Were brute unlovely mass, inert, and dead,
And not, as now, the green abodes of life!
As the sun is the greatest visible glory in the natural world, so it is selected by the pen of Divine inspiration as the brightest emblem of the Supreme Being—“The Lord God is a sun.” This great luminary has been considered by the Heathen as the representative of the Deity, and as such received religious adoration. According to Mr. Bryant’s system of Ancient Mythology, the worship of fire is nearly as old as the flood, having been propagated by the posterity of Ham, in Egypt, who called themselves Ammonians, and carried this worship with them wherever they went, erecting their puratheia, or fire-temples, in all their settlements. It is stated, that fire was the primitive, or at least the principal object of idolatrous worship, and common to all idolaters from the first apostasy at Babel. For the original institution of this sacred fire among the Chaldeans, we must go back to Nimrod, concerning whom the Alexandrian Chronicon asserts, that “the Assyrians called Nimrod, Ninus; this man taught the Assyrians to worship fire.” From the Greeks we may trace it backwards to the Ur of the Chaldeans; on which the learned Classius remarks, that “Ur is the name of a city wherein the sacred fire was conserved and worshipped by the Chaldeans, whence it was called Ur, which otherwise signifies fire.” Plutarch confesses that the Romans, in the days of Numa, borrowed their worship of fire from the Greeks at Athens and Delphi. Numa built a temple of an orbicular form, to represent, as Plutarch interprets, the system of the heavens; which temple was the conservatory of a holy and perpetual fire, kindled at first by the reflections of the sun-beams, and placed in the centre of the building; the astronomy of that early period placing the sun in the centre of the world. Fire has such an affinity to light, that the same word has sometimes comprehended them both. The Ur of the Chaldeans was fire; the Horus of the Egyptians was light: and the reason is plain, because fire and light are united at the body of the sun, and by him diffused over the world. If, therefore, we consider fire as called into action by the sun, and bear in mind that the ancient Pythagoreans used the same term ΠΥΡ to denote both fire and the sun,[116] we shall get at the root of most of the heathen mythologic divinity.
So universal was the attachment to this fire, that Macrobius undertook to reduce the names of all the heathen deities to the one object of the sun and its attributes. He says, “The Egyptians consecrated a lion in that part of the heavens where the heat of the sun is most powerful, because that animal seems to derive his nature from the sun, excelling all other creatures in fire and force, as the sun exceeds the other lights of heaven. His eyes, likewise, are bright and fiery, as the sun with a bright and fiery aspect surveys the world. The Lybians represented their Jupiter Hammon, which was the setting sun, with the horns of a ram, with which that animal exerts its strength, as the sun acts by its rays. The worship of Egypt abundantly shows, that the bull is to be referred to the sun; which is plain from the worship of a bull at Heliopolis, the city of the sun; and of the bull Apis at Memphis, where it was an emblem of the sun; and of the other bull called Pacis, consecrated in the magnificent temple of Apollo at Hermunthis.”[117]
Wheresoever fire was worshipped in the puratheia of antiquity after the manner of Numa, we may suppose that there the true solar system prevailed, which places the solar fire in the centre; and that this was really the universal opinion of the most ancient Heathens. This doctrine agrees with the name which they gave to the sun in his physical capacity, calling him cor cœli, the heart of the heaven;[118] which illustration and allusion is probably of very great antiquity, because it cannot with any propriety be applied to the more modern Ptolemaic hypothesis. The analogy is very striking; for as the heart is the centre of the animal system, so is the sun in the centre of our world: as the heart is the fountain of the blood, so is the sun the source of light and fire: as the heart is the life of the body, so is the sun the life and heat of animated nature, and the first mover of the mundane system: when the heart ceases to beat, the circuit of life is at an end; and if the sun should cease to act, a total stagnation would take place throughout the whole frame of nature. Macrobius, pursuing this analogy, says, “We have before observed, that the sun is called the fountain of the ethereal fire; therefore the sun is in the heavens, what the heart is in animals.” Since the circulation of the blood has been known, this analogy has been taken up with advantage by the celebrated Hervey himself, who, first of all the moderns, explained to us with sufficient accuracy this branch of natural philosophy. He observes, that the heart of animals is the foundation of life, the chief ruler of all things in the animal system, the sun of the microcosm, from which flows all its strength and vigor. The philosophers of antiquity called the sun the heart of the microcosm; the moderns call the heart the sun of the microcosm. There must be something very striking in the analogy which is thus convertible, and has been taken up at both ends by such different persons, at such remote periods of time.
The savage philosophy of America seems to have comprehended in it the relation, which we have already noticed, between the animal system and the frame of nature. Acosta, in his History of the Indies, reports, that in the human sacrifices of the Mexicans, the high priest pulled out the heart with his hands, which he showed smoking to the sun, to whom he offered this heat and fume of the heart, and presently he turned towards the idol, and cast the heart at his face. A very highly esteemed correspondent in Ceylon writes, There is a cast of people inhabiting this island who live wild in the woods, and worship fire as an emblem of purity; they are called Vandals, and several English officers have met a premature death by intruding near the holy fire, which is under a tamarind tree.
With the Persians fire was an object of worship from the earliest times, under the name of Amanus, and Mithas; and it is retained as such at this day by the Geberrs, Gaurs, Guebres, or Ghebers, a sect of Indian philosophers. Pottinger says, “At the city of Yezd, in Persia, which is distinguished by the appellation of the Darûb Abadut, or seat of Religion, the Guebres are permitted to have an Atush Kudu, or Fire Temple (which, they assert, has had the sacred fire in it since the days of Zoroaster), in their own compartment of the city; but for this indulgence they are indebted to the avarice, not the tolerance of the Persian government, which taxes them at twenty-five rupees each man.” Hanway informs us, that the Ghebers suppose the throne of the Almighty is seated in the sun, and hence their worship of that luminary. “As to fire,” says Grose, “the Ghebers place the spring-head of it in that globe of fire, the sun, by them called Mithras, or Mihir, to which they pay the highest reverence, in gratitude for the manifold benefits flowing from his ministerial omniscience. But they are so far from confounding the subordination of the servant with the majesty of the Creator, that they not only attribute no sort of sense or reasoning to the sun or fire, in any of its operations, but consider it as a purely passive blind instrument, directed and governed by the immediate impression on it of the will of God; but they do not even give that luminary, all glorious as it is, more than the second rank among his works, reserving the first for the stupendous production of the Divine power, the mind of man.” The temples are generally built over subterraneous fires. Rabbi Benjamin observes, “Early in the morning, they (the Parsees or Ghebers of Ouham) go in crowds to pay their devotions to the sun, to whom upon all the altars are spheres consecrated, made by magic, resembling the circles of the sun; and, when the sun rises, these orbs seem to be inflamed, and turn round with a great noise. Every one has a censer in his hands, and offers incense to the sun.”
It is not a little surprising that the descendants of faithful Abraham, taken into covenant with God, should fall under the influence of this idolatrous worship! The apostasy of the Israelites in the wilderness from the true God to the golden calf, was occasioned by a previous attachment to the sacred rites of the Egyptian idolatry. And the calves which were afterwards set up in Dan and Bethel, were probably derived from the same source. The Israelites were not only cautioned against this worship, but, if the charge of idolatry brought against an Israelite was proved by unequivocal facts and competent witnesses, it affected his life. Such was the progress of this idolatrous worship among this people at one period, that Josiah, king of Judah, took away out of the temple of the Lord the horses, and burned the chariots, which the kings, his predecessors, had consecrated to the sun. Job, in allusion to this vile worship, says, “If I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walking in brightness; if my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand:[119] this also were an iniquity to be punished by the judge: for I should have denied the God that is above.” Ezekiel, in a vision, saw “at the door of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east: and they worshipped the sun toward the east,” in imitation of the Egyptians, Persians, and other Eastern nations.
While the heathen have thus paid idolatrous worship to the sun, some persons, believing in the truth of revealed religion, have entertained strange notions concerning this luminary. It is remarkable, observes a polite writer, that whilst some of the ancients imagined the sun to be the seat of future blessedness, from Psal. xix, 14, “He set his tabernacle in the sun,” a Mr. Swinden, among the moderns, endeavors to prove that hell is seated in the sun, chiefly pleading that this is the grand repository of fire; that its horrible face, viewed by a telescope, suits the description given of the burning lake; and that being in the centre of the system, it might be properly said that wicked men were cast down into it. But these are mere hypotheses, and unworthy of serious consideration.