sun worship. Deification and adoration of the sun occurred primarily in agrarian societies. When man became a farmer, and thus dependent upon daily and seasonal changes of weather, he often turned to worship the great force that regulated these changes—the light and heat of the sun. The worship of the sun, although not peculiar to any one time or place, received its greatest prominence in ancient Egypt. There, the daily birth, journey, and death of the sun was the dominating feature of life. One of the most important gods of Egyptian religion was Ra, the sun-god, who was considered the first king of Egypt. The pharaoh, said to be the son of Ra, was the sun-god's representative on earth. In later Egyptian religion, under the rule of Ikhnaton, the sun-god Aton gained complete supremacy in what was Egypt's only monotheistic period. In Mesopotamia, where sun worship was also very important, the sun-god Shamash was a major deity and was equated with justice. In Greece there were two sun deities, Apollo and Helios, although there was no institutionalized form of sun worship. The influence of the sun in religious belief also appears in Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, Roman religion, Hinduism, Buddhism, and among the Druids of England, the Aztecs of Mexico, the Incas of Peru, and many Native Americans.

Veneration of the sun or its representation as a deity. It appears in several early cultures, notably in ancient Egypt, Indo-Europe, and Mesoamerica, where urban civilizations were combined with a strong ideology of sacred kingship, in which kings ruled by the power of the sun and claimed descent from it. The imagery of the sun as the ruler of both the upper and the lower world, which he visits daily, was prominent. Sun heroes and deities also figure in many mythologies, including Indo-Iranian, Greco-Roman, and Scandinavian. In late Roman history, sun worship was of such importance that it was later called “solar monotheism.” Seealso Amaterasu, Re, Shamash, Sol, Surya, Tonatiuh.

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