ing a sun amulet, waiting for the summer sunrise at
Stonehenge.
A spectacular object confirming northern sun worship
is the famous disk found in Trundholm in northern Zealand,
plated with gold and decorated with circles and spirals; it is
set on wheels and drawn by a bronze horse, probably one of
a pair. In all the Scandinavian countries have been discovered
objects and rock carvings decorated with disks, boats, and
scenes of humans raising their arms to a disk. Sometimes
there are men in the shape of disks, carrying weapons. These
have been interpreted as solar deities or mortals wearing the
sun’s emblem. The wheel, the boat, the cross in a circle, and
the swastika (a moving wheel) can all be seen as sun symbols.
The summer solstice in northern Europe today is
marked by bonfires and the rolling downhill of flaming
wheels, as it was no doubt millennia ago. The winter solstice
is a time to encourage the sun to grow again, represented by
the burning of the Yule log, the H:anukkah light, and the
lighted candles of Saint Lucy in Sweden. The boar’s head at
the Christmas feast represents the old year, or the old sun,
and the suckling pig with the apple of immortality in its
mouth is the new sun.
It was the tendency of nineteenth-century scholars to
search for a single key to the understanding of all mythology.
One of the most popular of these keys was the concept of
the sun hero, a ubiquitous figure who was either the sun itself
or an offspring of the sun. It has become clear over the years
that all myths cannot be traced to one source. Yet there are
some elements of myth that do seem to have solar references
in common, perhaps formulated by the ancients at the time
when astral religion invaded the Mediterranean world. It has
been pointed out (by Joseph Campbell, for instance, in The
Hero with a Thousand Faces) that in most myths heroes have
one divine parent and that they wander about on the earth
and make at least one trip to the underworld. Also, most
myths describe a wandering sun, which goes under or behind
the earth at night, and in most myths the divine parent is
perceived as a sun figure. One instance is the Greek Perseus,
whose mother, an underground divinity, was impregnated
by a shower of gold, the sun’s metal. Another is the Irish Cú
Chulainn, who is explicitly a son of Lugh Lamfhada, “Lugh
of the long hands,” an epithet that is reminiscent of the long
rays that end in human hands pictured at Amarna in Egypt.
Lugh was a god of brightness and the sky and, like Apollo,
master of all crafts. He fought at the mythical battle of Moy-
tura, where he vanquished his grandfather, the giant Balor,
who had one eye in the middle of his forehead, like the cy-
clopes, who were also sun figures. The Welsh counterpart of
Lugh is Lleu Llaw Gyffes, or Lludd. Lludd had a temple at
Lydney in England near the Severn where he is portrayed,
perhaps through Roman influence, as a young man with a
solar halo driving a chariot. The Samson of Genesis, a mighty
and short-tempered Herakles figure, has a name derived
from the Hebrew word for “sun.” Samson’s fight with a lion,
and his birth, which is connected with a supernatural figure
who vanishes in flames, seem to point to other solar con-
nections.
Homer’s Odysseus has been interpreted as a sun figure,
since he wanders for nine years, which is the period the
Greeks used to correlate solar and lunar calendars. He finally
reaches his Penelope, who weaves by day and unravels by
night. Most replete with sun details, however, is the story of
Herakles, son of the sky god Zeus, who wanders the earth
to perform his deeds, returns unhurt from the underworld,
dies in a fire, and is taken up to heaven. He not only lives
on in heaven but also has a shade who lives on in the under-
world. Herakles’ labors were perhaps limited to twelve (al-
though others have been recorded) in order to fit them into
the zodiac.
As an all-seeing eye who travels the world, the sun ac-
quired the character of a spy for the gods and therefore a
stern judge of humankind. When the heavenly bodies began
to be seen as parts of a well-ordered and consistent system,
more pure and dependable than that of the old gods, the sun,
an obvious leader in the sky, took his place as a symbol of
the newly emerging royal power. Thus, organized cults of the
sun are strongest in the great civilizations, which were often
kingships. A new sense of power and organization, as well
as a new sense of justice, found its central source in kingship,
just as the harmony of the heavens was centered in the sun.
“It is a remarkable coincidence,” writes Jacquetta Hawkes,
“that a discovery and an invention attendant on the creation
of Bronze Age civilization came just in time to provide sym-
bols of the sun gods and their temples. These were gold and
the wheel” (Hawkes, 1962, p. 73). Since its discovery, gold
has been the royal metal, as well as the sun’s. The sun royal
was adopted by all kings but never so completely as by the
Sun King, Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715). Elizabeth II of En-
gland at her coronation in 1952 wore a golden gown under
her robe, and her archbishop prayed that her throne “may
stand fast in righteousness forevermore, like the sun before
her and as the faithful witness in heaven.” One must thus
look to the high civilizations and imperial kingships to find
the most highly developed cults of the sun.
ANCIENT EGYPT. Very early in its history, somewhere in the
fourth millennium BCE, Egyptians broke away from a moon
calendar and organized time around the heliacal rising of the
star Sirius, which occurs about July 19. This date coincided
with the yearly inundation of the Nile, the most important
period in the agricultural life of a country that has no rainfall
and no seasons. From that time on the year was divided into
twelve months of thirty days each, with a five-day intraca-
lendrical period. Whether or not this arrangement affected
the religious life of the Egyptians, as some have argued, the
sun in various aspects became the dominant figure in Egyp-
tian religious life, combining with, and in some cases sup-
planting, other deities.
One of the earliest manifestations of the sun was the fal-
con god Horus, who appears on the famous palette of Nar-
mer, the unifier of the two lands that became Egypt. Horus8836 SUN