At the naming of the new-born infant in ancient Mexico, the mother thus addressed the Sun and the Earth: "Thou Sun, Father of all that live, and thou Earth, our Mother, take ye this child, and guard it as your son." A common affirmation with them was: "By the life of the Sun, and of our Lady, the Earth" (529. 97).
Many primitive tribes have the custom of holding the newborn child up to the sun.
Not a few races and peoples have called themselves "children of the sun." The first of the Incas of Peru—a male and a female—were children of the Sun "our Father," who, "seeing the pitiable condition of mankind, was moved to compassion, and sent to them, from Heaven, two of his children, a son and a daughter, to teach them how to do him honour, and pay him divine worship "; they were also instructed by the sun in all the needful arts of life, which they taught to men (529. 102). When the "children of the Sun" died, they were said to be "called to the home of the Sun, their Father" (100. 479).
The Comanche Indians, who worship the sun with dances and other rites, call him taab-apa, "Father Sun," and the Sarcees speak of the sun as "Our Father," and of the earth as "Our Mother" (412. 122, 72).
With the Piute Indians "the sun is the father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief. The moon is his wife, and the stars are their children. The sun eats his children whenever he can catch them. They fall before him, and are all the time afraid when he is passing through the heavens. When he (their father) appears in the morning, you see all the stars, his children, fly out of sight,—go away back into the blue of the above,—and they do not wake to be seen again until he, their father, is about going to his bed" (485. I. 130).
Dr. Eastman says of the Sioux Indians: "The sun was regarded as the father, and the earth as the mother, of all things that live and grow; but, as they had been married a long time and had become the parents of many generations, they were called the great-grandparents" (518 (1894). 89).
Widespread over the earth has been, and still is, the worship of the sun; some mythologists, indeed, would go too far and explain almost every feature of savage and barbarous religion as a sun-myth or as smacking of heliolatry.
Imagery and figurative language borrowed from the consideration of the aspect and functions of the great orb of day have found their way into and beautified the religious thought of every modern Christian community. The words of the poet Thomson:
"Prime cheerer light!
Of all material beings first and best!
Efflux divine! Nature's resplendent robe!
Without whose vesting beauty all were wrapt
In unessential gloom; and thou, O Sun!
Soul of surrounding worlds! in whom best seen
Shines out thy Maker!"
find briefer expression in the simple speech of the dying Turner: "The sun is God."