SUN WORSHIP SPINDEN 461 



passed from the evening bark to the morning bark by two female 

 divinities — perhaps at the moment of midnight on the underworld 

 river. Another picture shows the sun's disk raining a golden blessing 

 on the soul of Taho which takes the form of a bird. 



From the cultural foci of Mesopotamia and Egypt influences went 

 north and east.^ Evidences of solar worship in northern Europe 

 have been left in the magnificent memorial of Stonehenge, in the sun 

 chariot of Trundliolm with its gilded disk and its horse mounted 

 over six wheels like a Christmas toy, in the clay cult-wagon of 

 Duplaj in Yugoslavia drawn by three ducks with a roughly fashioned 

 sun god standing over his symbol as he drives. Lesser evidences of 

 sun worship during the Bronze and Iron Ages are seen in Swedish 

 rock carvings with suns held aloft in boats, not to mention the 

 numerous amulets that represent the sun as a wheel, or rising above 

 a boat, etc. The designs become richer as we draw near Greece and 

 come under Mycenaean and Cycladic art; now there are suns and 

 swastikas, suns and ducks, suns and funeral processions. 



THE SUN AS A RADIANT PERSONALITY 



We come at last to a sun god who truly is a radiant personality — a 

 god in human form with a ring of light about his head. The 

 Egyptians, as we have seen, balanced a sun disk on the heads of 

 various part-animal, part-human sun gods. Then the inspired Ikhe- 

 naton invented an elevated sun disk with numerous pendant rays end- 

 ing in small human hands. At this point the humanization of the 

 sun god stopped in Egypt until the late vogue of Amun. In Mesopo- 

 tamia, as we have also seen, the gods enter the dynastic period essen- 

 tially in human guise. Shamash, the sun god, may have the flaming 

 orb above or before him or he may be pictured with rays of light 

 streaming upward from his shoulders. In late Assyrian representa- 

 tions he is sometimes shown with a halo around the upper part of his 

 body, an especially clean example dating from the reign of Asur- 

 banipal (668-626 B. C). 



But I think, for all this, we should credit the Greeks with essential 

 refinements that produced the halo as a living convention in religious 

 art. References to Helios go back to Homer, but on a black-figured 

 Grecian vase (circa 600 B. C.) the charioteer is identified as Helios 

 by an overhead disk. Next he is pictured in all splendor on a famous 

 red-figured vase of the British Museum, with spiked rays of light 

 shooting out from his head. We may imagine that the Helios of the 

 Parthenon pediment was of this general style. The island of Rhodes 

 was sacred to Helios and its coins before 304 B. C. show the god with 

 streaming locks like Apollo. After that date he wears his spiked halo. 



• The writer wishes to acknowledge important help from John D. Cooney and Mrs. 

 Elizabeth Riefstahl, of the Brooklyn Museum staff, in the bandling of classical data. 



