The Sun is God

Abstract

The belief that precession of the equinoxes – the slow shift of the stars against the sun's position at the vernal equinox – was well known in ancient times is a staple of modern 'alternative' archaeology. It underpins Norman Lockyer's early archaeoastronomy in the 1890s and 1910s, C. G. Jung's theories on early Christianity in the 1950s, Georgio di Santillana and Hertha von Deschend's ‘Hamlet’s Mill’ the 1960s, and best sellers by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval in the 1990s. However, the idea can be traced back to radical antiChristian Enlightenment thinkers at the end of the eighteenth century, such as Jean Sylvain Bailly (1736–1793), who expounded his arguments on the astronomical origin of religious forms in two major works, ‘Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne’ (1775) and ‘Traité de l’astronomie indienne et orientale’ (1787). Charles François Dupuis extended the debate in 1781 in his ‘Mémoire sur l’origine des constellations, et sur l’explication de la fable par le moyen de l’astronomie’ (1742–1809) by attempting to establish the astronomical origins of mythology, while setting out a detailed argument that the twelve signs of the zodiac originated as an allegory of the seasonal cycle. The radicals' purpose was to undermine Christianity's claim to unique truth by demonstrating that it shared a common origin with all other religions, that the first religion was sun worship, that all gods, including Christ, were essentially solar, and that the changing forms of deities and religious ritual could be observed in the shift of constellations in relation to the vernal equinox. However, what was, to anti-clericalist free thinkers, a means of demonstrating religion's essential meaninglessness became, in the hands of the Romantics, a way of demonstrating that all religions were meaningful. Moved by such feelings, together with the belief that all religions shared a solar origin, the English painter Turner is reputed to have uttered the words 'the Sun is God' on his deathbed. Two hundred years later, the belief in the ancient knowledge of precession is still capable of exciting great passion.