Grandfather the Sun
Osage · deity · Osage traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Grandfather the Sun is the great luminary of the daytime sky, addressed in Osage ritual as a living person and elder kinsman. In the tribe's genesis the ancestors who dwelt above appealed to the Sun as the god of Day, and he counseled them and gave his own body as a symbol of the long life the people sought. He heads the ancestral Celestial Family beside the Moon, and the stars are reckoned their children. His token in the peace rites is the red downy eagle plume, standing for the sun in its reddening. Osage speech treats him as one radiant aspect of the single pervading power, Wakonda.
Children
Domains
- sun
- day
Powers
- gives the day and its light
Epithets
- Iⁿ'-tsi-go Miⁿ — Grandfather the SunGarrick A. Bailey, The Osage and the Invisible World (1995). (secondary)
Relations
- spouse: Grandmother the MoonJames R. Duncan & Carol Diaz-Granados, 'The Cosmology of the Osage: The Star People and Their Universe' (2004) — the ancestral Celestial Family. (secondary)
Sources
- The Sun is a personified being, the god of Day, one of the powers counseling the Little Ones and paired with the Moon.: Francis La Flesche, The Osage Tribe: Two Versions of the Child-Naming Rite, 43rd Annual Report BAE (1928). (primary); Duncan & Diaz-Granados, 'The Cosmology of the Osage' (2004). (secondary)