Sun Worship
a form of nature worship, widely, though by no means universally diffused at the present day among races of low culture. Traces of sun worship appear in the earliest records of the human race. They are present in the old theology of Egypt. Putting aside the later sun gods of Greece and Rome, horses were sacrificed on Mount Taygetus to that Helios to whom Socrates did not think it wrong to pray; and Cicero exclaims at the number of suns set forth by Roman theologians.
The worship of Mithra spread ad from the East into the Roman empire, and that Vedic divinity was at last identified with the sun. In the Old Testament there are solemn denunciations of sun worship (Deut. iv: 19, xvii: 3; Jer. xliii: 13; Ezek. viii: 16-18); for the Israelites were surrounded by sun worshipers, and it is clear from II Kings xxiii: 5, 19, that the rulers of Judah had adopted the cult.
Modern Hinduism is full of sun worship, and it exists as a distinct cultus among the Kol tribes, the Khonds, and the Tartars. It is still widely spread among the native races of Central America, and probably found its highest form of development in Peru, where the sun was held to be at once the ancestor and founder of the dynasty of the Incas, who reigned as his representative, and made sun worship the great State religion.