The moon confers a religious valorization on cosmic becoming and reconciles man to death.

The sun, on the contrary, reveals a different mode of existence. The sun does not share in becoming; although always in motion, the sun remains unchangeable; its form is always the same. Solar hierophanies give expression to the religious values of autonomy and power, of sovereignty, of intelligence. This is why, in certain cultures, we witness a process of solarization of the supreme beings. As we saw, the celestial gods tend to disappear from current religion, but in some cases their structure and prestige still survive in the solar gods, especially in the highly developed civilizations that have played an important role in history (Egypt, the Hellenistic East, Mexico). Many heroic mythologies are solar in structure. The hero is assimilated to the sun; like the sun, he fights darkness, descends into the realm of death and emerges victorious. Here darkness is no longer, as it is in lunar mythologies, one of the modes of being of divinity; instead, it symbolizes all that the god is not, hence the adversary par excellence. Darkness is no longer valorized as a necessary phase in cosmic life; in the perspective of solar religion, it is opposed to life, to forms, and to intelligence. In some cultures the luminous epiphanies of solar gods become the sign of intelligence. In the end sun and intelligence will be assimilated to such a degree that the solar and syncretistic theologies of the end of antiquity become rationalistic philosophies; the sun is proclaimed to be the intelligence of the world, and Macrobius sees in the sun all the gods of the Graecooriental world, from Apollo and Jupiter to Osiris, Horns, and Adonis (Saturnalia, I, ch. 1 7 -2 3 ). In the Emperor Julians treatise On the Sun King, as in Proclus Hymn to the Sun, solar hierophanies give place to ideas, and religious feeling almost completely disappears after this long process of rationalization.55 This desacralization of solar hierophanies is only one

among many other similar processes through whose operation the entire cosmos is finally emptied of its religious content. But, as we said, the complete secularization of nature is a fact only for a limited num be r of modems those devoid of all religious feeling. Despite the deep and sweeping changes that Christianity made