It's interesting seeing anti-theist anarchists have trouble with the concept of sun worship because the entire discourse about religion from yesterday had me thinking of a really good movie I saw on Saturday. That movie was Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.
There's a scene in the movie where you see lots of people trying to cross into the USA from Mexico on foot, and one man talks about how in his village the god Centeotl has "died" and the maize is gone, so he's hoping to go where the maize is good. Centeotl is the name of an Aztec god associated with maize. His very name comes from a word that means "dried maize still on the cob". In Bardo we see this god presented not merely as a god of maize but as the god who was himself the maize that grew and died.
I think that speaks to a religious worldview that modern people have trouble with, but which was commonplace throughout the ancient polytheistic cultures of the world. In that sense, to decry "worshipping a god which we now know is just a ball of nuclear fusion" is meaningless. After all, they likely understood that the sun itself was the god they worshipped, much like the maize was a god, in a similar way to how in Greece the earth itself and entire rivers were gods on their own. That's animism for you!
The Charmer-Charmee Addresser asks the sun to rise over her face, body, gait and talk; to give her part of its rays and to make her visible to all and admired by all. Examples:
Holy sun
holy great lord!
I’m not raising up the wind
from the earth
but I’m raising your circle
onto my head
your rays
into my eyelashes.
Holy sun
holy great lord!
You have forty-four little rays
give me four of them
and keep four
two I’ll put
on my eyebrows
and two on my cheekbones.
Sun, sun, dear brother
rise not on mountains, on forests on painted courtyards
on slopes with buildings
rise over my figure
and make my body beautiful.
- Towards a Typology of Romanian Love Charms by Sanda Golopentia
Sun FD in H-Alpha 1st of March 2023 - Colorized by Arne Danielsen [link] as a png / Sunlight - Hozier / The Sun from Rider-Waite tarot deck / Les Miserables - Victor Hugo / The Sun - Edvard Munch / Unlove’s the Heavenless Hell and Homeless Home - e.e. cummings / “The Midnight Sun Ceremony” from Andrea Zanatelli’s embroidery series [link] / Solar Power - Lorde / Summer Solstice - Danielle Barlow [link] / unknown (please dm for credit if known)