Sol Invictus 

Is the Sun Real?

To start our examination, for sure, the sun is real. Don't look right at it, it'll burn a hole in your retina! Would human life even be sustainable on this planet if the sun were to desert us or fail us? Without photosynthesis, where does the food chain even begin? So we must concede the sun is a real entity, and one to which we would owe a huge debt of gratitude if the sun were the sort of thing which might appreciate gratitude.

Aha, chortle the Jehovah's Witnesses, if you are forced to concede the sun is a real thing, and it is even mentioned in the Bible (it is), then why are you pretending it's a fiction? I'm not. But you say it's a false god. It's certainly not a true god! It's a creature, not the Creator. Again, our pattern repeats: the sun is a real thing, but it is not a real god.

As is the familiar pagan pattern, the pagan religionists deified this very noteworthy feature of the natural world. The Sun God has been called Sol, Apollo, Hyperion, Helios, Shamash, Ra, etc. The sun is for real! But God criminalizes worship of the sun. Why? Where does the Sun fall short of real deity?

A Created Being

If there were no sun, would the sun have the ability to call itself into existence and to begin to shine? From the sun's perspective, it just happens to be here; it did not create itself. Therefore the thanks we are tempted to give to the sun, because without his efforts human life on this planetary sphere would be unsupportable, belong rather to his own, and our, Creator:

In worshipping the sun, the pagans were venerating a created being, when their worship should have been directed to the Creator.

The problem with the false worship of the nations is not so much that they were worshipping non-entities, though in some cases they likely were. The world is real, the sun, moon, and stars are real, the oceans are real, etc. We ought to worship our Creator, as the Bible says, "Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth, before the difficult days come, and the years draw near when you say, 'I have no pleasure in them'. . ." (Ecclesiastes 12:1).

Is Jesus 'Sol'? Go up one level:

So it's OK to worship Jesus, but not OK to worship the sun. But wait a minute, some people say that Jesus is the sun! That viewpoint was taken by a popular internet movie, Zeitgeist:

There's no accounting for taste, and how that movie got to be popular I couldn't tell you. The case that Jesus is a solar god is based, first of all, on His birthday. If your birthday falls on or about the winter solstice, then you must be a solar deity, right? If not, why is Jesus' birthday given as that date, when the early church did not keep track?

Personally I think the reason is the popularity of an apocryphal work called the Protevangelion of James. In that work, John the Baptist's father is 'promoted' from being a priest of the line to being the high priest, and the place of his encounter with God is 'promoted' to the Holy of Holies, the day being, of course, the Day of Atonement. This date certain establishes a dating basis for the entire chain of events, John the Baptist's conception, then Jesus six months later. But personally I doubt the pious forger who produced the Protevangelion made these innovations to the story in order to arrive at this mid-winter date. Promotion is a common theme in apocryphal literature, there is always title inflation going on. It just happens to turn out that way. The Protevangelion was widely accepted as authentic (it is not) and as a result people thought they had good reason for a mid-winter date of the nativity:

Anaxagoras

The ancient philosopher Anaxagoras was accused of impiety when he resided in Athens, for saying that the sun was a fiery rock. This reductive materialism was perceived as an affront to religion. If a fiery rock, how also a god?:

His theories are not in the end all that plausible, nor his astronomy particularly advanced. His idea that the stars are rocks set on fire and sent twirling into the air is not all that convincing: "Anaxagoras, that the circumambient aether is of a fiery substance, which, by a vehement force in its whirling about, did tear stones from the earth, and by its own power set them on fire, and establish them as stars in the heavens." (Plutarch. Delphi Complete Works of Plutarch. On the Opinions of the Philosophers, Book II, Chapter XIII, Kindle location 58926). The best you can say about it is that it is anti-supernatural. His idea that nous, or mind, ordered the world is a keeper. Anaxagoras, like certain other of the pre-Socratics, was a flat-earther, according to Aristotle:

"Anaximenes and Anaxagoras and Democritus give the flatness of the earth as the cause of its staying still." (Aristotle, On the Heavens, Book II, Chapter 13, Section 111).

While not all that progressive in terms of astronomical knowledge,— both Plato and Aristotle were round-earthers,— Anaxagoras does seem to be on to something here. The sun has given us no reason to think that it is a being like us, displaying intention and self-awareness. It has put out no feelers, made no effort to open up lines of communication. If it does not have those attributes, what kind of 'god' can it be? Anaxagoras' fiery rock is not all that close, rather a fusioning gas ball; but still this is not what is meant by a 'god.' The pagans therefore were aggrieved that he had insulted their 'gods,' the sun and the moon.

There is some uncertainty here about exactly what became of Anaxagoras; for what it's worth, Plutarch seems to accept the theory that Pericles managed to rescue his friend:

"Even Protagoras had to go into exile, Anaxagoras was with difficulty rescued from imprisonment by Pericles, and Socrates, though he had nothing whatever to do with such matters, nevertheless lost his life because of philosophy." (Plutarch. Parallel Lives, Nicias, Chapter 23, Delphi Complete Works of Plutarch. Kindle location 16345).

As to the concept that the sun, moon, and stars are ensouled, intelligent beings, which it appears the Athenian prosecutors wished to vindicate, it seems even some Christians like Origen believed that, though hopefully without conceding that they were gods.

Apostasy

The temple at Jerusalem has been defiled by sun worship,

I always get a kick out of it when the newspapers breathlessly report that some archaeologist or other has discovered that the Bible is false. And the substance of this discovery? That someone has dug up some pagan implement of worship in Israel. This proves that the Bible is false, how? The prophets complained constantly of the apostasy of the people!

Scorched Earth

Sometimes people have wondered, if God despises idolatry the way He says He does, why doesn't He simply annihilate the false gods? But that would necessitate destroying the world He lovingly created:

It is one thing to be a real entity, another to be a real god. The sun is very much a real entity, as is the sky, the sea, thunder and lightning. It is a mighty poor god, though. There was a time when it was not.

Akhenaten

Egyptian history presents a startling interlude, when art, instead of formalized and stiff, became realistic. Pharaoh Akhenaten, who reigned over Egypt from approximately 1353-1336 BC, decided there is only one God, the sun god, Aten, and with one grand sweep of the hand did away with Egypt's traditional religious establishment. Egypt's inherited polytheism was to be replaced by monotheism:

"Men had slept like the dead; now they lift their arms in praise, birds fly, fish leap, plants bloom, and work begins. Aten creates the son in the mother's womb, the seed in men, and has generated all life. He has distinguished the races, their natures, tongues, and skins, and fulfills the needs of all. Aten made the Nile in Egypt and rain, like a heavenly Nile, in foreign countries. He has a million forms according to the time of day and from where he is seen; yet he is always the same." (Aten Hymn).

As to the million forms, it's more like a million names, and sometimes the observer struggles to understand why the solar disk has a different name than the sun god, and why the name changes depending on the time of day.

It didn't 'take.' The existing priests in Egypt made their living from polytheism and resented this new upstart religion. It was bad for business. It is intriguing to wonder what the relationship is between this outburst of monotheism, fleeting as it was, and the presence in Egypt of a large number of persons with a monotheistic heritage, the Hebrew slaves. Unfortunately there is no commonly agreed-upon date for the Exodus; depending on what date one adopts, the Hebrew slaves had either been gone for a century before Akhenaten or hadn't left yet.

It doesn't seem their practice of their ancestral religion was entirely continuous and uncorrupted. Joshua, speaking to the children of Israel, explains that their ancestors long ago were polytheists: "Your fathers, including Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nahor, dwelt on the other side of the River in old times; and they served other gods." (Joshua 24:2). Terah we know. But he goes on to say, the problem is not limited to the people of long ago:

"Now therefore, fear the Lord, serve Him in sincerity and in truth, and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the River and in Egypt. Serve the Lord! And if it seems evil to you to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you dwell." (Joshua 24:14-15).

It seems like it's possible some of the people either apostatized in Egypt, or at a minimum blended their religious practices with those of the people around them. But there must have been enough old-timers who still had the faith of Israel. It cannot be that the Egyptians had never heard of monotheism and invented it for themselves, when they had dwelling in their midst millions of persons with a vivid recollection of practicing monotheism.

Transportation

The Egyptians depict falcon-headed Ra transporting the solar disk across the sky in his daily progression in a bark, a small boat. His name at any given moment depends on what way-station he has made it to The Greeks and Romans gave him a four-horse chariot, a quadriga:

These creative imaginings cluster around a real, and highly visible, almost to the point of inescapability, event, the daily (apparent) progression of the sun across the sky. This is the process Paul is pointing towards, of imaginative elaboration, where the sun, a real thing, is given a biography and attributes that are not observable. The four-horse chariot, and for that matter the boat, are figments of the human imagination, although the sun itself is anything but a figment of the human imagination. The Greeks depicted Helios, who formed the subject of the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, as a naked man, which is how they liked to portray their gods. Or then there's this falcon-headed thing carrying the sun disk on his head, if you prefer. Then there's the ever-popular yellow circle for us less adventurous types.

One shudders to think of the forms this deity took in the New World, where bloody human sacrifice in his name and imagined interests was practiced. Mercifully, that was not so much a feature of Greek and Roman paganism. Please do not tell me, 'Iphigenia on line 1, Polyxena on line 2;' I know about them. I said "so much."

Perhaps the reader can recall reading James Frazer's tour-de-force, "The Gold Bough." While jam-packed with detail and incident, it ultimately fails to convince, because if all gods are really vegetation gods, then who is left to be the moon god? Reductive schemes which pare down all gods to fit in one unitary scheme fail to do justice to the Protean variabililty of ancient polytheism. Not all gods are the same thing; they are not interchangeable. Romulus was a man, and some gods are glorified men; but not all; when was the sea a man? Some of these gods are forces of nature, with fabulous stories woven into a broadly fictitious biography of some element of the word-structure which would not normally be expected to have a biography. The meteorological or astronomical component is quite naturally accompanied by sentiments of awe and wonderment, which is, wrongly, promoted to religious veneration. The sun,— the real sun, I mean, not Huitzilopochtli, never demanded human sacrifice and is not likely to have been aware it was ever offered.

Constantine

Constantine's father worshipped the sun, and some people say that Constantine did, too. The dad I believe, but the son seems legit, or as legit as a person can be who murders family members to simplify the succession:

Although he looks all innocent shining resplendently up there, when it comes to human sacrifice, the sun tragically has a blood-stained history,— or demonic or human imposters claiming to speak in his name, at any rate. What is God's position on human sacrifice?: