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]
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.
The main logogram for "Sun" was a representation of the solar disk,
(Gardiner N5), with or without a dot or circle in the center, with a variant including the Uraeus,
(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🜚ALCHEMICAL SYMBOL FOR GOLD). 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.
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.
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 (October 2010) block introduced another set of weather pictograms, including "white sun" without rays 1F323 🌣, as well as "sun with face" U+1F31E 🌞︎︎.
Two pictograms resembling the Sun with rays are used to represent the settings of luminance in display devices. They have been encoded in Unicode since version6.0 in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block under U+1505 as "low brightness symbol" (🔅) and U+1F506 as "high brightness symbol" (🔆).[9]
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).[a]
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).[10] The Bronze Age symbol has also been connected with the spokedchariotwheel, 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.[11]
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,[12] and is another solar symbol in some contexts.[13]
It is used among Buddhists (manji), Jains, and Hindus; and many other cultures, though not necessarily as a solar symbol.
Winged sun – Symbol of divinity, royalty and power
Notes
^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 21 June 2018. Retrieved 20 August 2018.
^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.
^"Bianchini's planisphere". Florence, Italy: Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza (Institute and Museum of the History of Science). Retrieved 17 March 2010.
^Maunder, A. S. D. (1934). "The origin of the symbols of the planets". The Observatory. 57: 238–247. Bibcode:1934Obs....57..238M.
^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. ISBN9780486153902. OCLC1124412910.
^Neubecker, Ottfried; Brooke-Little, J P (1976). Heraldry: Sources, Symbols, and Meaning. New York: McGraw-Hill. p. 142. ISBN9780070463080. OCLC1089555543.
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![Black Sun, a Nazi design[14]](File:Black_Sun.svg)
