The Sun
500 B.C.E. Not a God?
Solar Wind - Geo-magnetic Storms
500 B.C.E. Not a God?
Two thousand and five hundred years ago the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras claimed that the Sun is not a god who adjusts energy output to human needs but a huge ball of fire (which doesn't particularly care about humans). This idea did not go over well, and resulted in exile for the philosopher, after a proper trial for impiety.
They saw the Sun's visible light and saw the Sun as stable, powerful, majestic, and life-giving.
Ra, the Egyptian God of the Sun, was believed to rule in all parts of the created world: the sky, the Earth, and the underworld. He was the God of order, kings, and the sky.
The Greek and Roman God of the Sun was Apollo, radiant with grace and beauty. His forename, Phoebus, means “bright” or “pure” as benefits the image of the Sun as seen from Earth. Within Roman mythology, he wasn’t known as much as the God of Light but as the God of Healing and Prophecy with the nine Muses (Goddesses inspiring art and music) as his companions.
Apollo taught the art of medicine to humanity and served as an intermediary between the gods and men. Because of Apollo's truthfulness and integrity, he was granted the gift of prophecy and oracles.
Not all Sun gods are male. In Germanic mythology the Sun is female, and the Moon is male. The Old High German Sun Goddess is Sunna. In the Norse traditions, Sol rode through the sky on her chariot every day, pulled by two horses. Sun goddesses are found around the world
Where was the Sun when you were born? While overly simplistic how does that sign fit you?
Effect on Earth
Solar Wind - Geo-magnetic Storms
500 B.C.E. Not a God?
The Sun warms our seas, stirs our atmosphere, generates our weather patterns, and gives energy to the growing green plants. They in turn provide the food and oxygen for life on Earth.
The Sun appears to rule our seasons - which rules our days, weeks, and months.
We know the Sun through its heat and light, but other less obvious aspects of the Sun affect Earth and society. For example, sunlight and darkness trigger the release of hormones in our brains.
Many cultures revered the Sun as a god. Ancient astronomy arose from mapping the path of the Sun through the heavens, to know when to sow and to harvest, and when to sacrifice to the gods so that the harvest should be good.
The solstices and equinoxes are important calendar points that come to us from the apparent position of the Sun in our sky as tracked by Stonehenge. While connected to the seasons, they are not the sole reason why we have seasons. The reasons for the seasons are linked to Earth's tilt and its position as it orbits the Sun. The term "equinox" comes from two Latin words aequus (equal) and nox (night). The Sun rises and sets exactly due east and due west on the equinoxes, and day and night are of equal length.
Copernicus, describing the Sun mythologically said, "In the middle of all sits the Sun on his throne. In this loveliest of temples, could we place the luminary in any more appropriate place so that he may light the whole simultaneously. Rightly is he called the Lamp, the Mind, the Ruler of the Universe".
Solar Wind - Geo-magnetic Storms
Solar Wind - Geo-magnetic Storms
Solar Wind - Geo-magnetic Storms
The solar wind is a continuous flow of hot plasma from the solar corona. The energy of the solar wind equals that of the Earth's magnetic field. This is important because solar wind particles change their direction, and flow around the Earth, forming a comet-like plasma vacuum -- the magnetosphere. The magnetosphere is Earth’s magnetic field which serves as a shield, redirecting the material around the planet so that it streams beyond it.
Steady streams and intense storms of atomic particles blow outward from the Sun, often encountering the atmospheres of our Earth and the other planets. Instruments carried on satellites reveal a wide variety of invisible phenomena - lines of magnetic force, atomic particles, electric currents, and a huge geo-corona of hydrogen atoms - surrounding the Earth. Each is as complex and changing as the visible face of the globe.
The size of the magnetosphere’s sophisticated but stable structure depends on solar wind pressure, and hence, on solar activity. The tail of the magnetosphere stretches for hundreds of thousands of kilometers in the direction opposite to the Sun. Its electric currents embrace the entire near-Earth space. These phenomena are referred to as magnetic storms.
This process impacts life on earth - even on the vastly distance outer planets.
Basic Solar Facts
Astrologically Leo the King
Solar Wind - Geo-magnetic Storms
Our Sun is the star at the center of our Solar System. It is a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma with internal convective motion that generates a magnetic field which holds our solar system together.
When we look at the Sun's visible light, we see it as stable, powerful, majestic, and life-giving. In the 1950's shortly after the launch of the first satellites, mankind discovered the solar wind - a continuous flow of hot plasma from the solar corona. From space we have seen the Sun in other forms of light - ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays - that never reach Earth's ground.
Because the Sun continues to 'burn' hydrogen into helium in its core, the core slowly collapses and heats up As the core shrinks -the core's gravity is less and the sun's outer layers get larger,.
The sun is growing. Then shrinking, and growing again. Every 11 years, the sun’s radius oscillates by up to two kilometers, shrinking when its magnetic activity is high and expanding again as the activity decreases.
It is a very gradual process, and in the last 4 billion years, the Sun has grown by less than 20 percent at most.
Astrologically Leo the King
Astrologically Leo the King
Astrologically Leo the King
Where the Cancer season is all about the dreamy silvery moon, the Leo season is about the energy of the sun: golden, bright, impossible to ignore.
The sign spans the 120th to 150th degree of longitude.
The Leo image is impossible to miss. Making an impression is Job #1 for Leos, and when you consider their personal magnetism, you see the job is quite easy. Leos strength of purpose allows them to accomplish a great deal. The fact that this horoscope sign is also creative makes their endeavors fun for them and everyone else.
Leo Dates: July 23 – August 22
Symbol: The Lion
Mode + Element: Fixed Fire
Ruling Planet: Sun
House: Fifth
Mantra: I Will
Tarot Card: Sun and Strength
Number: 1
The Sun's Glyph
All astrology's glyphs (symbols/pictorgraphs) are based on the circle, line, half circle, and the cross. The dot is the essence.
The sun’s glyph is made up of the circle symbolizing spirit. It is focused by the central point inside it. The symbol of the represents life, influence, and strength. It symbolizes energy, will, being clear, and self. The sun’s positive traits include being determined, focused, noble, and original. At the same time, the sun can represent negative traits of being arrogant, too stubborn, egotistical, and opinionated.
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy mainly as light and infrared radiation. It is by far the most important source of energy for life on Earth.
Solar Energy Field
The article below is the best writing I have read on the essence of positive solar energy. It is by Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn in The Lost Light, 1940.
The myth of the Sun-gods is the very heart's core of religion at its best. For the ancient’s myth was a valuable instrumentality of knowledge. It was an intellectual, even a spiritual, tool, by the aid of which truth and wisdom could at one and the same time both be concealed from the unworthy and expressed for the worthy. The myth would enhance spiritual truth as a drama reinforces moral situations.
The Jesus figure of the Gospels, whether he lived historically or not (and there is much question of it even among theologians), is another in the long list of the solar gods. They were figured by ancient poetic genius as embodiments of divine solar glory living among men.
What were Sun Gods symbolical of? They were representative characters, summing and epitomizing in themselves the spiritual history of the human individual in his march across the field of evolving life on earth. They were the types and models of the divine potentiality pictured as coming to realization in their careers. They were the mirror held up to men, in which could be seen the possibilities locked up in man's own nature. They were type-figures, delineating the divine life that was an ever-possible realization for any devoted man. They were the symbols of an ever-coming deity, a deity that came not once historically in Judea, but that came to ever-fuller expression and liberation in the inner heart of every son of man. The solar deities were the gods that ever came, that were described as coming not once upon a time, but continuously and regularly. Their radiant divinity might be consummated by any earnest person at any time or achieved piecemeal.
They were typed as ever-coming or coming regularly because they were symbolled by the sun in its annual course around the zodiac of twelve signs, and the regular periodicity of this natural symbol typified the ever-continuing character of their spiritual sunlight. The ancients, in a way and to a degree almost incomprehensible to the unstudied modern, had made of the sun's annual course round the heavens a faithful reproduction of the spiritual history of the divine spirit in man.
Furthermore, there are other Sun-god figures in the Old Testament under a wide variety of names. They are Samson (whose name means "solar"), David, Solomon, Saul (equals soul, or sol, the sun--Latin.), Abraham, Moses, Gideon, Jephtha and the like. Their actions identify them as solar representatives.
Now let us see what the conception of our divinity as a Sun-god in reality meant to the sages of old, and what it should mean to us. It meant that the divinity within us, our divine soul or Self, was itself the Sun-god, or solar deity. And what does this signify in concrete terms for us? Just this; that the god within us is constituted of the imperishable essence of solar light and energy! In short, we ourselves, in our higher nature, are solar gods in potentiality! Our highest nature is an incorruptible body composed of the glorious essence of the sun's energy! We are Sun-gods. Our immortal spirits within us are composed of the radiant substance of solar energy.
Have we lost ultimate link between science and religion? It is the truth before whose altar both science and religion can kneel at last and find themselves paying tribute to the same god,--the god of solar radiance. It is a sentence from the learned Proclus, last of the Great Platonists: "The light of the sun is the pure energy of intellect." Are we big enough to catch the mighty significance of that statement?
(Thank you Dr. Kuhn.)