Symbols and Signs of the Sun

Signs & Symbols of the Sun
According to Copernicus in "De revolutionibus orbis", Hermes Trismegistus called the sun a visible god - the alchemists equated the sun with gold, the purest of metals, which represented the perfection of all matter, material and spiritual. The sun has been an important object of worship throughout the ages and in various cultures. We will be offering you images based on "Signs & Symbols of the Sun" by Elizabeth S. Helfman, New York: The Seabury Press, 1974, a book which presents images of the sun from the Sumerians and the Egyptians to the Indians and Inuit.

A temple dedicated to the Indian sun god Surya at Konarak, in the province of Orissa, was built in the shape of a giant sun chariot with twelve great pairs of stone wheels, each ten feet across. Each wheel is covered with minute circular carvings of flowers, rosettes and leaves. The Buddhists in India made the sun wheel their own wheel of law, formed as they said ‘’of a thousand spokes darting out a thousand rays.’’ In time this wheel was patterned with just eight spokes, representing the eightfold path of just behaviour that Buddhists said people should follow. Although the wheel of the law was no longer thought of as a sun wheel, it is nevertheless rooted in this symbolism.

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