The center of gravity of the solar system is within the Sun
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The center of gravity of the solar system is within the Sun. This huge body of fire gives to us and to all the other planets light and heat. It binds them together in the pattern which their combined motion creates. We are so used to receiving what the Sun brings us that we take its donations as a matter of course without appreciable thought for the nature of its being or the magnitude of its effects.
The Sun was worshiped as a god before the history of man's religion began. Some remnant of that worship stretches continuously from the most remote times to the present day. However much it may have changed or become amalgamated with other religions, still, in essence and origin, there remain traces of the primitive worship of the Sun. Our Christmas Day can be traced back long before the birth of Christianity, to the "Feast of the Undying Sun." For six months the shadows had increased in length as the Sun went southward. Who could tell that on this year the shadows would shorten again? If the Sun should take a sudden whim into his head to remain south, then the people in the north would starve and die. With prayers and sacrifices they begged him to be merciful. About the twenty-second of December they noticed that the shadows were no longer increasing their length. Three days later even the common people could see that the shadows had shortened. The Sun was returning north again! It would not die. The thankful people turned to it in praise.
Not until the beginning of the fifth century after the birth of Christ, was the twenty-fifth of December fixed as his birthday. Then the first observance came from the west where mothers had long held vigil to celebrate the Feast of the Undying Sun, "before they ever heard of the Holy Mother," wrote the Venerable Bede.
It is easy to trace back our celebrations to the worship of the Sun. It is less simple to find where they originated. Probably the origins of Sun worship are as diffuse as the customs in which they resulted. Certainly the Sun was worshiped in Persia, long before Zoroaster came to formulate superstition into a religion, and identify the "God of Light" with the "God of Good." Certainly the Sun was worshiped in Egypt before the Asiatics wandered into the country of the Nile bringing their equinoctial cult and their god, Adonis, whose earlier name was Tammuz, from the unknown part of Asia whence they came.
Only in China, where abstract thought was rare, and where ancestor worship absorbed so much of the religion that the remainder consisted in practical advice, did the Sun fail to hold its own as a deity. But even there, on the feast of the winter solstice, the faithful brought their offerings to the tombs and worshiped.
All the various aspects of the Sun were deified, and a host of little gods sprang up--some of them to the sunshine, some to the Sun who returned in the spring. The symbols to represent them were as various as the beliefs--horses and calves, and a boat sailing over the celestial sky. Different peoples, worshiping different varieties of the Sun God, met and fought out their battles as vehemently as in later years, the Catholics and the Protestants, both claiming to worship the same God, fought out theirs.
But in spite of the differences, there are a few general characteristics, which tended to recur over the Earth. One still extant is a curious symbol common to Chaldea, Babylonia and Egypt. It is a ring with wide wings spread from it, or below it, as a protection. The Assyrians completed the picture with a little figure dressed in pleated kilts, and even when the man is absent, the kilt is present, showing that the dress was more important than the man.
Some of these symbols show the most acute observation of celestial phenomena, and in some ways the sciences and religion worked hand in hand, each helping out the other.
Near the apex of the Nile Delta in Egypt, not far from the modern Cairo, there existed from very early times a city called Heliopolis--the city of the Sun. It contained Sun temples, each accompanied by a library with professional scribes and a list of the books carved on the walls. It had observatories, obelisk sundials, splendor brought from Asiatic colonies, and whatever paraphernalia an ancient astronomer could desire. All the various cults of the Sun flourished there until about 1450 B. C., when there arose in Heliopolis the first great monotheistic religion the world had ever known.
To Heliopolis was sent the young Amenhotep IV to gain the education suitable for a young king. His family like all Egyptians, were polytheists, worshiping the Sun and the stars, and a host of minor deities--but Heliopolis was the center of education, the university whose name carried the greatest distinction, so they sent their child to the city of the Sun. The results must have been startling. The young King possessed a power of abstract reasoning that was almost a thousand years ahead of his time. He could not see the sense of worshiping one god in different ways. He envisioned the Sun as a single, all powerful being, the source of life and light.
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