Solar symbol - WikiHQ

thumb|[[Helios with a radiate halo driving his chariot (Ilion, 4thcenturyBC; 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. 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.

Solar disk

thumb|The solar disk, [[crescent|crescent Moon and stars as shown on the Nebra sky disk ()]]

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

thumb|upright 0.5|The sun disk used in ancient Egypt as the crown for [[Ra and other gods]]

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.

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

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

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

In the Greek and European world, until approximately the 16th century, the astrological symbol for the Sun was a disk with a single ray, 24px|🜚 (). This is the form, for example, in Johannes Kamateros' 12th century Compendium of Astrology.

Astronomical symbol

The modern astronomical symbol for the Sun, a circled dot (), was first used in the Renaissance.

has a circlet with rays radiating from it.

Sun with face

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 the Windsor Herald.

Modern pictogram

thumb|upright 0.5|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.

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" ().

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).

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). 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" ). In the context of a culture that celebrated the Sun chariot, the wheel may thus have had a solar connotation (cf. 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.

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, and is another solar symbol in some contexts.

It is used among Buddhists (manji), Jains, and Hindus; and many other cultures, though not necessarily as a solar symbol.

The "Black Sun" (German: ) 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. It has been adopted by modern Satanist groups and neo-Nazis.

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