Every day the Sun still makes a small miracles, allowing us to source renewable and clean energy. EF Solare Italia, as the leading photovoltaic operator in Italy, is committed to generate solar power for the Country.
DIVINE LIGHT: THE CULT OF THE SUN IN ANCIENT TIMES
The nature of the Sun is known today: it’s a star, a yellow dwarf made mostly of hydrogen and helium. Thanks to scientific knowledge we are also able to harness its light to directly produce electricity through photovoltaic plants.
Until the first observations with telescopes in the XVII century, humanity ignored the real nature of the star, but understood well its crucial role for life on the planet, as source of light and heath that allows, chiefly, the growth of vegetable life forms. Before the spreading of monotheistic religions, most of the ancient civilizations believed the Sun to be a deity.
It was common belief in the Mediterranean area that the deity travelled across the sky during the day on some form of vehicle: a boat, according to the Egyptians, or a chariot, according to Greeks and Romans. Sometimes, a plurality of deities got associated with the Sun, and then assimilated one into the other: such was the case of Atum and Ra in the Nilotic pantheon, or of Apollo and Helios in the classical one.
The popularity of the solar deities in the ancient West experienced, through the centuries, several peaks: in Egypt, pharaoh Akhenaton, in the XVI century B.C., imposed a monotheistic cult of the solar disk, Aton, than lasted until his death. After that, though, the polytheistic nature of the Egyptian religion was restored and Akhenaton condemned to the damnatio memoriae. In Roma, in 274, emperor Aurelianus made the cult of Sol Invictus official: it remained popular until paganism was replaced by Christianity a century later.
Solar deities were revered in other continents too. In the past, In Central America, the Aztec considered the solar god Huitzilopochtli their patron and sacrificed people daily to nourish him, so that he may conquer the dark and rise again every day. This bloody practice costed the Aztecs the resentment of their subject populations, from whom they took their sacrificial victims, which subsequently allied with the Spanish conquerors. In Asia, the Sun was and still is worshipped as a god by many cultures, from Hinduism to Japanese Shintoism.
Every day the Sun still makes a small miracles, allowing us to source renewable and clean energy, which we can use to reach the decarbonisation goals of our society, which are more and more necessary to fight climate change. EF Solare Italia, as the leading photovoltaic operator in Italy, is committed to generate solar power for the Country thanks to its portfolio of over 300 plants in 17 Regions, with an installed capacity of more than 850 MW.