Sunny side up
FIERY BALL’S CONSTANT FASCINATION
★ IT’S officially Sun Awareness Week, encouraging us to protect our skin from its rays.
But, thanks to a slightly soggy bank holiday weekend, you might be starting to think the fiery ball in the sky is mythical.
★ And we’re not the first to be obsessed with whether it shines. Our ancient ancestors had unusual beliefs about that glowing disc in the sky, as
JAMES MOORE reveals…
Pharaoh share: From 2,600 years ago ancient Egyptians worshipped lots of sun gods. The main one was Ra. With the head of a falcon and a sun on his head wrapped in a cobra, he was thought to sail the sun across the sky in his boat each day. Khepri was god of the morning sun. His scarab beetle head came from the belief that the critters’ young appeared magically out of dung balls.
Spaced out: Nasa’s lunar Apollo missions were oddly named, as Apollo was the ancient Greek god of the sun not the moon. He was said to travel across the sky in a flying chariot driven by fiery horses to bring light to the world. Later, the Romans and the Norse had similar chariot-riding sun deities, both called Sol, with Vikings believing that a wolf chased the sun across the heavens. Barmy boffins: Some historic Greek thinkers tried to make sense of the sun. In 434BC Anaxagoras said: “The sun is a mass of fiery stone, a little larger than Greece.” Ptolemy’s view that the sun revolved around Earth was not overturned until Polish scientist Nicolaus Copernicus showed the reverse was true in the 16th century.
rays:
Huitzilopochtli, which weirdly means “blue hummingbird on the left”, was the sun god of the Aztecs. He was also a war god and wielded the holy fire serpent Xiuhcoatl as a weapon. They believed that sacrifices of human hearts to the deity were essential for the sun to rise the next day. The Mayans, meanwhile, had a crosseyed sun god called Kinich Ahau.
No sweat!:
The sun god of the Incas, who ruled in South
Deadly
America 600 years ago, was Inti. Gold was reckoned to be the sweat of Inti, whose image often appeared made from the stuff with a human face.
Sibling rivalry:
In Chinese mythology there were originally 10 suns, who were sons of the solar goddess Xihe, who took them one at a time across the sky in a chariot. But one day the kids misbehaved, appearing in the sky at the same time, burning up the Earth. A heroic archer shot down nine of them.
Dark thoughts:
Ancient cultures had lots of ways of trying to explain solar eclipses. Vietnamese tradition said it was eaten by a mischievous frog, Native Americans thought a squirrel had nibbled it and Siberians blamed a vampire which tried to gobble it, only to get its tongue burnt.
me: Experts think that the ancient stone circle of Stonehenge, begun in 3100 BC, served as a solar calendar, while the ancient Egyptian pyramids’ angled sides symbolised the rays of the sun and were aimed at helping rulers’ souls ascend to heaven.