carried out by Shamash, their god of the sun. Every morning, the scorpion-men of the East Mountain opened a gate and Shamash would emerge, cross the sky in his chariot, and at the end of the day enter the West Mountain gate and begin his travel through the Underworld, only to reemerge the next day and begin again.
The Aztecs believed the universe was composed of several cosmic eras with four different suns in four previous ages, each of which died at the end of its era. The fifth sun was named Tonatiuh, âHe Who Goes Forth Shining.â This was the first sun that had the ability to travel across the sky and it is his era in which we now live. Tonatiuh is, or was, responsible for the smooth functioning of the universe, and it was well known that if he weakened the world could come to an end, so he had to be fed, and the food that best sustained him turned out to be human flesh.
In yet another creation story, an obscure, wandering tribe of pastoralists in the deserts of the Middle East says simply that in the beginning an unnamable, abstracted entity created heaven and the earth. All was without form until this entity spoke aloud and said: âLet there be light â¦â
But before any of this, before the written word, at the very dawn of consciousness, the sun must already have been comprehended as the creator. Its image was scratched on cave walls, elongated stones were arranged upright in circular patterns to mark the annual circuit of this powerful entity. Fires were lit in early winter at the end of his apparent annual decline to assure his return, and finally he, or in some cultures she, was given a means of traveling across the sky, a boat, a chariot, a golden wagon pulled by fiery mules, and in some versions he was even supplied with an armed guard to help assure safe passage through the known dangers of the Underworld from west to east so that he could rise again the next morning.
And he was given also names: Surya, Sulis, Saule, Tsar Solniste, Sol, Sol Invictus, Sonne, Sun . And also food to assure his survival: fire, burnt offerings of goat, of oxen, and, periodically throughout history, of human flesh or blood.
Modern astronomy would in no way have disabused the ancients of their conviction that our closest star is a deity. The sun is, indeed, an all-powerful force, even in the eyes of seasoned astronomers. For some five billion years now it has seethed with hellish internal fires of 5,780 degrees Kelvin, a great heaving world of superheated gas that burns, as is now known, with a thunderous, deafening roar and is fueled by continuous nuclear fusion at its core, the whole of it overlain with explosions and exhalations of bursting, high-energy photons that collide with electrons and ions to create the heat and light upon which we earthlings survive. Immense reverse cataracts of convective currents flow upward from this fiery core, releasing explosions of fire at a million degrees centigrade before they cascade back down to the supercharged inner heart to be reborn. Vast solar flares in the form of electromagnetic radiation and energetic particles with temperatures that can soar to hundreds of millions of degrees shoot off into black space from this burning caldron; sudden upwellings of radiating material surge over its surface; periodically, double islands of cooler material some 40,000 miles wide sweep across its face in tandem; streaming particles of protons and electrons, the so-called solar winds, splay out into interstellar space at speeds of 1,800 miles a second. This yellow-colored, middle-sized star is a deathly furnace, and yet, from this hideous forge of ghastly fire, all life on earth is fashioned and sustained.
For all our science and craft, we are but parasites of the sun. The annual voyage of our own planet around this central star, the spinning earth, the resulting alternations of the four seasons, the turn of night and day, the great sweep of winds and weathers around the globe,