Solar power

Who do you think might have written the following?

Amaterasu, sun goddess and primal deity in the Shinto pantheon

‘”The Sun is god!” cried J.M.W. Turner as he died, and plenty of other people have thought there was much in his analysis. The Aztecs agreed, and so did the pharaohs of Egypt. We are an arrogant lot these days, and we tend to underestimate the importance of our governor and creator.

We forget that we were once just a clod of cooled-down solar dust; we forget that without the Sun there would have been no photosynthesis, no hydrocarbons — and that it was the great celestial orb that effectively called life into being on Earth. In so far as we are able to heat our homes or turn on our computers or drive to work it is thanks to the unlocking of energy from the Sun.

As a species, we human beings have become so blind with conceit and self-love that we genuinely believe that the fate of the planet is in our hands — when the reality is that everything, or almost everything, depends on the behaviour and caprice of the gigantic thermonuclear fireball around which we revolve.’

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Well, it’s not a Shinto apologist, nor is it a new-age religionist…   it’s a British politician by the name of Boris Johnson writing an article about the vagaries of the weather in Britain, which is currently suffering from a blanket of snow and feeling miserable for itself.

But in writing of the sun as ‘our governor and creator’ the maverick politician seems to be hitting on a similar theme to ancient humans.  In acknowledging the solar primacy, perhaps we may come to recognise that conditions on earth depend on activity up there.  By allying itself with the rising sun, the nascent Japanese state may have been unconsciously tapping into a scientific, as well as a higher, truth.

Ceremony to welcome the sun rise on the longest day of the year at the Meoto Rocks at Ise