[ p. 58 ]
Sevei’al savage tribes that worship the sun have been meiitioned in connection with the cult of the moon. The worship of the sun in particular belongs to the Persians, Egyptians, Amerinds, and Dravidians, who regard the sun as a beneficent god.’ The ancient belief in the efficacy of going with the sun still remains with us in various unconsidered ways, such as waiting at table and dealing cards, which really reflect a primitive usage preserved in religious rites in India and China and known among the Kelts as “walking the deazil,” that is going about a sacred object with the right hand toward it.
Classical antiquity gives us little idea of the importance of sun-worship, since neither Greek nor Roman laid any stress on it. Even in Homer a very secondary position is occupied by Helios; Apollo gets all the glory. As the Greeks imported Selene and moon-wmrship from the Semites (the native Greek mind regarded the moon only as of magical value), so the Romans imported thq state worship of both moon and sun from the Sabines. Helios received no part of earth till Rhodes was made for him, says Pindar, and this poetical statement is not far wu’ong for the Aryans of Greece. In India, on the other hand, the sun was worshipped from the earliest period under one form or another and as late as the tenth century of our era. there were six flourishing sects of sun-worshippers, though the native cult had been developed partly under P-ersian influence. In Persia itself, the cult of the sun eventually gave rise to that mystic religion known as [ p. 59 ] Mithraism, wMeli at one time threatened the success of Christianity. In this, however, as in the Apollo-cult of Greece, there is little or no real sun-worship; a later growth obscured whatever original sun-cult existed. The sun has often been thus elevated to a new position. Even in the seventeenth century, the Mohammedan Akbar attempted to revive sun-worship, but of course to him the sun was acceptable only as a sjunbol. What Akbar really tried to do was to make a new religion, taking the old sun-cult as an expression of the belief in one pure god. This is not important for the history of real sun-worship. The same thing was attempted by Amen-hotep IV in Egypt, who violently introduced among his people the worship of the “disc-sun” -(Aten-Ra), as a. monotheistic or pantheistic improvement on polytheism, perhaps a refinement of the older Southern sun-cult.
Curiously enough, these attempts, which represent a personal predilection and possibly owed their inception to outside influence, are -not without a parallel in America, where also the sun attained such divinity that it was taken as type of the Supreme God, though the rationalistic theologian who argued out such a divinity was first led to imagine a “god even higher than the sun,” because he observed that the sun itself went to its daily task like a menial or like an inanimate arrow shot from a bow; hence there must be a lord of the menial or shooter of the arrow. This too, however, was a momentary and individual expansion of what was otherwise a complete surrender to the sun-deity, a god exalted by Mexicans and Peruvians to the highest place, as even the northern Indians almost universally worshipped the same deity. As in Babylon, so in Mexico and Peru, the worship of the sun absoi’bed other cults. To the Mexican god rvere offered the most monstrous sacrifices of human beings. The sun here was distinctly the genius of productivity. [ p. 60 ] although in Peru the cult was heightened by the political pretensions of the rulers, all of whom were of the solar race.
The sun is distinctly a royal god and besides his power as fertilizer and sustainer he receives added glory as patron or ancestor of the king. So in Egypt the king is identified with Ea, in Babylon the king represents Shamash, and in Borne the emperor becomes an incorporation of Sol invictus. In the Chaldean system the sun occupied the central position among the seven circles of the universe; the other planets revolved about it; it was the King Sun, the heart of the world, the ruler of elements and seasons, the regulator of the stars, the chief divinity in nature, hence intelligent, not as a spirit in the sun but as being itself the mens mundi.[1] Philosophy finally separated the sun from reason and Christianity in the fourth century turned the day of the new sun into the birthday of Christ, while Supday, as first day, still represents the importance given to the sun in the astrological week.
Instead of becoming the recipient of bloody sacrifices, as god of productivity, the sun is sometimes regarded as a gentle creator, whose work is recognized as that of a preserver and whose cult consists in harmless offerings of vegetables, as is the case with Vishnu, whose disc and three . strides betray his solar origin, but who hates bloodshed and violence; or again the sun remains, as a creator whose work is done, a god to whom it is useless to offer any sacrifice. Thus the Khonds of India say: “In the beginning sun, the great god of light, created a wife, the earth-goddess. He is our chief god; she was the originator of evil. Hence we sacrifice to her and not to him, for it is necessary to placate her alone; he is .good, he need not be placated; hence he receives from us no sacrifice, [ p. 61 ] but we recognize him with a spring festival in his honor.” In like manner the Oraons regard the stm as supreme god, but they do not pray to him, “because he does no harm,” while to evil spirits they make sacrifice, “to placate them.” It is for the same reason, though not generally acknowledged, that there are only one or two temples to Brahman the Creator. His work is done and man worships the gods who are active, Vishnu as preserver, Shiva as destroyer.
The fact that such savages as the Khonds worship the sun as good as well as highest god brings up the question of savage ethics. It is doubtful whether any more primitive ideas exist than those of the Bechuanas of Africa, who worship rain as a beneficent power, or those of the Abipones of Paraguay, who recognize Ananga, a power that might be called either god or devil. He is worshipped and causes sickness, but he also sends wealth. Since even the fetish is a moral power, punishing theft and adultery, it is unnecessary to argue that the power (called spirit) of the Guana Indians is not native, because he “rewards the good and punishes the -wicked.” The sun in particular is apt to be esteemed a moral guardian from the fact that he sees all things; nothing can be hidden from him (or he is the eye of heaven); he is watcher as well as purifier and renovator. In Egypt, the sun-god is the first moral guardian of the world.
The progress in sun-worship may be illustrated by two sun-hymns found in the literature of India. The first dates back to the earliest period (though that was already civilized) and represents the sun as a material but divine body instinct with power, a measurer of time, an observer of man’s acts, also as eye of the Heaven-god: “Up now his beams are bearing him, that everyone may see the [ p. 62 ] sun, yon god who knows all beings well. Afar like thieves the stars withdraw before the sun, who seeth all. Wide through the world his beams are seen, like fires in all their brilliancy. Swift art thou, visible to all, maker of light art thou, 0 Sun; thou shinest through a lightsome world. Before the people of the gods thou risest up, before all men, that everyone may see the sun, with whom, 0 pure bright Heaven, as eye, thou lookest down on busy man. Across the sky and spaces wide thou goest, measuring the days and watching generations pass. Seven yellow steeds thy chariot drag, bright-haired one, 0 farseeing Sun. The sun has yoked his seven[2] pure steeds, the daughters of his wheeled car, and with them as his steeds he fares.”
A later poet added these words; “Out of darkness we have come, looking for the highest light, the god among gods. 0 Sun, as thou risest, helper of thy friends, to the highest sky, do thou bring to naught this sickness of my heart, this jaundice.” That is, he has utilized the hymn to make a charm connecting yellow sun and yellow jaundice, but in doing so he has inserted the significant words “highest light, god among gods.” Still later, by a thousand years or so, an epic poet composed another hymn to the sun, a hymn which shows how the god has now become supreme, the light of lights physically and morally.[3]
“Thou art, O Sun, the eye of the world, the source of all that is, the origin of all things, the refuge of the wise, the door, the resort of them that seek salvation. Thou upholdest the world in pity. The priests adore thee; the [ p. 63 ] saints adore thee. Purified ones and angels and singers of heaven follow thy course. All the gods have worshipped thee, and the Seven Fathers, through worshipping thee and offering to thee the flowers of heaven,[4] obtain all their desires; as by adoring thee they [originally] obtained heaven. In all the seven worlds naught is higher than thou; no being of heaven equals thee in glory; for in thee is all light; lord of light art thou; and in thee are all the elements, in thee all knowledge and wisdom and religious ardor [heat] . Through thy energy the artisan of the gods [called aU-maker] made the discus wherewith Yishnu slew the demon of darkness. Thou art thyself all-maker, as thou art the Creator. For it is thou who givest life, in summer drawing up with thy rays the moisture of earth and pouring it down again in the rainy season, giving rain, giving grain, giving life. When the thunderbolts bellow in the clouds and the clouds, pour forth lights, these are thy rays, gleaming in the clouds as lightning flashes. But kind art thou. Not fire nor house nor woolen clothes warm us and comfort us as dost thou. All the earth with its thirteen continents is illuminated by thee as one [one god thou shinest on all the different lands]; one and the same art thou wherever shining; thou art the only god ever busy to do men good, and not men only but all the three worlds [earth, atmosphere, and sky]. If so be thou risest not, bhnd is the world forthwith; through thy grace alone can men perform their tasks. The day of Brahman the Creator lasts for a thousand ages; of that day thou art the beginning and the end; thou art lord of the lords of all the ages and aeons [lord of all time] and when at last shall come the end of that great day [time], then sprung from thee shall likewise be that fire which shall consume the world. Universal dissolution [ p. 64 ] will ensue and, born of thy anger against a sinful world, fire shall leap forth and there shall be naught left save that fire itself. Yet this as lightning making clouds and floods and storms and death more universal still shall then become twelve suns, to dry again that flood in floods of fire; but all of them art thou, all the twelve suns, as thou art all the gods, Indra, Vishnu, Btahman the Creator, Agni [fire-god]; and not alone art thou that &e visible [Agni], but thou art the fire invisible which is thought; aye, intellectual fire, subtle intelligence, that^ too art thou and thou art the eternal [world-power] Brahma.[5] Pure soul, the swan, art thou, yet thou art also he-that-quickens, light, crowned god. Thou art all the names of the sun [sim under every aspect, as pure, strong, ruler, dark-killer, infinite, ineffable, eternal, etc.]; god of light and god of right and god who makes the day; god of the seven steeds, lord of the yellow steeds, swift runner, slayer of darkness [all these are but the names of the same god], the god of gods. On the sixth day of the moon or on the seventh day, whoso worships thee shall obtain thy grace, and thy grace shall give him good fortune. Blessed are thy worshippers, for they shall be free from danger, free from pain, free from all affliction; long shall they live and abide in good health who believe in thee as the soul of the world. 0 Lord of sustenance, give us today our food. I bow to thee and to the red runner, the god Aruna, who redly runs before thee, thy servant, my lord; I bow to thy rod [the rod of punishment]; I bow to thy bolt, the lightning; to all the saints who follow thee and take refuge in thee, unto these also I bow. Oh, .deliver me, who am thy suppliant.”
When this sun-god desires to have human progeny he mystically touches the pure daughter of royal race chosen for this honor and she conceives in purity unblemished, [ p. 65 ] so that she still remains a virgin[6] and bears a son. But the babe is put into a box and floats away upon the river till in good time he is rescued by a deserving man and grows up a demi-god yet earthly hero. In such wise men trace their descent from the gods.
From the time of the Rig-Veda the sun was emblematic of supreme godhead; in the Upanishads, God is the “sun that all shines after”; in philosophy, the sun is typical of God. It is not then foreign to Hindu thought when the beings “of endless light” appear in Buddhism, though some scholars seek to derive them from Persia.
As the sun marks the seasons and the years, he becomes typical of the regular succession of events. This leads to the conception of an established order in the universe and the sun may then become the leading Power, the planet around which (whom) and through the power of which the world revolves and is. Such was the King Sun in the Chaldean system and such was the conception underlying the heresy of Amen-hotep IV. But the idea of an Order governing the universe is elsewhere coimected rather with the Sky as a whole than with the sun-god. Sky as personified Heaven and Supreme. Lord thus becomes the exemplar of the divine Order called the Way in China and is regarded as the physical and moral support of the universe. In India, Varuna, “the wise god,” is Heaven thus personified as king of unswerving rule, beside whonl and dimly looming in the background lies Eight Order, which, not at first but before the end of the Rig-Veda, was also personified. Thus Eight Order, Rita, was originally a priestly conception and connoted the sacrificial order of the seasons but was then extended to embrace the whole order of the world as a moral order, not merely an orderly succession of events. Probably the [ p. 66 ] very first notion of seasonal regularity came -with the establishment of rites to mark seed-time and harvest, from which eventually grew up the conception of a world ordered morally as well as physically, and it was as “eye” of this moral power that the all-seeing Sun enhanced this conception on the moral side. A similar Power of Order appears in the person of the Egyptian goddess Maat. In all these early but already civilized communities the idea of right is fundamentally based on the conception of conformity to the underlying harmony of life; agreement with the great motiv of existence, and religion is thus an attempt to bring man into concord with eternal divine law. It is on a grander scale the same motive as that which in his narrow intellectual environment makes the savage obey the law of the little world he knows; he feels intuitively that he must be in harmony with the conditions of his outer life and that, as he must conform to the law of the tribe iu order to live well, so he must conform to the laws of the spiritual forces encircling him.
Cumont, Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans pp. 127 f . ↩︎
Seven is an indeterminate ‘several’ bnt was taken literally in tke seven steeds of tke sun, seven fathers, seven saints, seven rivers, seven worlds, etc[^xxxx] See below on the triad (ch. XVII). ↩︎
The earlier hymn is Rig-Veda 1, 50 j the later is found in the Mahibharata, III, 3. With the epithet “the door” compare the Bab. This hymn is to be repeated, in conjunction with the repetition of the hundred and eight “names of the sun.” The translation omits a few verses. ↩︎
That is, they offer the only imaginable offering one can find in heaven. ↩︎
Neuter Brahma, the Absolute, not the masculine Brahman, Creator. ↩︎
Virgin birth is attributed also to Zoroaster, whose mother conceived him immaculately (in the strict sense), and in later tradition to Buddha. ↩︎