A Church of the Sun book, chapter by chapter
Sunstory
The Sun We Have Always Loved
Told by Zora Rae deSole
Before there were cities, before there was writing, before anyone had a word for god, there was the Sun.
This is the history of the oldest worship on Earth: five thousand years, every continent, one star. Short chapters, told for a bright thirteen-year-old and for anyone who has ever watched a sunrise and felt something. The whole arc is here: prologue, every chapter, and the epilogue that brings the story home. Every claim traces to the sources listed at the end of each chapter.
Before there were cities
Before there were cities, before there was writing, before anyone had a word for god, there was the Sun.
Read →The people who caught the light
A history should begin with writing. That is a problem for us, because people loved the Sun for a very long time before anyone could write a word about it.
Read →The Sun with a name
Egypt is where our story gets its first name, and the name is the simplest one possible. Ra means sun. Not god of the sun. The Sun itself, riding a boat across the sky.
Read →The god who sees everything
East of Egypt, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, people in Mesopotamia were writing about the Sun even earlier. The Sumerians called him Utu; the Akkadians and Babylonians c...
Read →The Sun that keeps promises
Over the Zagros mountains, east of Babylon, the winged sun disk found a new home. The Persians were cousins of the people of India - the same old language family, the same old gods...
Read →The chariot with seven horses
Cross the mountains and deserts east of Babylon and the story changes key. In India the Sun was not a falcon or a judge but a charioteer, and his story is written in the oldest rel...
Read →The temple that greets the equinox
The stories of Surya did not stop at India's shores. For centuries, Indian traders and priests sailed south and east across the warm seas, and with them traveled their gods, their ...
Read →Ten suns in a tree
In China, the oldest Sun stories begin with too much of a good thing. Once, they said, there was not one sun in the sky, but ten.
Read →The goddess in the cave
East of China, across the sea, lies a chain of islands that named itself for the sunrise: Nippon, Japan, which means where the Sun comes from. The flag is a single red Sun on white...
Read →The boy who drove the Sun
Greece is where this book changes again, because the Greeks did something unexpected with the Sun: they loved its stories more than its worship. They gave the Sun the best characte...
Read →The Unconquered Sun
Rome absorbed Greece, gods and all, and where the Greeks had mostly told stories about the Sun, the Romans built it into the state. No people before or since has put the Sun so nea...
Read →The wolf behind the Sun
North of everything Rome ever ruled, winter swallows the light. For months the Sun is a low pale rumor, and people learn in their bones what this whole book is about. So it makes s...
Read →The Sun that comes home
In the far north, above the Arctic Circle, winter swallows the Sun. For weeks - in the very farthest places, for months - it never rises at all. The snow glows blue at noon, the st...
Read →The Sun that had to be fed
Across the ocean from everything you have read so far, people in the lands we now call Mexico looked up at the same Sun and understood something completely different. They did not ...
Read →The Sun was their family
High in the Andes of South America, where the air is thin and the Sun is close enough to touch, the Inca built the largest empire the Americas had ever seen, and they ran it on one...
Read →They danced for the Sun
On the great plains of North America, there was no golden temple and no emperor descended from the sky. There was grass to the horizon, herds of buffalo like brown weather, and the...
Read →The boy who lassoed the Sun
Across the Pacific, on islands scattered farther than any other people on Earth ever spread by boat, the Polynesians carried one hero everywhere they went. His name was Maui. He fi...
Read →The Sun woman
South of the Pacific islands lies Australia, home to the oldest continuous cultures on Earth. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have watched the Sun from that red land ...
Read →The children who threw the Sun into the sky
We end where everything began. Long before Newgrange, before Egypt, before anyone in this book built anything or wrote anything down, there were people in Africa under the same Sun...
Read →See you at sunrise
We have traveled five thousand years and every continent, and here is the secret at the end of the road: the story never stopped. It is still happening, every single morning, all o...
Read →The Sun will rise tomorrow too. See you at sunrise.