Following the Sun Read online

  I came upon these early solar artifacts some years ago while I was following the story of another solar-related event, a distant cousin of these ancient rituals, the Christian festival known as Carnival, which takes place the world around at the beginning of spring and is, as are so many Christian holidays, essentially a pagan festival. During Carnival, as any revelers will tell you, anything can happen; the world is turned upside down. It is a holiday that actually dates back to the Babylonian period, and probably evolved out of even earlier Neolithic rites. In Europe it is no accident that this event is celebrated at the end of February, when the world itself is changing, when the spring flowers begin to bloom out of the brown winter fields and the migratory birds return to Rome, where Carnival as we know it originated. Carnival evolved out of the pagan rites associated with earlier cults of the vegetative god Attis and bears some resemblance to the solar-based festival known as Saturnalia, both of which were subsumed by the Christian church in the first century A.D.

  But I am getting ahead of myself.

  To begin at the beginning, it is currently believed that some five billion years ago in a smoky region of the universe presently referred to by various cultures of earth as the Milky Way, a vast, incandescent cloud of gas began to coalesce and collapse on itself until it formed just one more of the one hundred billion stars found in the Milky Way.

  According to one theory, as it coalesced the cloud began to spin, and the more it shrank the faster it whirled and the rotary forces of this mad turning caused it to flatten into the shape of a spinning top. The force of this rotation was so great that a thin disclike section broke off from its widest girth and separated itself from the central star. This disk continued to spin and eventually clotted and broke apart and whirled off into space to form the nine planets, which, as if in memory of their ancient connection to the mother star, continue circling to this day. Another, more current theory holds that the cloud broke apart earlier and the nine planets formed at the same time as the sun.

  In either case, after a cooling period of some two billion years, on one of those planets, the third one out from the sun, a series of chemical reactions began brewing in its warming seas. Three billion years later, more or less, a complex recombination of these same chemicals developed the ability to label objects and subsequently named the planet upon which they—the now recombined complex chemicals—lived.

  I’m simplifying, of course, but that is one of the scientific theories concerning the creation of the sun and its family. That is only one version, however.

  The ancient Egyptians believed that Ra, the god of the sun, was the creator of our planet. In the beginning of time, they say, an egg rose from the primeval waters and from this primal egg, Ra hatched. Ra had two children, Shu and Tefnut, who became the atmosphere and clouds. They had more children, Geb and Nut, who became the earth and the sky. One day Ra wept, and from his tears human beings were created.

  The Fon people of West Africa hold that the sun god Liza created the world with the help of his partner Mawa, the goddess of the night, fertility, rest, and motherhood. Whenever there is an eclipse, it is said that Liza and Mawa are making love. Long ago, after one eclipse, their son, Gu, was born. Gu shaped the world with an iron sword and then taught the people the art of ironworking so they could make their own tools and shelter. (Unfortunately, Gu did not know humans would use their knowledge to make weapons.)

  The Sumerians said the work of creation was carried out by Shamash, their god of the sun. Every morning, the scorpion-men of the East Mountain opened a gate and Shamash would emerge, cross the sky in his chariot, and at the end of the day enter the West Mountain gate and begin his travel through the Underworld, only to reemerge the next day and begin again.

  The Aztecs believed the universe was composed of several cosmic eras with four different suns in four previous ages, each of which died at the end of its era. The fifth sun was named Tonatiuh, “He Who Goes Forth Shining.” This was the first sun that had the ability to travel across the sky and it is his era in which we now live. Tonatiuh is, or was, responsible for the smooth functioning of the universe, and it was well known that if he weakened the world could come to an end, so he had to be fed, and the food that best sustained him turned out to be human flesh.

  In yet another creation story, an obscure, wandering tribe of pastoralists in the deserts of the Middle East says simply that in the beginning an unnamable, abstracted entity created heaven and the earth. All was without form until this entity spoke aloud and said: “Let there be light …”

  But before any of this, before the written word, at the very dawn of consciousness, the sun must already have been comprehended as the creator. Its image was scratched on cave walls, elongated stones were arranged upright in circular patterns to mark the annual circuit of this powerful entity. Fires were lit in early winter at the end of his apparent annual decline to assure his return, and finally he, or in some cultures she, was given a means of traveling across the sky, a boat, a chariot, a golden wagon pulled by fiery mules, and in some versions he was even supplied with an armed guard to help assure safe passage through the known dangers of the Underworld from west to east so that he could rise again the next morning.

  And he was given also names: Surya, Sulis, Saule, Tsar Solniste, Sol, Sol Invictus, Sonne, Sun. And also food to assure his survival: fire, burnt offerings of goat, of oxen, and, periodically throughout history, of human flesh or blood.

  Modern astronomy would in no way have disabused the ancients of their conviction that our closest star is a deity. The sun is, indeed, an all-powerful force, even in the eyes of seasoned astronomers. For some five billion years now it has seethed with hellish internal fires of 5,780 degrees Kelvin, a great heaving world of superheated gas that burns, as is now known, with a thunderous, deafening roar and is fueled by continuous nuclear fusion at its core, the whole of it overlain with explosions and exhalations of bursting, high-energy photons that collide with electrons and ions to create the heat and light upon which we earthlings survive. Immense reverse cataracts of convective currents flow upward from this fiery core, releasing explosions of fire at a million degrees centigrade before they cascade back down to the supercharged inner heart to be reborn. Vast solar flares in the form of electromagnetic radiation and energetic particles with temperatures that can soar to hundreds of millions of degrees shoot off into black space from this burning caldron; sudden upwellings of radiating material surge over its surface; periodically, double islands of cooler material some 40,000 miles wide sweep across its face in tandem; streaming particles of protons and electrons, the so-called solar winds, splay out into interstellar space at speeds of 1,800 miles a second. This yellow-colored, middle-sized star is a deathly furnace, and yet, from this hideous forge of ghastly fire, all life on earth is fashioned and sustained.

  For all our science and craft, we are but parasites of the sun. The annual voyage of our own planet around this central star, the spinning earth, the resulting alternations of the four seasons, the turn of night and day, the great sweep of winds and weathers around the globe, tides, ice ages, and the vast, ill-understood cycles of heat and magnetism on the sun’s surface affect the internal cellular and hormonal rhythms of all the living things of the earth. Green plants, the source of all animal life, though fixed in place on the ground, have elaborate and still not entirely understood mechanisms for tracking the sun’s daily course across the sky and through the year. All animals are subject to these same rhythms of light, everything from sleep, to seasonal hormonal changes, to migration or hibernation, digestion, the sex of certain cold-blooded species, and even, it turns out, mood swings in higher mammals, such as human beings.

  Even the most atheistic of scientists will admit that, in its magnitude, its veritable power, in its measureless, unknowable inner heart, the sun is very like a god. Like nothing else we know, it breaks down the apparent split between science and spirit. It is both myth and fact, factual and mythological, spiritual and physical,
ethereal and material, and there is no escaping its power.

  Whichever creation story one believes, the fact remains that every day on earth a large rounded ball of bright fire appears over the eastern horizon and spreads a vast cone of light across the section of earth on which you, the observer, happen to be standing. Even in winter this benevolent light has warmth in it. You can feel it on a January day if you pick the right spot. And this warmth, this heat, this light, this great coursing chariot of blazing flame, is the source of all life on an otherwise cold and lifeless planet called earth. From the sun all things proceed.

  That first day of spring outside Cádiz I was feeling the effects of the god of the sun, whoever he or she may be, having spent too much time on the beach the day before with Dickey and her mother.

  The morning after our night on the town I had gone out for coffee and sat reading a local paper on the promenade near Dickey’s hotel. It was the sort of day I had been waiting for—a misty warmth, with the smells of the freshly washed streets rising all around and mixing with the smells of the coffee and hot milk and fresh bread. Later that morning Dickey had emerged, and we made plans to go to the beach in the afternoon. I spent the rest of the morning poking around the town looking for a bicycle shop to get a strap fixed on one of my panniers and then rode out to the appointed beach not far from the city.

  By the time I got there, the spring sun was burning with a sort of cool freshness, and even though it was still early in the season there were many northern Europeans at the beach that day. Dickey had brought her mother along, a somewhat rounded woman in her early sixties who reminded me a little of one of the early chthonic figurines fashioned by the Paleolithic cave worshipping folk. Without any self-consciousness, she and Dickey stripped off their tops, arranged their towels, and lay back to bask in the spring sun. They had traveled a great deal in Europe, I gathered, and were seasoned beachgoers.

  Sun-worshiper though I am, I actually don’t like simply lying out and basking, I much prefer to walk along a beach looking for adventures, so I left them basking and took a walk. All along the shores, people in various stages of dishabille were stretched out flat or walking along the sand, and a few of them, probably German or Scandinavian, were swimming in the still cold waters of the Atlantic. Here were blond well-muscled German Apollos in tiny male bikinis, and there were many topless goddesses, basking or chatting in little groups. One young couple, possibly Swedish, blond, tanned, and stripped naked, was standing with their backs to the water, their faces turned up to the sun so as to better accept its benevolent rays which, I presumed, had been so long denied to them through the long dark winter.

  As the day progressed, the sun grew hotter, and more and more winter migrants began to appear, some older visitants in bathrobes and slippers, others younger, carrying small backpacks with towels and suntan lotions. Here, like seals on a rutting beach (which this somewhat resembled, as many of these beachgoers were young and presumably unmarried), the happy throngs stretched out to enjoy the famous sun of Andalusia. Except for a few packs of dark-haired young males, most of these sojourners were northerners judging from their winter-white skin and their light-colored hair. The locals, I noticed, stayed clothed, the northerners tended to strip to le minimum.

  None of this sunbathing is especially good for human skin, as we now know. As a part of this life-giving fire, the star we call Sun throws off a wide complex of rays that combine to produce the electromagnetic radiation that we term light. We actually see only a small part of the spectrum, the white light that contains all wavelengths, which, when separated or dispersed by a prism or a rainbow, reveals its full range of colors. But there are other species of rays streaming off of this burning star, including X rays and invisible ultraviolet radiation. Some of these rays are beneficial. Ultraviolet radiation can kill germs and convert a certain amount of vitamin D in our skin. But the healthy bronze of a suntan is, in fact, a sign of damaged skin, a reaction that serves as a form of protection from what is essentially an assault of ultraviolet rays.

  Our current concern over the presence of these tanning rays is nothing new; nineteenth-century women also worried about excessive exposure to the sun and pale, lily-white skin in the 1860s was considered as beautiful as the bronzed skin is to the fashion conscious of a later time. But this current fear of exposure to the sun, dangerous though it may be, seems to be part of a larger social phenomenon concerning the many perceived dangers that lurk in the natural world. The outdoors—as opposed to the indoor world of cyberspace—is rank with disease-carrying mosquitoes and ticks, poison ivy, and sun, as well as kidnappers, criminals, hunters, and, perhaps worst of all judging from the ominous nightly reports, bad weather.

  I’d hoped to get in shape for my bicycle trip, but I never did get around to taking the long practice rides that I had intended to take before leaving. As a result, not four hours into my pilgrimage, I began to feel my muscles tightening. I wasn’t worried though, having no particular schedule in fact I calculated that if I got to Puerto de Santa María, and liked it, I might as well stay there. So I pedaled on slowly through the pastoral landscape, stopping often to look at frogs or birds, and in due time came to what seemed to me a fine overlook, an ancient ruin with crumbling arches just beyond a gully. I was leaning against my bicycle looking at the ruin when a small falcon shot over my head and flew straight into one of the arches, so I wheeled my bike up a narrow sand road and came to a grassy spot among the olive trees and sat down to watch.

  In a minute or two the falcon flew out again; clearly it had a nest in among the broken crevices. This seemed a propitious sign for this journey. In the ancient Egyptian cosmology, the sun god Ra would often appear in the form of a falcon. It was he, Horus, the falcon, who represented one of the visible forms of Atum, the first creator.

  It occurred to me, while I sat there, that I was getting hungry, so I unpacked my bread, sliced some tomatoes, and uncorked the wine bottle.

  The ruined arches were on the other side of what appeared to be an old dried-out streambed. Although I was not sure whether I was in the right spot, there was a Moorish tower marked on the map in about the same place. So here yet again, or so I imagined, was evidence of the great age of the Caliphate. The ruin, whatever it was, appeared to be medieval, which would have dated it back to that singular period in European history when the Moors held sway over the region they called Al Andalus, better known in our time as Andalusia.

  The seven-hundred-year period of Muslim sovereignty over Spain and southern France, contrary to Western cant, was one of the more benign periods in the long record of European politics and warfare. It was a period of great artistic, scientific, and commercial advancement, and also a time of great tolerance, imagination, music, and poetry. Moors, as the Europeans called the North African Muslims, entered Europe from the south led by the Caliph Abd al Rahman I in the middle of the eighth century, and within two hundred years had turned Al Andalus into a bastion of culture and commerce. They brought with them the technology of irrigation and turned the normally dry plains of the south into an agricultural cornucopia, supplementing the olives and wheat that already grew there with pomegranates, oranges, lemons, aubergines, artichokes, and almonds, as well as saffron, sugarcane, cotton, and rice.

  One does not get far in Andalusia without reminders of this great age. You see the Moorish influence in the architecture and the tiles, in music, in the physiognomy of the southerners, even in advertisements. Besides, anyone you talk to will often bring up the fact that the Moors, their former enemies, laid out gardens and built marvelous structures admired the world around. Spain does not easily forget its past.

  By midafternoon I arrived at El Puerto de Santa María, a town of many hidden courtyards lined with bright red geraniums, buttressed churches, and, like many villages in this region, a deep history. There are several Paleolithic sites in the area, and the actual founding of the village is credited to the Athenian leader Menestheo, who stopped in here after the Trojan War. But
as usual in Andalusia, it was the Moors who really settled the place. The town used to be called Alcanatif, which means Port of the Saltworks; Alfonso X conquered the city in 1260 and changed the name to Santa María de Puerto. Some of the later voyages of Christopher Columbus set sail—so it is said—from this small harbor, and the pilot for the Santa Maria was born here.

  I rode slowly into the town plaza, dismounted, and wheeled my bicycle around the plaza like a tired racehorse, looking for a good café in the sun. Genuinely fatigued by now, I sat down, ordered a coffee, and stretched my legs out toward the square. It was about three o’clock and the town had entered into that afternoon somnolence that affects sun-blasted villages the world around. Many of the shops were closed, save for the tourist kiosks, and most of the people out and about were northern Europeans. A group of Germans or English had descended upon one of the kiosks that sold hats and were trying them on while a blond gentleman in short pants with a great arching paunch and a camera recorded the adventure. The shop women watched with bemused cynicism, their arms folded and an attentive eye to their hats—they had seen this sort of thing before, no doubt, and were leery lest their merchandise be ruined.

  I noticed an old man in gray trousers and a gray vest standing next to the café, also observing the scene. He was the last of the old peasant types that you still see from time to time in this tourist-ridden coast, dark eyes, grizzled, poorly shaven, and hands like rocks, clearly a man of the soil.

  “They probably won’t even buy a single hat after all this,” I said to him by way of openers.

  He tipped his head to one side, cynically.

  One of the tourists dropped a hat onto the stone plaza.

  The old man shook his head again. “These women work hard for their hats. I know their fathers and uncles. They are good workers, although one uncle.…” Here he lifted his thumb toward his mouth to indicate drinking and winked at me with a smile.