THE SUN GOD.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20828, 21 September 1929, Page 9

THE SUN GOD.

WORSHIPPED BY HIGH CIVILISATIONS. . A “ RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION.” Se "d o'? j“uS. b “ n I,eld in r “ ds *•»'“* I My suppose that sun worslup has ami H U ’f te i g - nen,] thro «Khout tii e world and that it is a part of the religion of h r VaKe t l' lbes - This, says Sir dfaraetiriseTV? 8 a , n - ( l rror - Slm worship cfiaractcused the higher civilisations of oblatron y ’to V I,le Pt f ' niitive Bnv “8« made 1 mo , r ? terrifying gods. He. found sun worship a part of the original 1 Aiyan religion and reminds us that Heat the “jlri aS tl u e b . ,rtbtl "y not of Christ, ff, tl,e . church father well knew. °/ Mlthra, the Unconquered Sun, cod ot the Persians. are , tbe beneficent curative powers of the sun s rays this season’s discovery, ft™ °- God (fused or confused with the sun m the later Greek pantheon), slew the dragon of the raarshor th» sun dialled iwamp tcvurs e . the sunburned will know best just when he became Apollyon the Destroyer “The suns beams,” chants the chorus in Iphigeim in iauns,” “ can heal all ; , tb ® . s “ n Roddess, most eminent of J apan s Shinto deities, gave health; and it is interesting, just now, to note that Orphic poesy identified the sun with the physician Aesculapius. The wonders of the world included that colossal bronze image which Rhodes, Island Qf the Sun and the Rose, erected to the sun about 284 D.c., of which. Pliny says that few men could encircle the thumbwith both arms. The sun was worshipped by the Babylonians and, ip the most rcmote antiquity of which we have such records, by their predecessors, the Sumerians. He was a popular god in the Assyrian pantheon from the earliest times, and both among the ancient Babylonians and certain North American Indian tribes he was, regarded as a judge In Palmyra remains of a great temple of the sun still rise majestically. The sun was originally a foreign god to Greece and Rome, and big cult eventually fell upon scandalous days under the wicked Emperor Heliogabalus. In India, on the other hand, he not only tfas worshipped as 1 far back as any record goes, but is worshipped to-day, as well, by many peoples there.

Of Heliopolis, that famous sacred city of the sun near the present Cairo, which had vanished before the beginning of our era. only an obelisk is left, yet among all the peoples of antiquity it was the Egyptians who adored the sun longest and most fervently. Ho dimmed their other deities, indeed, and the Egyptian kings believed themselves to be sons of the incarnate sun, just as “sons of the sun” were supposed to-be born in Peru in the prehistoric days.