itya, thou art great."

Selden observes that whether the gods be called Osiris, or Omphis, or
Nilus, or any other name, they all center in the sun.

According to Diodorus Siculus, it was the belief of the ancients that
Dionysos, Osiris, Serapis, Pan, Jupiter and Pluto were all one. They
were, the sun.

Max Muller says that a very low race in India named the Santhals call
the sun Chandro, which means "bright." These people declared to the
missionaries who settled among them, that Chandro had created the world;
and when told that it would be absurd to say that the sun had created
the world, they replied: "We do not mean the visible Chandro, but an
invisible one."

Not only did Dionysos, and all the rest of the gods who in later ages
came to be regarded as men, represent the sun, but after the separation
of the male and female elements in the originally indivisible God, Maut
or Minerva, Demeter, Ceres, Isis, Juno, and others less important in the
pagan world were also the sun, or, in other words, they represented the
female power throughout the universe which was supposed to reside in the
sun.

In most groups of Babylonian and Assyrian divine emblems, there occur
two distinct representations of the sun, "one being figured with four
rays or divisions within the orb, and the other, with eight." According
to George Rawlinson, these figures represent a distinction between
the male and female powers residing within the sun, the quartered disk
signifying the male energy, and the eight-rayed orb appearing as the
emblem of the female!(26)

26) Essay x.

During an earlier age of human history, prior to the dissensions which
arose over the relative importance of the sexes in reproduction, and at
a time when a mother and her child represented the Deity, the sun was
worshiped as the female Jove. Everything in the universe was a part of
this great God. At that time there had been no division in the god-idea.
The Creator constituted a dual but indivisible unity. Dionysos formerly
represented this God, as did also Om, Jove, Mithras, and others. Jove
was the "Great Virgin" whence everything proceeds.

"Jove first exists, whose thunders roll above,
Jove last, Jove midmost, all proceeds from Jove;
Female is Jove, Immortal Jove is male;
Jove the broad Earth, the heavens irradiate pale.
Jove is the boundless Spirit, Jove the Fire,
That warms the world with feeling and desire."