We Worship the Sun
The Limitless Light. This is one of the names given by the ancient Gnostics to the ultimate “Ground of Being,” the Thing Behind All Things, only describable because of what it isn’t.
Light!
Sunlight drives away the terror of the darkness, inviting us to emerge from the cave and harvest the spring greens, also beginning to emerge from the darkness of the soil, and to prepare the fields for planting. The arrival of the longer days in mid-winter are a time of celebration, a demarcation of the end of the cold times of austerity. It’s no wonder the Sun has been worshiped in so many forms by so many cultures around the world.
But, there’s another aspect of Solar Worship worth considering, which, to me, has interesting implications. I think it was best described by ☮t♭ in our article on weeds:
The function of plants, generally, is the conversion of sun-light through photosynthesis into matter (and energy) which is then usable throughout an ecosystem.
Plants are like solar Bitcoin miners.
Except they are self-assembling, automatically reproducing and generate biomass which can be used in a billion different ways through life’s kingdoms. It’s actually better than money.
So plants, taking in the sunlight, make it available to all of the members of a biosphere. They transform it into pollen for other plants and bees, into nectar for birds and insects, into dietary fiber and nutrients for animals, into nitrogen as they decay and incorporate themselves into the soil. Even plants that don’t photosynthesize live by feeding off of organisms that do.
When you think about it, even crude oil is a concentrated, plant-based distillation of stored sunlight.
Without the plant’s ability to convert light to energy and matter, we’d still be stuck in a pre-cyanobacteriological world, single-celled organisms bumping around in the darkness of a vast, primordial sea.
So maybe there’s more to Sun Worship than just being happy that you can finally get a tan and stay outside past five.
Maybe Solar Worship is actually a vestigial memory of plant consciousness, a recognition that all of life is transformed sunlight distributed through a biosystem.
Perhaps our acknowledgement of the need for solar energy and our dependence upon plants to make it available to us manifested as deities like Sol Invictus, Apollo, and Mithras.
Most plants and the spirits that inhabit them quite obviously worship the Sun. They stretch forward towards it like humans doing yoga, taking in the light, eating it in a kind of pure sensatory experience. Is there any wonder that we’re sometimes advised to “raise our hands to heaven” when we pray?
Jesus said, “If they say to you, ‘Where did you come from?’, say to them, ‘We came from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established itself and became manifest through their image.’ ...” — Gospel of Thomas, Saying 50
