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saying,When thou Jilibeambaertje risest, I too rise from my bed!' in the evening, 'When thou Jilibeambaertje sinkest down, I too get me to rest!' The woman brought this as a proof of her assertion that even among the Samoyeds they said their morning and evening prayers, but she added with pity that there were also among them wild people who never sent up a prayer to God." Mongol hordes may still be met with whose shamans invoke the Sun, and throw milk up into the air as an offering to him, while the Karagas Tatars would bring to him as a sacrifice the head and heart of bear or stag. Tunguz, Ostyaks, Woguls, worship him in a character blending with that of their highest deity and Heaven-god; while among the Lapps, Baiwe the Sun, though a mighty deity, stood in rank below Tiermes the Thunder-god, and the great celestial ruler who had come to bear the Norwegian name of Storjunkare.1

In direct personal nature-worship like that of Siberian nomades of our day, the solar cultus of the ancient pastoral Aryans had its source. The Vedic bards sing of the great god Surya, knower of beings, the all-revealer before whom the stars depart with the nights like thieves. We approach Surya (they say) shining god among the gods, light most glorious. He shines on the eight regions, the three worlds, the seven rivers; the golden-handed Savitar, all-seeing, goes between heaven and earth. To him they pray, “On thy ancient paths, O Savitar, dustless, well made, in the air, on those good-going paths this day preserve us and bless us, O God!" Modern Hinduism is full of the ancient Sun-worship, in offerings and prostrations, in daily rite and appointed festival, and it is Savitar the Sun who is invoked in the "gayatri," the time-honoured formula repeated day by day since long-past ages by every Brahman: "Tat Savitur varenyam blargo devasya dhimahi, dhiyo yo nah prakodayât.-Let us meditate on the desirable

1 Castrén, 'Finn Myth.' pp. 16, 51, etc. Meiners, 1. c. Georgi, 'Reise im Russ. Reich.' vol. i. pp. 275, 317. Klemm, 'Cultur-Geschichte,' vol. iii. p. 87. Sun-Worship in Japan, Siebold, Nippon,' part. v. p. 9. For further evidence as to savage and barbaric worship of the Sun as Supreme Deity, see chap. xvii.

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light of the divine Sun; may he rouse our minds!" Every morning the Brahman worships the sun, standing on one foot and resting the other against his ankle or heel, looking towards the east, holding his hands open before him in a hollow form, and repeating to himself these prayers: "The rays of light announce the splendid fiery sun, beautifully rising to illumine the universe."-" He rises, wonderful, the eye of the sun, of water, and of fire, collective power of gods; he fills heaven, earth, and sky with his luminous net; he is the soul of all that is fixed or locomotive."-" That eye, supremely beneficial, rises pure from the east; may we see him a hundred years; may we live a hundred years; may we hear a hundred years."-" May we, preserved by the divine power, contemplating heaven above the region of darkness, approach the deity, most splendid of luminaries!" A Vedic celestial deity, Mitra the Friend, came to be developed in the Persian religion into that great ruling divinity of light, the victorious Mithra, lord of life and head of all created beings. The ancient Persian Mihr-Yasht invokes him in the character of the dawning sun-light, Mithra with wide pastures, whom the lords of the regions praise at early dawn, who as the first heavenly Yazata rises over Hara before the sun, the immortal with swift steeds, who first with golden form seizes the fair summits, then surrounds the whole Aryan region. Mithra came to be regarded as the very Sun, as where Bacchus addresses the Tyrian Bel, “ εἴτε σὺ Μίθρης, Ηέλιος Βαβυλῶνος.” His worship spread from the East across the Roman empire, and in Europe he takes rank among the great solar gods absolutely identified. with the personal Sun, as in this inscription on a Roman altar dating from Trajan's time-" Deo Soli Mithra." 2

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1 'Rig-Veda,' i. 35, 50; iii. 62, 10. Max Müller, 'Lectures,' 2nd Ser. pp. 378, 411; 'Chips,' vol. i. p. 19. Colebrooke, 'Essays,' vol. i. pp. 30, 133 Ward, Hindoos,' vol. ii. p. 42.

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2 Khordah-Avesta,' xxvi. in Avesta tr. by Spiegel, vol. iii. See Cox. Mythology of Aryan Nations,' vol. i. p. 334, vol. ii. p. 354. Strabo, xv. 3, 13. Nonnus, xl. 400. Movers, 'Phönizier,' vol. i. p. 180: "Hi Mi6px ἀνικήτα;” “Διος ἀνικήτου Ηλίου.”

The earlier Sun-worship of Europe, upon which this new Oriental variety was intruded, in certain of its developments shows the same clear personality. The Greek Helios, to whom horses were sacrificed on the mountain-top of Taugetos, was that same personal Sun to whom Sokrates, when he had staid rapt in thought till daybreak, offered a prayer before he departed (ἔπειτ' ἄχετ ̓ ἀπιὼν προσευξάμενος τῷ ἡλιῳ).1 Cæsar devotes to the German theology of his time three lines of his Commentaries. They reckon in the number of the gods, he says, those only whom they perceive and whose benefits they openly enjoy, Sun and Vulcan and Moon, the rest they know not even by report. It is true that Caesar's short summary does no justice to the real number and quality of the deities of the German pantheon, yet his forcible description of nature-worship in its most primitive stage may probably be true of the direct adoration of the sun and moon, and possibly of fire. On the other hand, European sun-worship leads into the most perplexing problems of mythology. Well might Cicero exclaim, “How many suns are set forth by the theologians!" The modern student who shall undertake to discriminate among 'the Sun-gods of European lands, to separate the solar and non-solar elements of the Greek Apollo and Herakles, or the Slavonic Perun and Swatowit, has a task before him complicate with that all but hopeless difficulty which besets the study of myth, the moment that the clue of direct comparison with nature falls away.

The religion of ancient Egypt is one of which we know much, yet little-much of its temples, rites, names of deities, liturgical formulas, but little of the esoteric religious ideas which lay hidden within these outer manifestations. Yet it is clear that central solar conceptions as it 1 Plat. Sympos. xxxvi. See Welcker, Griech. Gotterlehre,' vol. i. pp. 400,

412.

2 Cæsar de Bello Gallico, vi. 21: "Deorum numero eos solos ducunt, quos cernunt et quorum aperte opibus juvantur, Solem et Vulcanum et Lunam, reliquos ne fama quidem acceperunt."

3 Cicero de Natura Deorum, iii. 21.

were radiate through the Egyptian theology. Ra who traverses in his boat the upper and lower regions of the universe, is the Sun himself in plain cosmic personality. And to take two obvious instances of solar characters in other deities, Osiris the manifester of good and truth, whe dies by the powers of darkness and becomes judge of the dead in the west-land of Amenti, is solar in his divine nature, as is also Har-p-chroti (Harpokrates) the new-born Sun of the winter solstice. In the religions of the Semitic race, the place of the Sun is marked through a long range of centuries. The warning to the Israelites lest they should worship and serve sun, moon, and stars, and the mention of Josiah taking away the horses that the Kings of Judah had given to the sun, and burning the chariots of the sun with fire, agree perfectly with the recognition in Palmyra of the Lord Sun, Baal-Shemesh, and with the identification of the Assyrian Bel and the Tyrian Baal with the Sun. Syrian religion, like Persian, introduced a new phase of Sun-worship, into Rome, the cultus of Elagabal, and the vile priest-emperor who bore this divine name made it more intelligible to classic ears as Heliogabalus. Eusebius is a late writer as regards Semitic religion, but with such facts as these before us we need not withhold our confidence from him when he describes the Phoenicians and Egyptians as holding Sun, Moon, and Stars to be gods, sole causes of the generation and destruction of all things.

The widely spread and deeply rooted religion of the Sun naturally offered strenuous resistance to the invasion of Christianity, and it was one of the great signs of the religious change of the civilized world when Constantine, that ardent votary of the Sun, abandoned the faith of Apollo for that of Christ. Amalgamation even proved possible be

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1 See Bunsen, Egypt's Place in Univ. Hist. ;' Wilkinson, Ancient Egyp tians,' etc.

2 Deut. iv. 19. xvii. 3; II Kings xxiii. 11.

3 Mövers, Phönizier,' vol. i. pp. 162, 180, etc. Lamprid. Heliogabal. i. 4 Euseb. Præparat. Evang. i. 6.

tween the doctrines of Sabæism and Christianity, and in and near Armenia a sect of Sun-worshippers have lasted on into modern times under the profession of Jacobite Christians; a parallel case within the limits of Mohammedanism being that of Beduin Arabs who still continue the old adoration of the rising sun, in spite of the Prophet's expressed command not to bow before the sun or moon, and in spite of the good Moslem's dictum, that "the sun rises between the devil's horns." Actual worship of the sun in Christendom soon shrank to the stage of survival. In Lucian's time the Greeks kissed their hands as an act of worship to the rising sun; and Tertullian had still to complain of many Christians that with an affectation of adoring the heavenly bodies they would move their lips toward the sunrise (Sed et plerique vestrum affectatione aliquando et cœlestia adorandi ad solis ortum labia vibratis). In the 5th century, Leo the Great complains of certain Christians who, before entering the Basilica of St. Peter, or from the top of a hill, would turn and bow to the rising sun; this comes, he says, partly of ignorance and partly of the spirit of paganism.* To this day, in the Upper Palatinate, the peasant takes off his hat to the rising sun; and in Pomerania, the fever stricken patient is to pray thrice turning toward the sun at sunrise, "Dear Sun, come soon down, and take the seventy-seven fevers from me. In the name of God the Father, etc."5

For the most part, the ancient rites of solar worship are represented in modern Christendom in two ways; by the ceremonies connected with turning to the east, of which an account is given in an ensuing chapter under the heading of Orientation; and in the continuance of the great sun

1 Neander, 'Church History,' vol. vi. p. 341. Carsten Niebuhr, 'Reisebeschr.' vol. ii. p. 396.

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2 Palgrave, Arabia,' vol. i. p. 9; vol. ii. p. 258. See Koran, xli. 37. 3 Tertullian. Apolog, adv. Gentes, xvi. See Lucian de Saltat. xvii.; compare Job xxxi. 26.

4 Leo. I. Serm. viii. in Natal. Dom.

5 Wuftke, Volksaberglaube,' p. 150.

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