Helios with a radiate halo driving his chariot (Ilion, 4th century BC; Pergamon Museum)

A solar symbol is a symbol representing the Sun. Common solar symbols include circles (with or without rays), crosses, and spirals. In religious iconography, personifications of the Sun or solar attributes are often indicated by means of a halo or a radiate crown.

When the systematic study of comparative mythology first became popular in the 19th century, scholarly opinion tended to over-interpret historical myths and iconography in terms of "solar symbolism". This was especially the case with Max Müller and his followers beginning in the 1860s in the context of Indo-European studies.[1] Many "solar symbols" claimed in the 19th century, such as the swastika, triskele, Sun cross, etc. have tended to be interpreted more conservatively in scholarship since the later 20th century.[2]

Solar disk

The solar disk, crescent Moon and stars as shown on the Nebra sky disk (c. 1600 BC)

The basic element of most solar symbols is the circular solar disk.

The disk can be modified in various ways, notably by adding rays (found in the Bronze Age in Egyptian depictions of Aten) or a cross. In the ancient Near East, the solar disk could also be modified by addition of the Uraeus (rearing cobra), and in ancient Mesopotamia it was shown with wings.

Bronze Age writing

Egyptian hieroglyphs have a large inventory of solar symbolism because of the central position of solar deities (Ra, Horus, Aten etc.) in ancient Egyptian religion.

The main logogram for "Sun" was a representation of the solar disk,
N5
(Gardiner N5), with or without a dot or circle in the center, with a variant including the Uraeus,
N6
(N6).

The "Sun" logogram in early Chinese writing, beginning with the oracle bone script (c. 12th century BC) also shows the solar disk with a central dot (analogous to the Egyptian hieroglyph); under the influence of the writing brush, this character evolved into a square shape (modern 日).

Classical era

The disk with a ray as a symbol for the Sun in late Classical (4th c.) and medieval Byzantine (11th c.) mss[3]

In the Greek and European world, until approximately the 16th century, the astrological symbol for the Sun was a disk with a single ray, 🜚 (U+1F71A 🜚 ). This is the form, for example, in Johannes Kamateros' 12th century Compendium of Astrology.[4]

Astronomical symbol

The modern astronomical symbol for the Sun, a circled dot (U+2609 ☉ SUN), was first used in the Renaissance.

Rayed depictions

Akhenaten worshipping Aten (14th century BC; 1903 drawing)

A circular disk with alternating triangular and wavy rays emanating from it is a frequent symbol or artistic depiction of the sun.

Antiquity

The ancient Mesopotamian "star of Shamash" could be represented with either eight wavy rays, or with four wavy and four triangular rays.

The Vergina Sun (also known as the Star of Vergina, Macedonian Star, or Argead Star) is a rayed solar symbol appearing in ancient Greek art from the 6th to 2nd centuries BC. The Vergina Sun appears in art variously with sixteen, twelve, or eight triangular rays.

Bianchini's planisphere, produced in the 2nd century,[5] has a circlet with rays radiating from it.[6]

Sun with face

Sun (ten rays) and Moon with faces in a manuscript miniature illustrating the fourth day of creation (12 C.)[7]
Sun with a face and eight (alternating triangular and wavy) rays (fresco in Larbey, France, dated c. 1610)
Rayed depictions of the Sun with a human face are a Western iconographic tradition which became current in the Early Modern period.

The iconographic tradition of depicting the Sun with rays and with a human face developed in Western tradition in the high medieval period and became widespread in the Renaissance, harking back to the Sun god (Sol/Helios) wearing a radiate crown in classical antiquity.

Sunburst

The sunburst was the badge of king Edward III of England, and has thus become the badge of office of Windsor Herald.

Modern pictogram

Typical "clear weather" pictogram (triangular rays)

The modern pictogram representing the Sun as a circle with rays, often eight in number (indicated by either straight lines or triangles; Unicode Miscellaneous Symbols ☀ U+2600; ☼ U+263C) indicates "clear weather" in weather forecasts, originally in television forecasts in the 1970s.[8] The Unicode 6.0 Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block introduced another set of weather pictograms, including "white sun" without rays 1F323 🌣, as well as "sun with face" U+1F31E 🌞︎︎.

The "sun with rays" pictogram is also used to represent the "high brightness" setting in display devices, encoded separately by Unicode 6.0 U+1F506 🔆 (Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs).

Crosses

The "sun cross", "solar cross", or "wheel cross" (🜨) is often considered to represent the four seasons and the tropical year, and therefore the Sun (though as an astronomical symbol it represented the Earth).[lower-alpha 1] In the prehistoric religion of Bronze Age Europe, crosses in circles appear frequently on artifacts identified as cult items. An example from the Nordic Bronze Age is the "miniature standard" with amber inlay revealing a cross shape when held against the light (National Museum of Denmark).[9] The Bronze Age symbol has also been connected with the spoked chariot wheel, which at the time was four-spoked (compare the Linear B ideogram 243 "wheel" 𐃏). In the context of a culture that celebrated the Sun chariot, the wheel may thus have had a solar connotation (c.f. the Trundholm sun chariot).

The Arevakhach ("solar cross") symbol often found in Armenian memorial stelae is claimed as an ancient Armenian solar symbol of eternity and light.[10]

Some Sámi shaman drums have the Beaivi Sámi sun symbol that resembles a sun cross.

The swastika has been a long-standing symbol of good fortune in Eurasian cultures: its appropriation by the Nazi Party from 1920 to 1945 is a brief moment in its history. It may be derived from the sun cross,[11] and is another solar symbol in some contexts.[12] It is used among Buddhists (manji), Jains, and Hindus; and many other cultures, though not necessarily as a solar symbol.

The "Black Sun" (German: Schwarze Sonne) is a 'sun wheel' with twelve-fold rotational symmetry. The design was incorporated as a mosaic into a floor of Wewelsburg Castle during the Nazi era and may have been inspired by Alemannic Iron Age swastika-like designs in Migration-period Zierscheiben.[13] It has been adopted by modern Satanist groups and neo-Nazis.

The "Kolovrat", or in Polish Słoneczko, represents the Sun in Slavic neopaganism.

Modern flags and emblems

Official insignia which incorporate rayed solar symbols include the flag of Uruguay, the flag of Kiribati, some versions of the flag of Argentina, the Irish Defence Forces cap badge, and the 1959–1965 coat of arms of Iraq.

The depictions of the sun on the flags of the Republic of China (Taiwan), Kazakhstan, Kurdistan, the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, and Nepal have only straight (triangular) rays; that of Kyrgyzstan has only curvy rays; while that of the Philippines has short diverging rays grouped into threes.

Another rayed form of the sun has simple radial lines dividing the background into two colors, as in the military flags of Japan and the flag of North Macedonia, and in the top parts of the flags of Tibet and Arizona.

The flag of New Mexico is based on the Zia sun symbol which has four groups of four parallel rays emanating symmetrically from a central circle.

Code points in Unicode

Character information
Preview☉☀☼🜨🌣
Unicode name SUN BLACK SUN WITH RAYS WHITE SUN WITH RAYS ALCHEMICAL SYMBOL FOR VERDIGRIS WHITE SUN
Encodingsdecimalhexdechexdechexdechexdechex
Unicode9737U+26099728U+26009788U+263C128808U+1F728127779U+1F323
UTF-8226 152 137E2 98 89226 152 128E2 98 80226 152 188E2 98 BC240 159 156 168F0 9F 9C A8240 159 140 163F0 9F 8C A3
UTF-1697372609972826009788263C55357 57128D83D DF2855356 57123D83C DF23
Numeric character reference☉☉☀☀☼☼🜨🜨🌣🌣
Character information
Preview🌞🔆🜚⽇𓇴
Unicode name SUN WITH FACE HIGH BRIGHTNESS SYMBOL ALCHEMICAL SYMBOL FOR GOLD KANGXI RADICAL SUN SUN WITH URAEUS
Encodingsdecimalhexdechexdechexdechexdechex
Unicode127774U+1F31E128262U+1F506128794U+1F71A12103U+2F4778324U+131F4
UTF-8240 159 140 158F0 9F 8C 9E240 159 148 134F0 9F 94 86240 159 156 154F0 9F 9C 9A226 189 135E2 BD 87240 147 135 180F0 93 87 B4
UTF-1655356 57118D83C DF1E55357 56582D83D DD0655357 57114D83D DF1A121032F4755308 56820D80C DDF4
Numeric character reference🌞🌞🔆🔆🜚🜚⽇⽇𓇴𓇴

U+2299 ⊙ CIRCLED DOT OPERATOR

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sun symbols.

Notes

  1. ↑ Since at least 1988, the International Astronomical Union has deprecated use of planetary symbols in journal articles.The IAU Style Manual (PDF). The International Astrophysical Union. 1989. p. 27. Archived (PDF) from the original on June 21, 2018. Retrieved August 20, 2018.

References

  1. ↑ C. Scott Littleton (1973). The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological Assessment of the Theories of Georges Dumézil. University of California Press. p. 34. ISBN 978-0-520-02404-5.. See also R. F. Littledale, "The Oxford Solar Myth, A Contribution to Comparative Mythology" in: Echoes from Kottabos, London (1906), 279–290 for a satire on this effect.
  2. ↑ notably ciriticized by Richard Chase, The Quest for Myth (1951); see also Astralkult for the more general tendency of over-interpretation of mythology in terms of astral mythology.
  3. ↑ Jones, Alexander (1999). Astronomical papyri from Oxyrhynchus. pp. 62–63. ISBN 0-87169-233-3.
  4. ↑ Neugebauer, Otto; Van Hoesen, H. B. (1987). Greek Horoscopes. pp. 1, 159, 163. ISBN 9780871690487.
  5. ↑ "Bianchini's planisphere". Florence, Italy: Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza (Institute and Museum of the History of Science). Retrieved 2010-03-17.
  6. ↑ Maunder, A. S. D. (1934). "The origin of the symbols of the planets". The Observatory. 57: 238–247. Bibcode:1934Obs....57..238M.
  7. ↑ Michon, Solange (1987). "Un moine enlumineur du XIIe siècle : Frère Rufillus de Weissenau" [Brother Rufillus de Weisenau: a monastic illuminator of the twelfth century]. Journal of Swiss Archaeology and Art History (in French). doi:10.5169/seals-168847.
  8. ↑ Daniel Engber, Who Made That Weather Icon?, New York Times, 23 May 2013.
  9. ↑ entry Archived 2007-09-28 at the Wayback Machine at the Nebra sky disk exhibition site (landesmuseum-fuer-vorgeschichte-halle.de)
  10. ↑ Айк Демоян «Армянские национальные символы» = «Հայկական ազգային խորհրդանշաններ». — Ереван: «Пюник», 2013.
  11. ↑ Koch, Rudolf (1955) [1930]. The book of signs : which contains all manner of symbols used from the earliest times by primitive peoples and early Christians. Translated by Vyvyan Holland. Dover. p. 18. ISBN 9780486153902. OCLC 1124412910.
  12. ↑ Neubecker, Ottfried; Brooke-Little, J P (1976). Heraldry: Sources, Symbols, and Meaning. New York: McGraw-Hill. p. 142. ISBN 9780070463080. OCLC 1089555543.
  13. 1 2 Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2002). Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity. New York University Press. p. 3. ISBN 0-81-473124-4.
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