Solar Folklore

For centuries, humans have attempted to explain the Sun in terms of their own worldviews. The Sun can be a god, a demon, a mischievous spirit, an omnipotent creator or a ruthless taker of life. Whatever role it plays, most cultures have recognized the significance of the Sun as prime controller of all life on Earth.

As you read these, remember they were not stories created to entertain, nor were they written for children. These myths, legends and tales represent their culture's worldview, a peoples' attempt to explain, understand, and come to grips with nature's phenomena. To the people who tell them, these stories are as relevant and true, as deeply meaningful and spiritually important, as any scientific explanations.

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Indigenous American | Australian Aborigine | Mesopotamia | Judeo-Christian | Other Cultures | Ancient Astronomers | Great Quotes | Other Pages

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Indigenous American

North American

• Why There is Day and Night (As told by Lynn Moroney)
• Raven and the Sun
• Raven and the Sun
• Three-legged Rabbit
• Coyote and Eagle Steal the Sun and Moon
• Boy and the Sun
• Sun and Her Daughter
• Spider and the Sun
• Little Brother Snares the Sun
• One Who Walks all Over the Sky
• Fifth World
• Tsohanoai

For more Indigenous American starlore, see Starlore of Native America.

Mezo & South American

• Huitzilopochtli (Aztec)
• Inti (Incan)

Australian Aborigine

No one knows what the earliest humans thought about the sky, for no records exist. However, the culture of the Australian Aborigines, which has been passed down via legends, songs, and dances for more than 40,000 years, gives us a glimpse of how these earliest known astronomers interpreted the Sun and stars.

The Aborigines represent the world's oldest and most long-lived culture, a heritage rich in wisdom and insight. The Aborigines are at one with the Earth, nature, and the sky. Their view of the cosmos is based on their concept of the Dreaming -- a distance past when the Spirit Ancestors created the world. Aborigine songs, dances, and tales convey how, long ago, the Spirit Ancestors created the natural world and entwined the people into a close inter-relationship with nature and the sky.

• Aborigines' View of the Sun

Mesopotamia

• Gilgamesh and the Sun
• Shamash

Judeo-Christian

• The Creation
• Joshua Halts the Sun

Others

Ancient Egypt

• Horus

African Cultures

• Liza

China

• Ten Suns

Classical Greece and Rome

• Apollo

Inuit (Greenland)

• Malina

Japan

• Amaterasu

Norse

• Freyr

Ancient Astronomers

• Newgrange and Newgrange Photographs -- world's oldest astronomically-oriented structure!
• The Sundagger -- Anasazi (Native American) marker for solar and lunar cycles
• The Big Horn Medicine Wheel -- Native American pointer to sun and stars
• Stonehenge -- ancient astronomical site
• Aztec "Sun Stone" or Calendar
• Maya Astronomy
• Native American Astronomy
• Ancient Astronomy in India (and Egypt)
• Ancient Japanese Astronomy
• Rock Art

A Modern Sunwheel

Great Quotes

"The Sun is a mass of fiery stone, a little larger than Greece." --Anaxagoras 434 BC "Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you." --Maori proverb "The Universe is populated by innumerable suns, innumerable earths, and perhaps, innumerable forms of life. That thought expresses the essence of the Copernican revolution. No revelation more striking has ever come from the scientific mind." --Robert Jastrow 1989 "To the best of our knowledge, our Sun is the only star proven to grow vegetables." --Philip Scherrer 1973 "The purpose of life is the investigation of the Sun, the Moon, and the heavens." --Anaxagoras 459 BC "The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be." --Carl Sagan Some people can tell what time it is by looking at the sun. But I have never been able to make out the numbers. --5/6th grader "Anyone who has lived through an English winter can see the point of building Stonehenge to make the Sun come back." --Alison Jolly 1988 "One astronomer set up his equipment in an empty chicken coop to protect his instruments from the wind, and then spent most of the eclipse trying to shoo away the chickens, who dutifully reported to the roost when darkness fell." --Wm. Hartmann 1978 "Dew is formed on leaves when the sun shines down on them and makes them perspire." -- 11-year old, on a science exam "Mankind will not remain on Earth forever, but in its quest for light and space will at first timidly penetrate beyond the confines of the atmosphere, and later will conquer for itself all the space near the Sun." --Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky "I'm astounded by people who want to know the Universe. It's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown." --Woody Allen "In the Universe the difficult things are done as if they were easy." --Lao Tzu "Those bright spots you see are Solar Rays. Each of those gas bubbles is the size of the Earth! NASA hopes this video will help us understand other stars in our Solar System." -- Reporter for Bay Area Channel 7 News (1997) Did you realize that 4.5 pounds of sunlight hit the earth each second? -- Mike Rushford "Red sky in morning, sailors take warning. Red sky at night, sailors delight." --Old Sailor's Adage "Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry." --Richard Feynman One cannot learn anything so well as by experiencing it oneself." -- Einstein "The tides are a fight between the Earth and moon. All water tends towards the moon, because there is no water in the moon, and nature abhors a vacuum. I forget where the sun joins in this fight." -- 11-year old, from a science exam "The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the Universe to do." --Galileo Galilei While the earth seems to be knowingly keeping its distance from the sun, it is really only centrificating. --5/6th grader "We think that the Sun watcher is not a good man. He was wrong last year. The Hopi think that is why we had so much cold this winter and no snow." --Crow Wing 1925 "And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the Sun, and the Moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars." --Revelation 12:1 "Imagination is more important than knowledge." --Albert Einstein "The sky broke like an egg into full sunset and the water caught fire." --Pamela Johnson 1982 "One world at a time." --Thoreau "Hitch your wagon to a star." --Ralph Waldo Emerson "That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder." --Calvin (& Hobbes) "Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground." -- Theodore Roosevelt "Sweetened by the Sun" -- On package of C&H; Pure Can Sugar "The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives." --Albert Einstein "Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers." --Voltaire "You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it for himself." --Galileo Galilei "What is the Sun? If the science of astronomy could solve this great problem, it would be nearly capable of solving that of the entire Universe." --Amedee Guillemin, 1870

Quotations extracted from collections by Brad Snowder, Western Washington University Physics Club, and Amara Graps.

This page is http://solar-center.stanford.edu/folklore/folklore.html
Created by Deborah Scherrer in May 1997
Last Modified by DKS on 1 December 1997

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