Celestial Deities

Celestial Deities gathers figures whose office is a fixed light in the sky itself, the sun and the moon, rather than a weather portfolio exercised from the sky. Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi are the two entries the atlas currently holds for this grouping, siblings born together with Susanoo from Izanagi's purification in the Kojiki and Nihongi, and each one's defining episode is the reason the sun and moon keep to separate skies today. Amaterasu's flight into the cave of Ame no Iwato, and her return coaxed out by her own reflection, is the account of the sun's disappearance and return to the world; Tsukuyomi's killing of the food goddess Uke Mochi, and Amaterasu's resulting refusal ever to look on his face again, is the account of why the two deities' lights no longer share one sky. Read together, Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi are less a settled pair than the two halves of a single story about day and night, and the atlas files them together rather than leaving them scattered under a catch-all.

The heading is kept apart from Sky Deities on purpose. A sky deity here is a weather-commanding office, thunder, lightning, rain, exercised from above rather than embodied as a fixed light; Xevioso's command of the storm is that kind of portfolio and belongs to a different category even though both groupings sit under the same sky. It is kept apart from Primordial Deities for the same reason an origin generation is not the same claim as a functional office: Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi are not the deities who made the world, they are two named lights in the finished one. Departmental Gods remains the right home for a deity whose portfolio has not yet been narrowed to a single fixed function; once the office is specifically a celestial body, it belongs here instead.