Blessed Night, Loves 😊

I Pray All Is Well With Everyone…And Your Hearts And Minds Are Full Of Love, Joy, And Compassion…For All God’s Children…And All God’s Creation. And If That Be Not The Case For Some Of Us…Let Not The Darkness Of The Outer World’s Appearances Distract, Deceive, Or Mislead Us Into Loving Less Than Our Divine Capacity…Any Of God’s Children Or Creation! Let Not The Flow Of Love Emanating From The Heart Of Our “Mighty I AM Presence” Be Impeded By Prejudiced Beliefs, Negative Thinking…Or Past Conditionings. Instead, Tho, Let Us All Strive – No Matter The Circumstances – To Radiate Back Into The Atmosphere The Love And Light That The World So Desperately Needs; The Love And Light Of The Living God That Dwells Within Each And Every One Of Us – Mankind’s Life Stream! Lest The Humanity Of The World Stifles Its Own Evolution…Lingering In The Darkness Of The Hate, War, And Destruction…That Mankind Is Continuously – And Irresponsibly – Calling Forth By Its Own Actions! RAISE UP!  Amen…

Give Thanks And Praises For Love And Life…

And Y’all Be Love…

“The pre-eminence of the Sun, as the fountainhead of life and man’s well-being, must have rendered it at a date almost contemporaneous with the birth of the race, the chief object of man’s worship. “It was”, says Karnes, “of all the different objects of idolatry the most excusable, for upon the sun depend health, vigour, and cheerfulness, and during its retirement all is dark and disconsolate.” Hence, as we shall see, the chief masculine deity of every nation, which was the chief object of their idolatrous worship, is in every case to be identified with the sun.

The Abbé Banier wrote in like vein: “Nothing was more capable of seducing men than the Heavenly Bodies, and the sun especially. His beauty, the bright splendour of his beams, the rapidity of his course, his regularity in enlightening the whole earth by turns, and in diffusing Light and Fertility all around, essential characters of the Divinity who is Himself the light and source of everything that exists, all these were but too capable of impressing the gross minds of men with a belief that there was no other God but the sun, and that this splendid luminary was the throne of the Divinity. God had fixed his habitation in the heavens, and they saw nothing that bore more marks of Divinity than the sun.”

In the words of Diodorus Siculus: “Men in earlier times struck with the beauty of the Universe, with the splendour and regularity which everywhere were in evidence, made no doubt that there was some Divinity who therein presided, and they adored the sun as expressing the likeness of the Deity.”

The worship of the sun was inevitable, and its deification was the source of all idolatry in every part of the world. It was sunrise that inspired the first prayers uttered by man, calling him to acts of devotion, bidding him raise an altar and kindle sacrificial flames. Before the Sun’s all-glorious shrine, the first men knelt and raised their voices in praise and supplication, fully confirmed in the belief that their prayers were heard and answered. Nothing proves so much the antiquity of solar idolatry as the care Moses took to prohibit it. “Take care”, said he to the Israelites, “lest when you lift up your eyes to Heaven and see the sun, the moon, and all the stars, you be seduced and drawn away to pay worship and adoration to the creatures which the Lord your God has made for the service of all the nations under Heaven.”

Then we have the mention of Josiah taking away the horses that the king of Judah had given to the sun and burning the chariot of the sun with fire. These references agree perfectly with the recognition in Palmyra of the Lord Sun, Baal Shemesh, and with the identification of the Assyrian Bel, and the Tyrian Baal with the sun.

…In India, a land teeming with mythology, we find as we might expect, Sun worship a predominant feature of the Hindu religion. All the myths prove that the fancied combat between light and darkness, waged daily in the spacious field of the firmament, is of solar origin. As we have seen Osiris, the Sun-God of the Egyptians, triumphing over the demons of darkness, so in India we find Indra, the great solar deity of the Hindus, successful in his combat with Vritra, the serpent of night. The worship of Indra constitutes the very essence of the Vedic religion, although he was by no means the only Sun-God worshipped in India, for the Hindus worshipped the sun in its various aspects after the manner of the Egyptians. The rising sun was called “Brahma”, on the meridian it was known as “Siva”, and in the west at nightfall, “Vishnu”.

“In regard to Vishnu”, says Keary, “the great epic of the Hindus relates that when he was armed for the fight, Agni gave him a wheel with a thunderbolt nave. This can only mean a wheel that shoots out thunderbolts from its nave when it turned.” The wheel has throughout the ages symbolized the sun. In Central India, Sun worship still prevails among many of the hill tribes, and the Sun is invoked as the Holy One, the Creator, and Preserver. White animals are sacrificed to him by his votaries. One of the early and most important Sun-Gods was Sûrya. He is represented as moving daily across the sky in a golden chariot drawn by seven white horses.

The ancient Sun worship of India is reflected in the daily religious rites and festivals of the modern Hindus. Thus, the time-honoured formula repeated daily since long past ages by every Brahman, indicates clearly, the divine element in the sun: “Let us meditate on the desirable light of the divine sun, may he rouse our minds.” Here is a direct appeal to a solar deity, and every morning the Brahmans may be seen facing the east, standing on one foot, and stretching out their hands to the sun as they repeat this prayer which has come down unchanged from remote ages.

The Zoroastrians, and the modern exponents of that faith, the Parsees, saw in the sun, fire and light, a manifestation of a divine and omnipotent power, and regarded them in a measure as symbols of the deity; but there can be little doubt that this distinction was not always borne out, and that the sun and fire itself, were literally worshipped by them. In the Parsee temples burns a fire which, it is said, has never been extinguished since it was kindled by Zoroaster four thousand years ago. In praying, the Parsees are admonished to stand before the fire, and turn their faces toward the sun, and when a young Brahman’s head is tonsured, he is to this day so placed that he has the sacred fire to the east whence comes the sun of which it is a type.

…The two great solar divinities of Greece were Helios or Hyperion, and Phœbus Apollo. Just as the Egyptians regarded their Sun-Gods Ra and Osiris as distinct aspects of the sun, so the Greeks distinguished the orb from the rays of the sun. Helios represented to the Greeks the physical phenomenon of light, the orb of the sun which throughout the seasons rises and sets daily. Phœbus Apollo, on the contrary, was the beneficent divinity who not only created the warmth of springtide, but protected mankind from the dangers and diseases of the more desolate seasons. He was essentially human in his sympathies and yet wholly godlike in dignity. Some writers, notably Hesiod, regard Hyperion as the father of the sun, moon, and dawn, and therefore the original Sun-God and the father of Phœbus Apollo; but Homer identifies Helios with Hyperion as “he who walks on high.” The worship of the Sun-God Helios, the counterpart of the Latin Sol, was imported into Greece from Asia, but by no means gained a high degree of popularity.

…We come now to a consideration of the preeminent feature of Hellenic Sun worship, the worship of the Sun-God Phœbus Apollo, the god who is more especially the deity of the later Greeks, the Dorians, and Ionians. The authors of this religion were probably the Dorians, who inhabited the northern portion of Greece, and who founded their first kingdom in Crete. Before the Doric invasion, however, there was in Crete a species of Sun worship, for the bull-headed Minotaur, according to the authorities, could hardly have been anything else than a Sun-God of the Asiatic stamp. With the coming of the Dorians to Crete, Apollo worship was established, and through the migrations of these people (about the tenth century before our era), the cult of Phœbus Apollo spread on every side, until this religion was in favour wherever the Greek language was spoken.

…The resemblance between the lives of the Sun-God Phœbus Apollo, and Jesus Christ, the central figure and Exemplar of the Christian religion, is striking. The circumstances of their birth were in many respects similar, in that they were born in comparative obscurity. The mother of Apollo sought in vain for a suitable place to bring forth her offspring and had recourse at last to a desolate and barren island in the midst of the sea. The Virgin Mary found her only refuge in a comfortless and humble shelter for the beasts of the field. Three gifts were presented the Far-Darter at his birth by Zeus, and the Magi presented the same number of gifts to the infant Jesus. Further, the infant Apollo was hurried away to a peaceful land soon after his birth, and in like manner the child Jesus was conveyed to a place of safety to escape a threatened danger.

…Again, as personifying the sun, Phœbus Apollo must necessarily be born weak and suffer hardships, he must wander far and lead a life of strife and action, but above all it was imperative that he should die. It is this last act which makes the character of the Sun-God approach the nearest to human nature. Although the Sun-God’s death at nightfall is ignominious, akin in this respect to the crucifixion, still its predominant feature is one of glory, and the reappearance of the triumphant sun after death is in every way typical of the resurrection, thus portraying in a startling manner the completeness of the analogy between the lives of Christ and Apollo.

…In the spirit religion of Japan, we find the worship of the Sun-God is supreme. He is regarded as the “heaven-enlightening great spirit, below him stand all the lesser spirits through whom as mediators, guardians, and protectors, worship is paid by men.” Among the Shinto deities, however, the Sun-Goddess was the central figure. To reconcile Buddhism and Shintoism, the chief priests claimed that the Sun-Goddess had been merely an incarnation of Buddha. The shrine of the Sun-Goddess stood in the Mikado’s residence and was reverenced by that monarch as one of his family gods. Her emblem was the mirror, which is to the present day considered one of the sacred treasures of the Japanese sovereigns.

…The Sun worship of Peru first claims our attention, as it easily overshadows in importance and magnificence the solar worship of any other of the western tribes. It has been shown that Sun worship prevails, for the most part, where the sun is welcomed for his genial warmth, and where nature suffers at his departure. Thus, in the lowlands of South America, Sun worship attained little prominence, but on the high plateaus, such as those in Peru, it flourished vigorously, and was the dominant feature of the life of the natives. The Peruvians believed that the Sun was at once the ancestor and the founder of the Inca dynasty, and that the Incas reigned as his representatives and almost in his person.

The Sun, therefore, was the sovereign lord of the world, the king of heaven and earth, and was called by them “Inti”, which signifies Light. The Peruvian villages were so built that the inhabitants could have an unobstructed view of the east, in order that each morning the nation might unite in saluting the rising Sun and rejoice in the advent of the Lord of Light. The Sun alone of all the deities had a temple in every large town in Peru. The Peruvian Sun temples probably exceeded in magnificence those of any other nation on the earth.

…Although the Sun worship of the Peruvians reached a higher state of exaltation and perfection than that of any other South American people, still the pre-eminence of the Sun, and its deification, was the very essence of the early religion of Central America, and particularly Mexico. The ancient Mexicans called themselves “Children of the Sun”, and daily greeted the rising sun with hymns of praise and offered to the solar deity a share of their meat and drink. Even to this day, the inhabitants of the interior of Mexico, as they go to mass, throw a kiss to the Sun before entering the church. …The priest invoked the Sun saying: “The Sun has risen, we know not how he will fulfil his course, nor whether misfortune will happen. Our Lord, do your office prosperously.”

…Proceeding northward, we find the worship of the Sun that anciently existed and flourished in the far east, equally prominent in the life of the early Indian tribes of North America. The chiefs of the Huron tribe claimed descent from the Sun and believed that the sacred pipe was derived from this luminary. …Many of the Indian tribes have a similar tradition. The Iroquois regarded the Sun as a god, and offered him tobacco, which they termed “smoking the Sun.”

… The early Indian tribes of Virginia prostrated themselves before the rising and setting Sun, and Tylor tells us that the Pottawotomies would climb sometimes at sunrise to the roofs of their huts to kneel and offer to the luminary a mess of Indian corn. The powerful Sioux tribe regarded the Sun as the Creator and Preserver of all things and to him they sacrificed the best of the game they killed in the hunt. The Shawnees believed that the Sun animated everything, and therefore must be the Master of Life or Great Spirit. The Sun worship of the Indian tribes dwelling in the southern portions of North America seems to have been on a more elaborate scale than that in vogue in the north. Doubtless it was influenced by the widely extended and exalted Sun worship of the South American tribes.

Among the tribes inhabiting what is now the state of Louisiana, it was customary for the chief to face the east each morning, and prostrate himself before the rising Sun. He also smoked toward it, and then toward the three other cardinal points of the compass. These Indians even erected to the Sun a rude temple, a circular hut some thirty feet in diameter. In the midst of it was kept burning a perpetual fire, prayers were offered to the Sun three times each day, and the hut was the repository of images and religious relics. Following the Inca custom, the bones of their departed chiefs were also placed in the sacred structure. Their highest and most powerful chief was regarded as the Sun’s brother, and he conducted as high priest the temple service of worship to the Sun. The Dakota Indians called the Sun “the mysterious one of day”, and believed that this deity watched over them in time of need.”

Sun Lore of All Ages, by William Tyler Olcott, 1914

Pray – Anno Domini Beats