deities across cultures: which ones match Helios and Selene

The short answer

Only Sol has a documented match to Helios, and the sun matches that do exist run through Rome. Ra, Surya, Luna and Isis have reference pages that record a comparison, while the Mesopotamian, Norse, Japanese and Inca sun and moon deities are not matched to Greek gods on any page read for this article. Of ten entries below, one is Attested, four Scholarly and five Popular claim.

A more telling difference is who is male and who is female. Helios is a god and Selene a goddess. Amaterasu is a goddess and Tsukuyomi a deity of the moon. In Norse sources Sól is a sister and Máni a brother. In Mesopotamia both the sun and the moon are gods, and they are father and son. Each tradition assigned the sex of its sun and moon for itself.

The Greek baseline: Helios, Selene and Apollo

Selene is the Greek goddess and personification of the Moon, the daughter of the Titans Hyperion and Theia and the sister of Helios and Eos in Hesiod's account. She drives a moon chariot across the sky, usually pulled by two horses. Her best-known story is her love for the mortal Endymion, whom she visits in a cave on Mount Latmus according to the earliest surviving account, from Apollonius of Rhodes. The Helios entry describes the sun personified as a youth with a radiant crown driving a golden chariot pulled by four white horses, who returns east by night by another means, and who as the all-seeing sun was invoked in oaths.

The sun and the moon also blur into other Greek figures. The Apollo entry says that from the 5th century BCE Apollo was often identified with Helios, that Phoebus, meaning bright, was his chief epithet, and that classical Latin poets did not merge Apollo and Sol until the 1st century CE. The Selene entry says that in post-classical times she was often identified with Artemis and was also linked with Hecate, and that all three were regarded as lunar goddesses though only Selene was seen as the Moon itself. The Apollo entry does not link Artemis to the Moon, so that identification is recorded only on the Selene page.

Sun and moon deities across cultures

Each row gives the tradition, the figure, the sun or moon role, and what the reference pages record about a match to Helios or Selene. The marks are explained near the end of the article.

Where the matches hold and where they fail

Sol and Sol Invictus

Sol Invictus is the official sun god of the late Roman Empire, either a later aspect of the old Latin god Sol or a replacement for him. Scholars disagree. In the traditional view Sol Indiges was an early, minor god whose cult faded by the 1st century AD, while the revisionist view sees one continuous cult of Sol with at least three temples active under the Empire. The emperor Aurelian revived the cult in AD 274 and made it a major state religion, and a new temple to Sol was dedicated on 25 December 274.

Some scholars say Aurelian also instituted a festival on that date, but Steven Hijmans doubts it and argues that the earliest certain evidence comes from Julian about thirty years later. The entry notes that the epithet Invictus was used for several Roman deities, including Apollo, and that Augustus's victory at Actium was piously attributed to Apollo-Helios. The match between Helios and Sol is old, though in practice it passed through Apollo.

Ra, Isis and Thoth

Ra and Helios are paired on the Ra page, and the Helios page says the Greek sun's chariot ride by day and boat trip by night possibly reflect Ra sailing in a barque and being reborn each dawn. Ra is also king of the gods and enemy of Apophis, roles that Helios lacks. For the moon, the Interpretatio graeca table pairs Selene with Isis, while the Thoth page describes a god of the Moon, wisdom and writing whom the Greeks matched to Hermes, not to Selene. The wider comparison is on the page about Greek and Egyptian gods.

Surya

This section describes Surya as the page does. He is the solar deity in Hinduism, one of five deities in the Smarta tradition's Panchayatana puja, and the Rigveda describes him as the rising sun and a dispeller of darkness. He rides a chariot pulled by seven horses, driven by Aruṇa.

The earliest depictions of Surya on a chariot appear in Buddhist railings at Bodh Gaya, in the Bhaja Caves and in a Jain cave at Khandagiri, and that these follow a similar depiction of Helios, the chariot-riding sun god of Hellenistic mythology. That is a statement about images and not about the gods' stories. In Buddhist Mount Meru cosmology, Surya is considered female, in contrast to a male lunar god. Worship declined greatly around the 13th century, which the page attributes possibly to the destruction of sun temples in North India.

Utu and Nanna

Utu, called Shamash in Akkadian, was the Mesopotamian sun god, responsible for justice and for protecting travelers because he was believed to see everything during his daily journey. His cult centers were Sippar and Larsa, his wife was the dawn goddess Aya, and a stele inscribed with Hammurabi's legal code shows him seated on a throne. His parents were the moon god Nanna and Ningal, and his twin sister was Inanna.

Nanna, called Sin in Akkadian, had the crescent as his main symbol, a sacred number of 30 tied to the days of the lunar month, and Ur as his main cult center, where his temple Ekišnugal means house of the great light. This is the one pair of sun and moon gods in the table that are father and son, and neither page names a Greek equivalent.

Sól and Máni

Máni is the Moon personified in Germanic mythology, brother of the personified Sun, Sól, with Mundilfari named as their father. He guides the path of the moon and controls its waxing and waning, according to Prose Edda chapter 11. In the Prose Edda he takes two children, Hjúki and Bil, from the Earth as they fetch water from a well, and they follow him through the heavens.

In Grímnismál, Hati pursues the moon through the sky, and the Prose Edda has Máni consumed at Ragnarök by one of two wolves chasing the heavenly bodies, though the page does not name Hati as that wolf. The entry for Sól itself was not read for this article, so what is recorded here about her comes from the Máni page.

Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi

Amaterasu is the sun goddess of Japanese mythology, often considered the chief kami of the Shinto pantheon, and the Kojiki of c. 712 CE and the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE describe her as ruler of the heavenly realm Takamagahara and ancestress of the Imperial House through her grandson Ninigi. She is one of the Three Precious Children of Izanagi with Tsukuyomi, the moon deity, and Susanoo, the storm god.

In the cave myth she shuts herself in the Ama-no-Iwato, plunging the world into darkness, and the other gods lure her out with a mirror. A separate variant describes a dispute with Tsukuyomi that splits night from day. Her chief place of worship is the Ise Shrine in Mie Prefecture. Shinto is a living religion, and the page is described here without comment on its beliefs.

Inti and Mama Killa

Inti is the Inca sun god and national patron of the Inca state, better understood as a cluster of solar aspects divided by the stages of the sun. Manco Cápac was thought to be his son, and the ruler was considered Inti's living representative. The Qurikancha in Cusco held a golden disk with a human face as the most significant image of Inti, and each conquered province gave a third of its lands and herds to him. His sister is Mama Killa, the moon goddess, described as generally benevolent. The festival Inti Raymi honored him at the winter solstice. No page read makes a Greek comparison.

Sun and moon as siblings, spouses or parent and child

The relationships between the two bodies vary just as the genders do. Helios and Selene are brother and sister in Hesiod, as are Sól and Máni and Inti and Mama Killa, and Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi are siblings among three. In Mesopotamia the moon is the father of the sun. Selene is also the lover of Endymion, among others, and the Selene page lists Zeus, Pan and Helios among the gods said to be her lovers. Nothing in the pages read gives a single pattern, and any claim that sun gods are male or moon gods female in every culture fails against the Japanese, Norse and Buddhist Mount Meru examples above.

What the strength marks mean

On this page the mark rates the match to Helios or, for moon figures, to Selene. Attested means a documented identification: Roman writers linked Apollo with Sol, and Helios is the equivalent of Sol. Scholarly means a reference page records the comparison without an early source, as for Luna, Ra, Isis and Surya. Popular claim means no page read for this article makes a Greek match, though each figure is a real sun or moon deity in the tradition that holds the story.

The reference pages are secondary sources. Hesiod, Apollonius, the Eddas, the Kojiki and the Rigveda were read only through them. The Sól page and the Wikipedia pages for several other Norse sources were not read for this article, which is why the Norse entry rests on one page. Hindu and Shinto traditions are living religions, and the figures are described here as the pages describe them.