The sky father or heavenly father is a recurring theme in mythology all over the world. The sky father can be the complement of the earth mother and appears in some creation myths, many of which are Indo-European or ancient Near Eastern. Other cultures have quite different myths; Egyptian mythology features a sky mother or Heavenly Mother and an earthly dying and reviving god of vegetation. A sky father is often also a solar deity, a god identified with the sun, while in contrast, Shintoism has a sun goddess. A sky father figure also appears in ancient Turkic religion.

In late nineteenth century opinions on comparative religion, in a line of thinking that begins with Friedrich Engels and J. J. Bachofen, and which received major literary promotion in The Golden Bough by Sir James G. Frazer, it was believed that worship of a sky father was characteristic of nomadic peoples, and that worship of an earth mother similarly characterised farming peoples. According to this body of doctrine, nomads militarily overran farming societies, and replaced goddesses with male gods. During the process, it was believed that the invaders devalued the status of women and replaced a matriarchy with a patriarchy. The religious changes were imagined to reflect this change in the status of the sexes. This belief system was linked to the discovery of the Indo-European languages, and it was fancied that the military conquest underlying this model spread those languages. The sky father was held to be an Indo-European cultural ideal. Aryan and Indo-European were synonymous during this period.