Crishna is made to say:
"I am the light in the Sun and Moon, far, far beyond the darkness. I am the brilliancy in flame, the radiance in all that's radiant, and the light of lights."[546:2]
In the Maha-bharata, Crishna, who having become the son of Aditi (the Dawn), is called Vishnu, another name for the Sun.[546:3] The demon Putana assaults the child Crishna, which identifies him with Hercules, the Sun-god of the Greeks.[546:4] In his Solar character he must again be the slayer of the Dragon or Black-snake Kulnika, the "Old Serpent" with the thousand heads.[546:5] Crishna's amours with the maidens makes him like Indra, Phoibus, Hercules, Samson, Alpheios, Paris and other Sun-gods. This is the hot and fiery Sun greeting the moon and the dew, or the Sun with his brides the Stars.[546:6]
Moore, in his Hindu Pantheon, observes:
"Although all the Hindu deities partake more or less remotely of the nature and character of Surya, or the Sun, and all more or less directly radiate from, or merge in, him, yet no one is, I think, so intimately identified with him as Vishnu; whether considered in his own person, or in the character of his most glorious Avatara of Crishna."
The ancient religion of Egypt, like that of Hindostan, was founded on astronomy, and eminently metaphysical in its character. The Egyptian priests were far advanced in the science of astronomy. They made astronomy their peculiar study. They knew the figure of the earth, and how to calculate solar and lunar eclipses. From very ancient time, they had observed the order and movement of the stars, and recorded them with the utmost care. Ramses the Great, generally called Sesostris, is supposed to have reigned one thousand five hundred years before the Christian era, about coeval with Moses, or a century later. In the tomb of this monarch was found a large massive circle of wrought gold, divided into three hundred and sixty-five degrees, and each division marked the rising and setting of the stars for each day.[547:1] This fact proves how early they were advanced in astronomy. In their great theories of mutual dependence between all things in the universe was included a belief in some mysterious relation between the Spirits of the Stars and human souls, so that the destiny of mortals was regulated by the motions of the heavenly bodies. This was the origin of the famous system of Astrology. From the conjunction of planets at the hour of birth, they prophesied what would be the temperament of an infant, what life he would live, and what death he would die. Diodorus, who wrote in the century preceding Christ Jesus, says:
"They frequently foretell with the greatest accuracy what is about to happen to mankind; showing the failure or abundance of crops, and the epidemic diseases about to befall men or cattle. Earthquakes, deluges, rising of comets, and all those phenomena, the knowledge of which appears impossible to common comprehensions, they foresee by means of their long continued observation."
P. Le Page Renouf, who is probably the best authority on the religion of ancient Egypt which can be produced, says, in his Hibbert Lectures:[547:2]
"The Lectures on the Science of Language, delivered nearly twenty years ago by Prof. Max Müller, have, I trust, made us fully understand how, among the Indo-European races, the names of the Sun, of Sunrise and Sunset, and of other such phenomena, come to be talked of and considered as personages, of whom wondrous legends have been told. Egyptian mythology not merely admits, but imperatively demands, the same explanation. And this becomes the more evident when we consider the question how these mythical personages came to be invested with the attributes of divinity by men who, like the Egyptians, had so lively a sense of the divine."