Sun gods

This text belongs to a set of three, all related to the sun. I have written them simultaneously in the same period. There is no particular order to them. This is the second one to be published.

Mosaic of Christ portayed as Sol Invictus, on the ceiling of the tomb of the Julii, located under St. Peter's Basilica. Dated to the 3rd century CE

Why did we invent Gods when there is already the sun burning high up in the sky?

A history in which the sun and sun depictions have appeared often is that of religion. The list of sun gods found throughout history in different cultures around the globe is huge, so much so that the creation of sun gods could easily appear as something universal in human societies. The idea that the sun must have influenced the stories of divinity and deities is not uncommon, nor is the desire to draw from this a universal conclusion about humans and their culture. Still today, people are producing (conspiracy-ish) theories that reduce religious symbols of major traditions, like Christianity, to a supposedly original meaning of sun worship.

While such theories are not taken serious by most academic scholars today, after the growing importance of comparative studies in history and philology during the intellectual rule of Romanticism, which roughly lasted untill the 1850’s, the study of myth in the third quarter of the 19th century was very seriously dominated by the ‘solar mythology’ of Friedrich Max Müller, originally a leading Sanscrit scholar. Müller was very important for a movement and approach that is known as comparative mythology: the systematic comparison of mythical stories from different cultures with the goal of finding underlying patterns and themes in order to draw out shared and perhaps even universal symbolic structures. Following the idea from comparative philology that there had been a common Indo-European language lying behind Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Zend, Gothic, and Celtic, Müller believed that there had also been a small community in Asia – the Aryans – that spoke this language, and that their thought and culture could be revealed through the Vedas. He argued that these Aryans were fascinated with the sun, the sunrise, and sunset, and that the majority of the words from their language had to do with solar events. In Lectures on the Science of Language (1869), he writes: “I look upon the sunrise and sunset, on the daily return of day and night, on the battle between light and darkness, on the whole solar drama in all its details . . . as the principal subject of early mythology”. Müller also thought that this Aryan language was not yet capable of a high level of abstraction, and that therefore their language was inherently metaphorical (and thus mythical). As the original Aryan language split into different languages and cultures, the original reference of the remaining old words and phrases to the sun and its movements, according to Müller, got forgotten. These words were then later explained by new made-up stories, thereby creating myths upon myths, resulting in complex mythical stories. Müller famously called this the ‘disease of language’, and even argued that we humans, by means of language, are always in the process of creating myths, and that we should free ourselves from these myths by means of comparative philology.

Müller’s solar mythology comes down to the idea that all (Indo-European) myths could be traced back to different locutions expressing the sunset or sunrise. In fact, for Müller, when we today tell someone ‘good morning’, we are engaging in a solar myth. Influenced by Müller, other scholars like Cox, Kuhn, Schwartz, and Peller crafted similar reductions of myth and folklore to natural phenomena, like thunderstorms or the sky. Today such theories are known to be inaccurate, and are even approached with ridicule and considered to be absurd. In The Folktale (1946), Stith Thompson even wrote that these ‘students of comparative mythology’ “built up a structure so fantastic that the modern reader who ventures to examine it begins to doubt his own sanity”. However, in his own time, Müller’s approach was by far most widely held. When he died in 1900, Queen Victoria (Müller left Germany at 26 years old and had been living in England eversince) even sent a personal telegram of sympathy to his widow, and condolences were added by royalty from around the world. From an intellectual perspective, the downfall of Müller’s solar mythology took a long running debate in the late 1880’s and 1890’s with the Scottish writer and scholar Andrew Lang, whose evolutionary anthropology did not last long into the 20th century either. Richard Chase, in his book Quest for Myth (1949) summarized three principle criticisms against Müller’s comparative mythology, namely first that “It is essentially a theory of degeneration”, as “it is modeled on the traditional Christian historiography”. This basically means that it presupposes that there has been in the past a period or moment of truth, and that we are now living in a distorted time in which the truth is lacking. Second, Müller would focus too much on language, meaning etymology, and not take into account other types of developments, like cultural, geographical, or political ones. And lastly, he gave too much attention to the origin of myths and too little to their historical developments.

It seems to me that these three criticisms towards Müller’s solar mythology basically express a single error: it reduces the complexity of the history and culture of mythological stories to natural phenomena. This is interesting, since it shows that not only myths reduce reality – nature – to a (relatively simple) story, but also scholarship like this can easily do so. The history of the comparative mythologists in the 19th century is a demonstration of overlooking the fact that ‘nature’ (or ‘sun’) is also a mental and linguistic category, a concept, an idea, and that therefore one can just as easily reduce ‘culture’ to ‘nature’ as vice versa. I think it would even be accurate to say then that Müller was right insofar he believed that, as he expresses clearly in On the Philosophy of Mythology (1871)

Mythology, in the highest sense, is the power exercized by language on thought in every possible sphere of mental activity; and I do not hesitate to call the whole history of Philosophy, from Thales to Hegel, an uninterrupted battle against mythology, a constant protest of thought against language.

However, what he missed is that his own theory of solar mythology is a case that only proves this point: Müller’s theory of solar mythology is itself mythical. The reduction of myths to nature or of nature to myths are in fact not two qualitatively different processes. Rather, it would be more accurate to speak of two directions of a single movement, a tendency of nature to render itself mythical; myths are natural and nature is mythical.

Let us overthink a sun god that is both natural and mythical, that is decisive yet wholly without intention, that embodies this single tendency of being.

Sources:

• Chase, R. (1949). Quest for Myth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

• Dorson, R. M. (1955). The Eclipse of Solar Mythology. The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 68, No. 270, 393-416.

• Doty, W. G. (2000). Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals. Tuscaloose and London: The University of Alabama Press.

• Feldman, B., & Richardson, R. D. (1972). The Risse of Modern Mythology: 1680-1860. London: Indiana University Press.

• Littleton, C. (1966). The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological Assesment of the Theories of Georges Dumézil. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.