Beyond its practical importance, the sun is a provider of meaning. Its recurrent and plural presence in many mythologies, religions, traditions and popular cultures testifies to its transcendence. It has been venerated as a paradoxical source of power, equality, regeneration and unity.
This celestial body has been claimed by the rulers of many empires as an emblem of legitimation and a basis of uncontested power – even turning black and endowed with twelve rays. Thus, of divine descent, the sun grants rulers, in the dazzled eyes of all, an infinite power.
Conversely, in many utopias it embodies equality: doesn’t each of us have our place under the sun? Heralding brighter tomorrows, it is often praised by various actors engaged in resistance movements against oppression. The symbolic relationship between the sun and power persists today. Political movements of all stripes incorporate the sun into their names and slogans to suggest change, progress, optimism, reliability, renewal, rebirth, universality or purity. This solar symbolism seems to have crystallised in the Renaissance and Enlightenment in the form of a constructed dualism with the moon – masculine/feminine, light/darkness, reason/belief, etc. – so much so that with the positivist modernity and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century, it became associated with technological power. This power has reached the point where we now imagine we could live without the sun!
