Sun Mythology

Ra is born from Nut every morning, crosses the sky in the day boat and then fights Apep in the Duat from the night boat before he is born again. The Egyptians called him Khepri at dawn, Ra at noon and Atum at dusk. Pharaoh bears the title 'son of Ra', because kingship draws its legitimacy from the sun. In the Heliopolitan cosmogony Atum comes into being by himself on the first mound and brings Shu and Tefnut out of his own body, which is how the line of the gods begins. The Pyramid Texts therefore call Ra both the father of the gods and the god who gives birth to himself. Ra in the Egyptian family tree →

Helios is the son of Hyperion and Theia. Every day he drives his four-horse chariot from east to west, and at night he returns along Oceanus in a golden cup. Because he sees everything from the sky he acts as a witness, and it is he who reports Aphrodite's adultery and the abduction of Persephone. His son Phaethon takes the chariot and scorches the earth. Helios in the Greek family tree →

Apollo is the son of Zeus and Leto, and he is the god of prophecy, music, archery, medicine and measure. At Delphi he kills Python and takes over the oracle. In the Hellenistic age he is identified with the Sun under the epithet Phoebus, the bright one. In astrology he stands for the Sun's face of consciousness, clarity and order. The sources give him four fields at once. Prophecy belongs to him at Delphi, music and poetry through the Muses, medicine under the epithet Paean, and purification through the rite that cleanses a polluted person. In the Eumenides of Aeschylus it is Apollo who purifies Orestes after the killing of his mother and so lifts the curse of blood. The maxims cut at the entrance to his temple, know yourself and nothing in excess, describe the measured reason attached to his name. Apollo in the Greek family tree →

Utu is the son of the Moon god Nanna and the twin of Inanna. Because he is the god of justice and divination, Hammurabi claims to have received his laws from him, and Gilgamesh sets out against Humbaba under his protection. Each morning he saws through the eastern mountains and rises into the sky. Utu in the Mesopotamian family tree →

Amaterasu is the sun goddess born from Izanagi's left eye. When her brother Susanoo offends her she shuts herself in a cave and the world goes dark, and only Ame-no-Uzume's dance and a mirror draw her out again. The Japanese imperial line traces its descent from her and the shrine of Ise belongs to her. In her the sun takes a feminine form. Amaterasu in the Japanese family tree →

Surya is the Vedic sun god who crosses the sky in a chariot drawn by seven horses. In Vedic astrology he is the graha of the soul (atman), the father and the king. Sunday (Ravivara) is his day, and ruby, the colour red and gold are among his correspondences.

Sol Invictus means 'the Unconquered Sun'. Aurelian made his worship a state cult in 274. His birthday falls on 25 December, just after the winter solstice, which is the moment the light begins to return. His cult was intertwined with that of Mithras, and the Christian Christmas came to occupy the same day in the calendar.

The Sun stands at the centre of the system. In the chart it likewise signifies the king, the father, the ruler and authority. Pharaoh is called the son of Ra, Louis XIV of France styled himself the 'Sun King' and the Japanese emperor traces his line to Amaterasu. When the king rules well the land is fertile, and when he falls sick the land lies barren, as the legend of the Fisher King tells. The killing of the king is the other side of the same idea. In Babylon, when an evil omen appeared, a substitute king (šar pūhi) was placed on the throne and put to death once the danger had passed. In The Golden Bough James Frazer describes how the priest at Nemi could only be replaced by the man who killed him, and he ties that custom to the killing of the king. Frazer's general theory is disputed today, but the replacement of a worn out king is genuinely attested in the Babylonian texts.

Every night the Sun dies in the west, passes through the underworld and is born again in the east. Jonah in the belly of the fish, Osiris in the coffin and Jesus in the tomb walk the same road. Jung called this pattern the 'night sea journey' and read it as the hero descending into darkness and returning with light. In astrological terms the Sun describes consciousness plunging into the unconscious in order to be renewed.

The Sun gives sight. In myth it is the all-seeing witness, and in a human being it is the discerning mind. In astrology it marks the centre of the 'I', the purpose of life and the creative will. The same light also casts the shadow, which is why the shadow is sharpest where the Sun is strongest.

The Sun's sign is Leo and its animal is the lion. The maned, proud male at the head of the pride is one of the oldest emblems of kingship. In Egypt Sekhmet is described as the raging Eye of Ra in lion form. The first labour of Heracles is to kill the Nemean Lion, whose skin then becomes his armour. In the tarot's Strength card a woman closes the lion's jaws with her hands.

The Sun's metal is gold, because gold does not corrode, does not decay and carries the colour of light. In alchemy the gold of Sol is the goal of the work (opus), and the turning of lead, which is Saturn, into gold is read as the ripening of the soul. In the body the heart, the eyes and the vital force belong to the Sun.

In the tarot the Sun card shows a naked child on a white horse in front of a wall, with sunflowers behind. The card speaks of openness, joy, success and the conscious state of innocence. In the Golden Dawn system it corresponds directly to the Sun. In Kabbalah it is attached to Tiphereth (Beauty), the sephira at the centre of the tree.

Mithras, a god of Persian origin, became the god of the Roman legions. In his myth he is born from the rock, kills the bull in the scene known as the tauroctony and then dines with Sol. The cult's seven grades of initiation correspond to the seven planets, and the highest grade bears the name Pater. For this reason the cult of Mithras is called the mystery religion of the Sun.

Phaethon, the mortal son of Helios, asks to drive his father's chariot for a single day. The horses will not obey him, the earth burns and Zeus strikes him down with the thunderbolt. The story shows that the Sun's power is carried by measure rather than by inheritance. In this reading identity is not something handed down by the father but something a person earns by his own measure. Phaethon in the family tree →

The darkening of the world when the Sun withdraws is a motif that many stories share. Amaterasu shuts herself in the cave, Demeter sinks into mourning and the winter sun retreats to the south. In these stories the gods call it back with dance, laughter and a mirror. The winter solstice festivals of Saturnalia, Yule and Christmas are in fact this same ceremony of calling back.

Asclepius is the son of Apollo and Coronis, and he learns medicine from the centaur Chiron. When he begins to raise the dead, Zeus strikes him down and then sets him in the sky as Ophiuchus, the serpent bearer. At his sanctuary in Epidaurus the sick slept within the precinct and received their cure in a dream, a practice known as temple incubation. In solar symbolism healing passes from Apollo the physician to his son, because the same god grants both light and health. Asclepius in the Greek family tree →

A sun god fathering a son on a mortal mother is a widespread narrative pattern. Pharaoh calls himself the son of Ra, Mithras is born from the rock and takes his meal with Sol in Rome, and the avatars of Vishnu come down when an age goes wrong. In the Abrahamic traditions the prophet takes on the same mediating role through speech, and the Christian calendar places the birth of Jesus on 25 December, the day of Sol Invictus. Comparative mythology gathers these under the heading of the solar son, but the grouping does not prove direct transmission between the cultures.

William Lilly writes that the father is signified by the Sun in a day birth and by Saturn in a night birth. Myth arranges the reckoning between son and father in several ways. Phaethon asks for his father's chariot and falls, Horus clears his dismembered father Osiris before the tribunal, and Perceval heals the wounded Fisher King by putting the question to him. In these stories identity is not inherited ready made from the father, since the son has to earn it by his own act.

In almost every language the words for the moment of understanding are drawn from light. The Buddha's awakening is told as happening at daybreak under a fig tree at Bodh Gaya, and the word buddha means the one who has woken up. The Pali texts call him Adiccabandhu, kinsman of the sun, and trace the Shakya line back to the solar dynasty. The Latin illuminatio and the European Enlightenment use the same image, and in astrology it is the Sun that stands for consciousness and discernment.

Alchemy orders its work by colour. Blackening (nigredo) is putrefaction, whitening (albedo) is purification and reddening (rubedo) marks the completion of the work. Some texts place a yellowing (citrinitas) between the last two. In the rubedo the matter turns to gold, so the stage belongs to Sol and therefore to the Sun. Jung reads this sequence of colours as a psychological process and matches the rubedo with a person gathering their scattered parts into one.

Tiphereth is the sixth and central sphere on the tree of the sefirot, and its name means beauty. The classical source of the doctrine of the sefirot is the Zohar, written in the thirteenth century, where Tiphereth stands as the point of balance between the spheres above and below. Kabbalah places it in the body at the middle of the trunk, where the heart sits. The scheme that pairs the planets with the sefirot belongs to post-Renaissance occultism rather than to classical Kabbalah, and it is that late pairing which attaches the Sun to Tiphereth.

The solar hero goes down into the dark and comes back carrying a treasure. In the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason takes the Golden Fleece at Colchis from the dragon that never sleeps. In the Epic of Gilgamesh the hero brings up from the sea floor the plant that makes an old man young again, and a snake carries it off on the way home. In the Nibelung story Siegfried kills the dragon Fafnir and takes the cursed ring together with the gold. In all three a serpent or a dragon guards what the hero is after. Gilgamesh in the Mesopotamian family tree →

The earliest written form of the Grail story is the unfinished romance of Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval ou le Conte du Graal. Perceval, who grew up in the forest, watches the grail procession pass through the castle but asks nothing in order to seem well mannered, and the wounded Fisher King is left unhealed. In Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival the hero comes back years later and asks the king what ails him, and both the king and the land revive. The story turns on an unschooled young man healing the king and the country by asking the right question.