Why do people assume that all moon deities were goddesses?
Do they? I don’t think the average person has the slightest idea what a moon deity is period. But certainly there is a traditional link in some mythologies between the moon and the sacred feminine as well as between the sun and the sacred masculine. The reason for this is primarily because many ancient cultures in Europe and elsewhere linked the moon to the female and the sun to the male. In other mythologies where this link did not exist, there was no set rule as to which gender the sun or the moon was linked to and hence no “pattern” that was as easy to generalize. The correlation between the moon and the female gender is partly because female menstruation is linked to the lunar cycle. Likewise, the moon influences the oceans’ tides on Earth, and water has generally been associated with the female rather than the male. Water and earth are linked to the female, and hence we have associations such as the Earth as a womb and correlations between amniotic fluid/the menstraul cycle and wa
