"I am the eye with which the Universe
Beholds itself and knows itself divine."
The various sun-gods would be passed in review, Ra of the Egyptians, Apollo of the Greeks, and the various forms of sun-worship, from the most primitive times down through the Persian religion, that of the Peruvians, the "children of the sun," to that of the modern Parsees—and that of the unnamed multitudes who in substance have echoed the words which Moore puts into the mouths of the Hyperboreans:
"To the Sun-god all our hearts and lyres
By day, by night belong;
And the breath we draw from his living fires
We give him back in song."
But the subject is too great and is deserving of special treatment. Certain of the more essential conceptions involved will come before us in the chapter on light. Mirabeau on his death-bed would seem to have put the whole matter in the briefest space—"Si ce n'est pas là Dieu, c'est du moins son cousin-german." Turner, on his deathbed, was briefer and bolder still—"The sun is God." Knowing the man and knowing his work, we can understand what he meant. Put it the other way round, we have the same, and yet the fuller truth—"the Lord God is a Sun."
CHAPTER XXIX
LIGHT AND DARKNESS
Robert Fludd, the English Rosicrucian, who died in 1637, wrote a treatise on the universe, in which he taught that man was a microcosm of the macrocosm, and that light and darkness are the two great principles of existence, the one of animate, the other of inanimate nature. He held that soul and life are every day shed from the sun upon all objects open to his beams. For such doctrines as these he was denounced as practically an atheist! Fortunately the times have changed, though we have still much to learn in the way of rational tolerance and sympathetic receptivity.
Who shall say how old is this idea of two distinct, and generally opposing principles, the light and the dark? The Babylonian cosmology carries us a long way back, but not to the beginning of such mystical conceptions. For in that cosmology Marduk is a well-developed god of light, with Tiâmat as his antithesis, the goddess of the dark, and the nature and course of the deadly contest between them has taken form in a well-defined series of myths.
One of the most obvious emotional effects of darkness is to inspire fear, and there are few who have not in some degree and on some occasions experienced a sense of discomfort in the dark—a chill, or a shrinking, which in certain cases, especially with children, may amount to terror. It is possible that we have here, as is often contended, an organic reminiscence of the experience of our remote ancestors. Certainly it is not difficult for us to sympathise with the primitive dread of darkness, nor to understand the transition to the conception of darkness as a hostile power. But there is also an element which may be regarded as simply personal and individual—a natural anticipation of unknown dangers, and a sense of helplessness should the apprehensions be realised. There is, moreover, an element of a still more directly mystical character, that which Everett describes as a feeling that in the darkness the familiar world is swept away and that we are touching the limits of the natural. Hence the chill of the unknown and supernatural.