Sun
SUN. There can hardly be anyone on earth who has not been profoundly aware of the apparent progress of the sun across the heavens and who has not related to it, either personally or as a numinous force. The rising and setting of the sun provides one of the primal dichotomies, parallel to those between day and night, light and darkness, warmth and cold, life and death, yang and yin. Night is mysterious, dangerous, akin to the darkness of the womb. Daylight symbolizes renewed life, truth, logic. In modern thinking, the sun often stands for individual consciousness, and the moon (or night) for the unconscious, the ocean, or the feminine principle. In children's drawings, a happy scene includes a huge round sun with rays like hair. Unhappy and frustrated children produce an entirely black sky. Mentally disturbed patients often draw their own bodies as the sun's disk, complete with arms and legs like rays.
In classical poetry birth is described as "reaching the shores of light." In the Eumenides of Aeschylus, the conflict is between the fearsome Furies, avengers of the mother's blood, who constantly invoke the "dark mother," and the shining Apollo, revealer of truth and righteousness (and symbolic of paternal predominance).
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