The Symbolism of the Sun
Introduction
The Sun when paired with the Moon is treated as a ‘fiery’ masculine symbol
with the Moon as a ‘watery’ feminine symbol.
The Sun in this pairing is the creator of Ideas,
the Moon as the one who gives birth to these ideas as ‘form’.
She is then the Great Mother and Mother Nature.
This symbolism thus casts the masculine ‘father’[sun]
as the thinker and the ‘mother’ [moon] as the practical one
who nurtures the ideas through their gestation to completion.
And the symbolism works well as long as one remembers
everything is then ‘the child of the Great Mother
- Mother Nature’.
But many thousands of years ago,
it seems that ‘the feminine’ was regarded as the conceptual thinker
- the one who came up with the ideas
- and ‘the masculine’ was looked on as the one who took the ideas
and engineered them into some form of earthly solution.
And indeed this symbolism is used in the film the Matrix.
The Matrix
The Matrix film was first released in 1999,
and is an American science fiction film ...
written and directed by the Wachowskis,
whose biography is on our website,
because they use lucid dreaming to help them with their work.
The Matrix is the ultimate Reality
- see our videos on Reality and the Order of Creation
and it is the perceptible world that is virtual - an illusion.
And in the film, The Oracle is a woman and defines the plan.
She knows everything that is going to happen,
and is the one with the Ideas.
The Oracle: “I’d ask you to sit down, but you're not going to anyway.
And don’t worry about the vase.”
Neo: “What vase?” [Neo accidentally breaks a vase]
The Oracle: “That vase.” Neo: “I’m sorry.”
The Oracle: “I said don’t worry about it. I’ll get one of my kids to fix it.”
Neo: “How did you know?”
The Oracle: “What’s really going to bake your noodle later on is,
would you still have broken it if I hadn’t said anything.
And in contrast the Architect is a man,
and the programmer of the Matrix.
The one who made the plan ‘visible’.
Rather amusingly despite his arrogance, he hasn’t got it right yet.
The Architect:
The matrix is older than you know.
I prefer counting from the emergence of one integral anomaly
to the emergence of the next, in which case this is the sixth version.
The first matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect,
it was a work of art, flawless, sublime.
A triumph equalled only by its monumental failure.
The inevitability of its doom is as apparent to me now
as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being,
thus I redesigned it based on your history
to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature.
However, I was again frustrated by failure.
I have since come to understand that
the answer eluded me because it required a lesser mind,
or perhaps a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection.
He then continues by telling Neo
- the hero of the tale and a messianic figure
“You are the eventuality of an anomaly,
which despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate
from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision.“
So, in this case the Oracle would be classified as the Sun,
and the Architect, for all his inflated ego
and big words is the Moon.
And towards the end of the film it is the Oracle
who solves the problem the Architect has created,
in order to stop a catastrophic systems error
and the massive multiplication of evil.
The Sun as a goddess - Sól and Sulis
The Sun goddess was worshiped widely throughout Germany,
Scandinavia and other areas of Europe by both the Celts,
where she was given the name Sulis and the Norse,
where she was known as Sól.
In Norse mythology, Sól is described in the Poetic Edda,
compiled in the 13th century AD from earlier traditional sources.
However it is very clear the mythology is far earlier.
This picture shows the Trundholm sun chariot
from the Nordic Bronze Age, discovered in Denmark.
In both the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda she is described
as the sister of the personified moon,
Máni, the god [male] of the Moon.
There is a common Proto-Celtic root *sūli-,
from which the Celtic female deity Sulis derives,
related to the various Indo-European words for "sun"
- including the Sanskrit sūryah.
And Solveig is a woman’s name
and sung by a woman in Grieg’s Solveig’s song.
The Sun as a goddess - Ancient Egypt and Isis
If we now go back several thousand years, to Ancient Egypt,
the earliest deities associated with the Sun are all goddesses:
Wadjet, Sekhmet [with a lioness’s head],
Hathor, Nut, Bast, Bat, and Menhit.
0 Isis, one of the most important Goddesses,
also has strong solar connections.
In some places - notably, Her famous temple at Philae -
Isis was worshipped specifically as a Sun Goddess.
The Ancient Egyptians recognised the existence
of an invisible Ultimate Intelligence and the Sun and Moon
are then depicted as the Eyes of this Intelligence,
the Sun being the large eye and the moon a smaller eye.
Among Her solar epithets are Female Re (Re-et) and the Eye of Re.
Re was equivalent in the Egyptian pantheon
to the creator in the Indian Trimurti,
and was thus opposed to the destroyer - Apop (Gr. Apophis),
the father of the apo-calypse.
This is one reason why the seven symbolic Planets
includes the Sun and Moon as planets.
The system has an invisible Ultimate Intelligence
with seven Intelligences all called ‘planets’ for convenience,
but which include two the Sun and Moon that
in these modern more literal times we would not regard as planets.
Ancient beliefs then gave a special additional role to the Sun and the Moon
as ‘eyes’ of the Ultimate Intelligence with the female Sun
being the stronger of the two,
almost like a symbolic spyhole in the heavens.
Furthermore it seems this ‘eye’ was also, for them,
the means by which change was effected from above.
The Eye of Re was an active power.
While Re the Creator stayed aloof in the sky,
as befits the Ultimate Intelligence,
the solar power - the Eye Goddess
- went forth to enact this Being’s Divine will.
So why did the Moon become feminine?
Isis became associated with the Moon,
when Egypt came under Greek rule in the 3rd century BC,
following the conquest by Alexander the Great.
In other words, it was the rise of the masculine
masculine that forced the change, and it stayed.
More about Eyes
And once one investigates the idea of The Sun and Moon
as symbolic Eyes of a far more remote and unknowable deity,
one starts to see it all over the world.
Even in Islam, the sun is the eye of Allah.
A Dictionary of Symbols - J.E. Cirlot
Many indigenous people hold that the eyes of heaven
are the Sun and the Moon located on either side of the world-axis,
and there are prehistoric drawings and engravings
which may be interpreted after this fashion.
Eliade notes that for the pigmies and bushmen,
the sun is the eye of the supreme god.
The Samoyeds see the sun and the moon as the eyes of heaven.
From The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries,
by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, [1911]
The Rev. T. M. Morgan, Vicar of Newchurch parish,
near Carmarthen, South Wales:
'My father said there used to be expressed in Cardiganshire
a belief in reincarnation. This was in accord with Druidism,
namely, that all human beings formerly existed on the Moon,
the world of middle Light, and the Queen of heaven;
that those who there lived a righteous life
were thence born on the Sun,
and thence onward to the highest heaven;
and that those whose moon life
had been unrighteous were born on this Earth.
Through right-living on Earth, souls are able to return to the Moon,
and then evolve to the Sun and hence to the highest heavens...’
with no short cuts - eh Icarus?
Solstice
The winter solstice occurs when the most northern point
of the earth is tilted furthest away from the sun.
This results in the fewest hours of light
and the most hours of darkness.
The word solstice itself means ‘standing still sun’.
The sun appears to stand still at this point for 3 days
after which it appears to move again
and the hours of light begin to grow.
The reason for this is because before and after the solstice
the declination speed is less than 30 arcseconds per day
which is undetectable to the naked eye.
Solstice myths often contain this auspicious moment
of the ‘rebirth’ of the sun on the 25th of December.
And the growth of a new era, a new beginning, a fresh spring.
And this is why this date is used to celebrate
of many ‘sun gods’, prophets and auspicious people
- not just Jesus.
Their birth dates are celebrated during the re-emergence
of both nature and life
“after the moment of the deepest dark”.
Before it was renamed to Christmas, this time was celebrated
as the pagan festivals of Yule (Jul) and The Wild Hunt.
But there is also the Iranian Yalda night which comes from
Zoroastrianism and can be traced back to well before 2,000 BC.
The festival of the unconquered sun, Sol Invictus,
and Saturnalia are connected with the solstice.
And finally, the Indian festival of Lohri
is also a solstice festival but takes place
after the month of the solstice has been observed.