by Ogo A. Bellard

Created on: July 31, 2007

"If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware... I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sunrise" -Vincent Van Gough

The Sun creates the visible world around us, without its light there is darkness, coldness and death. It is no wonder our first mythological God/Goddess was The Sun, praised and worshiped in various forms, from the moment we could first cogitate about the apparent death and rebirth of the sun and therefore ourselves. Perhaps we instinctively realised that without the Sun there would be no life on earth, and soon incorporated mythological rituals to worship this ultimate giver of life. The oldest recorded interpretations of the Sun were discovered at the Apollo 11 Cave in the Huns Mountains of south-western Namibia, Africa. An incised ochre cave painting dated at 100,000 B.C, which is also the generally accepted date for the rise of Homo sapiens. Though interestingly enough, there were very few societies, which exclusively worshipped the sun as their prime God/Goddess.

"A woman who awakens daily in her camp in the east, lights a fire, and prepares the bark torch she will carry across the sky. Before setting out, she decorates herself with red ochre, which she spills, colouring the clouds red. Upon reaching the west, she reapplies her paint, again spilling reds and yellows in the sky, before returning home underneath the earth, where her torch warms the earth from below." -Aboriginal Sun Myth

The Australian Aborigines are the oldest surviving single culture, dated to over 50,000 BC in their origins. For them the sun was a divine feminine being, one of many, as it was in most cultures that pre-date, the late ancient Egyptian turn to patriarchy that was affirmed in new European culture by the Greeks onwards. Many tribal languages in Africa today, still use the name of the Sun; Ashanti-Nyankopan, Barotse-Nyambi, and Dogon-Amma, as the name for their supreme being. However like the Greek-Helios and Sumerian-Utu, although all powerful, the Sun was not assigned a specific major role in everyday ritual. That is until Akhenaton in ancient Egypt around 1352 BC.

"The higher the sun ariseth, the less shadow doth he cast; even so the greater is the goodness, the less doth it covet praise; yet cannot avoid its rewards in honours" -Amenhotep IV

Aten was

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