Solar rays have seemed to have the magical properties of fertility, creativity, prophecy and healing. No wonder then that the sun has evoked the worldly prestige and authority of rulers and royalty who wear the sunlike crown, the world-transcending intelligence of the “enlightened one,” and the vision of the haloed saint. As the heavenly warrior, the sun’s blazing light turns back the darkness of primeval chaos.
The sun has been worshipped across cultures and throughout time. The sun, in its power, came to be the symbol of the king as the son of the sun. France’s Louis XIV chose the sun as his personal emblem and emblazoned his Palace of Versailles with representations of the sun. The connection to royalty was still alive in England at the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 when she wore a golden cloak under her robe and a crown of gold, rayed like the sun on her head – even though this time the ruler was a woman.
More than 5000 years ago the symbol of the sun appeared in visual form as a circle with a dot at the center in countries like Egypt and China, without any known connection between them. The circle with a dot is still used in astrology as the symbol for the sun and in alchemy as the symbol for gold or the highest goal of the work.
Like all symbols, the sun is bivalent; it is not only part of creating life, it is also destructive. Hindu god Rudra in his aspect as “fire, lightning and the sun” destructively “devours flesh, blood and marrow” with his burning, “atrocious” heat (Kramrisch, 15). The ferocity of the sun exhausts the body, boils the brain and drives to madness. The familiar Greek myths of Icarus and Phaethon are instructive: To fly too near the sun is to court destruction and death.
Kramrisch, Stella. The Presence of Siva. Princeton, NJ, 1981.
(Featured Image- 2An.084 – Detail from a wall painting in the tomb of Ramses VI, ca. 1145–1137 B.C.E., Valley of the Kings, Egypt.)