A God of Life and a Goddess of Death? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

When I gave my book, The Sun Blessed Prince, to my mom to read she offered me her feedback periodically as she read through it. One of her questions though from the outset was why I chose to make the deity presiding over life a god and not a goddess. Women, she dutifully informed me, were the ones who brought life into the world and therefore it should be the domain of women.

More or less, many mythologies around the world do prescribe to this belief. If there is a pantheon of gods, it is the goddess who reigns over matters of fertility - not a god.

However, Life and Death in this book are not solely responsible for the physical act of giving birth and once you expand global pantheons to look at what else may fall under a gendered domain - things do differ.

To begin with, Life, in The Sun Blessed Prince is more closely related to an act of endurance. Anything that continues on the way it always has been, is something that is existing. That existence is life. There is an unchanging dimension to life in this context. The sun rises and sets every day. It is a predictable event. One that can always be depended on as a result. The sun is the embodiment of life. It creates heat, it creates energy. It allows for plants to grow and vitamin D to be processed.

Death, by contrast, is not merely an end of things, but rather a change. In this book, Death symbolizes how not all things are eternal. The sun may rise - but it also sets. And while it can be depended on, the day that follows is not the same as the day that came before. The moon brings in tides, and weather patterns upset an otherwise eerie consistency.

There is death involved with every childbirth, the death of the life that came before - transitioning someone from a single existence into one defined by their choices of parenthood. Each marriage and friendship and action taken is one that is done in a vast cosmos of little deaths.

The choice to apply genders to the gods in the way I did in this book was done primarily to emphasize the cultures and their beliefs and interpretations of how the gods must be. The people who write the mythos of the gods are the ones who celebrate them in a certain way. Soleb, the sun kingdom, is patriarchal. While a queen can inherit the throne, there is a perception of enduring legacy and male supremacy that is embedded in how that ascension may rise. When this culture thinks of the god that grants them their lives: they envision a masculine leader who is strong and capable. A man to carry their burdens and hold their legacies together.

In Alelune, the culture is such that - while they worship the goddess Death, they do so because they believe nothing is permanent. Nothing lasts forever. They embrace challenges and changes and they argue against notions of ever staying perfectly in one place.

If Life is a man, then Death must be a woman, for she is the change in the status quo. She is the opposite of what Life is. If Life is the sun, then she is the moon. If Life is stability, then she is uncertainty.

This of course does not mean that women are chaos and changeable and incapable of stability. However, those aren’t uncommon perceptions of women at all. Often blamed for their tempestuous feelings and their changeable moods, women are very rarely praised for their calmness of mind and stability of character. This filters into the mythos of the world of The Sun Blessed Prince on how women and men are perceived.

Throughout the book, the gender of the gods, even what the gods like, are somewhat called into question. Life is depicted in statuary as suspiciously similar to the ruling kings of Soleb - a subtle choice by the artist tying religion close to the throne (or more?) When Death is seen on page, she is described as looking different each time. It depends who looks at her and what she is doing at the time. Perception here, is key.

TSBP questions the gods and their origin story, and more on their involvement and their actual existence gets expanded in the sequel, but there certainly was a conscious choice to make them gendered in this first book. And I hope as you read, you’ll enjoy exploring or contemplating what these differences may mean over time.