The sun represents the male principle in most traditions, but was female in Germany and Japan and for many tribes in the Celtic world, Africa, Native America, Oceania and New Zealand. It was an imperial yang emblem in China but was never seen as supreme in the Chinese pantheon of gods. Like a number of other peoples, the Chinese symbolized the destructive aspects of solar power in a myth about how multiple suns made the world too hot. The ten original suns refused to share their solar duties on a rota basis and entered the sky together. The divine archer Yi had then to kill nine of them to restore cosmic balance. A distinctive solar emblem in China is a red disk with a three-legged black raven or crow symbolizing the three phases of the sun (rising, zenith, setting).
The most elaborate sun cults were those of Peru, Mexico and Egypt. Emphasizing the Inca claim to be "children of the sun", the Peruvian sun deity was depicted in human form with a disk-like golden face. In the Aztec cult of the Fifth Sun, the war god Huitzilopochtli required continuing human sacrifices to sustain the strength of the sun as guardian of the contemporary era. This charmless story, masking Aztec blood lust, is a pole away from the Nordic legend of the death of the handsome young Nordic god of light, Balder, but is one of countless myths and rites based on the symbolic theme of the sun's eclipse, nightly disappearances or seasonally waxing and waning power. Thus Egyptian solar myth depicts the barque of the sun travelling each .night through underworld perils before emerging triumphantly from the mouth of a serpent each morning. In a farcical treatment of the theme, the Japanese sun-goddess Amaterasu of hides herself in a cave and has to be tricked to come out again. Personifications of the sun are multiple in some cultures, as in Egypt where Khepri is the scarab god of the rising sun, Horus the eye of day, Ra the zenith and Osiris the setting sun. In Greece, Helios personified the sun, whereas the Roman Sol was desultorily displaced by Apollo, representing the brilliance of its light.
Alternatively, the sun is the son of the supreme god or symbolizes his vision or radiant love. It was the eye of Zeus in Greece, of Odin in Scandinavia, of Ahura Mazda (alter natively called Ormuzd) in Iran, of Varuna in India and of Allah to Muhammad. It was the light of the Buddha, of the Great Spirit in Native North America, of God the Father in Christianity. Christ, the Sun of Righteousness, replaced Mithras in the Roman Empire as a resurrection symbol of the Unconquered Sun.
In iconography the sun is represented by a vast range of emblems. These include the gold disk, the rayed or winged disk (most common in the Middle East), the half-disk with rays (Nihon, meaning "sun-source", the emblem of Japan), the circle with central point (a symbol of the conscious self in astrology), and a star, spiral, ring, wheel, swastika (or other turning cross forms), heart, rosette, lotus, sun-flower and chrysanthemum. It could be further represented by bronze, gold, yellow, red, diamond, ruby, topaz, a winged or feathered serpent, an eagle or an eagle with a serpent, or a falcon, phoenix, swan, lion, ram, cock or bull. Golden or white horses or swans draw the solar chariot. The "black sun" was an alchemical symbol of unworked primal matter.
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