The Hopi Indians claim that they made their sun themselves,
by throwing into the sky a shield made of buckskin together
with a fox skin and a parrot’s tail to make the colors of sun-
rise and sunset. The San of Africa believe that the sun was
once a mortal who gave out light from his armpit. In order
to make the light brighter, some children threw him into the
sky, whereupon he became round and shines now for all hu-
mankind. Among the Tatars, the culture hero Porcupine
took some fire on his sword and threw it up into the sky to
make the sun. For the moon, he thrust his sword into the
water; thus the sun is hot and the moon cool. The famous
American Indian trickster Coyote is said to have sent the
wolf to bring him fire to make the sun. In one of the Oceanic
myths that describe life beginning inside a shell, the creator,
Spider Woman, opened the shell and then threw up two
snails to make the sun and moon. In Norse mythology the
sun and moon are sparks from Muspelheim, the realm of fire.
The gods, however, anthropomorphized them and set them
to drive chariots across the sky.
In more sophisticated societies, the luminaries were set
in the heavens by the high god. Sometimes, they represented
his eyes. In ancient Egypt the sun was sometimes called the
eye of Re; in northern Europe, the eye of Óðinn (Odin); in
Oceania, the eye of Atea.
The creation myth of Mesopotamia, Enuma elish, relates
how the conquering god Marduk, who had solar characteris-
tics himself, “set up stations for the gods in the sky, deter-
mining the year by setting up the zones.” According to the
Book of Genesis “God made the two great lights, the greater
light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the
night.... And God set them in the firmament of the heav-
ens to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over
the night, and to separate the light from the darkness” (1:16–
18). In Plato’s great myth the Timaeus, “the Demiurge [the
creator] lit a light which we now call the sun... to shine
through the whole heaven and to enable the living creatures
to gain a knowledge of numbers from the uniform move-
ments. In this way there came into being night and day, the
period of the single most intelligent revolution” (39c). Thus
the Demiurge, having set out all the heavenly bodies, put
them in motion and brought time into being.
More often, the sun is anthropomorphized, sometimes
as a female but more frequently as a male. He crosses the sky
by the appropriate means of locomotion. In ancient Sumeria,
he walked. In ancient Egypt, he sailed in a boat like the ones
on the Nile, in company with some of the other gods and
the pharaoh. When the horse was domesticated, about the
beginning of the second millennium BCE, the sun drove a
chariot pulled by white or flaming horses. The horse, the sa-
cred animal of the Indo-Europeans, was one of the animals
most closely connected with the sun and was often sacrificed
to it. Another creature associated with the sun was the
bird—a falcon, raven, or eagle, or, of course, the fabulous
phoenix, which dies and is born again from the fire every five
thousand years. The wings of birds are attached to the sun’s
round form to produce the winged disk so common in solar
iconography. In Africa and India the tiger and especially the
lion are sun animals; in the Americas, the eagle and the jag-
uar. Leo is the zodiacal sign for the fiercest summer month;
the lion is the royal animal on all the kingly architecture of
the ancient Near East. The many representations of a lion
attacking a bull may, some have surmised, reflect the heat
of summer routing spring, represented in the zodiac by Tau-
rus, the bull, or the paternal cult, attacking the female
horned moon.Eclipses of both sun and moon were experienced with
great dread. The Tatars believed that an eclipse meant that
the sun was attacked by a vampire who lived in a star. In
Norse myth the sun was pursued by a supernatural wolf who
will devour it when the world ends. The ancient Egyptians
believed that a demon—the Chinese, a dragon—was attack-
ing the sun. Some North American Indian tribes, on the
other hand, believed that the sun and moon were eclipsed
when they held their infants in their arms. In Tahiti it was
believed that eclipses occurred when the sun and moon were
mating.
Many devices were employed to “cure” eclipses, such as
the beating of drums or the making of other loud noises or
the shooting of arrows at the sun. “Snaring the sun” is one
of the most widespread sun myths in Oceania and North
America. This is one of the exploits of Maui, the Polynesian
culture hero, for instance, who caught the sun and beat it so
that it would not go so fast. It has been conjectured that sto-
ries of this kind are explanations for the solstices, when the
sun is perceived to stand still for several days. The high cul-
tures of the Inca and of Mesoamerican peoples were familiar
with the stations of the sun, and the Pueblo measured sunrise
points on the eastern horizon to divide the year. The Zuni
used as a gnomon an erect slab with a solar effigy on top,
and the sun temple at Cuzco, like Greek temples, was so ori-
ented that the sun at the solstice would penetrate the shrine.
There seems to be no doubt that the impressive monu-
ment at Stonehenge in England was set up to mark the sol-
stices and equinoxes as well as the stations of the moon. New
carbon 14 readings indicate that Stonehenge is at least as old
as the first pyramids, ruling out influence from the East on
its construction. In view of the tremendous labor involved
in moving and setting the megaliths, which occurred in three
stages several centuries apart, there can hardly be any ques-
tion that religious motivation was involved. Diodorus
Siculus, writing in the first century BCE, described a “spheri-
cal temple to Apollo among the Hyperboreans,” which may
be a reference to Stonehenge as a great temple to the sun.
Recent research has turned up other observatories in Scot-
land, the Orkneys, and even in Carnac in Brittany. Gold and
bronze disks engraved with crosses and spirals, daggers and
horse trappings with the same designs, and amber disks with
gold rims, all contemporary with the last phase of Stone-
henge, have been found in the British Isles and in Scandina-
via. It is tempting to imagine a crowd of people, each carry-SUN 8835