The Sun has been an object of worship in a very large number of cultures, and the atlas records many of them separately: Shamash in Mesopotamia, judge and revealer of what is hidden; Ra and later Aten in Egypt; Surya and the twelve Adityas in India; Helios and Sol Invictus in the Greek and Roman worlds; Amaterasu in Japan, from whom the imperial line was traced; Inti in the Inca state cult. It does not follow that these are versions of one another, and the nineteenth-century tendency to reduce all mythology to solar allegory, associated with Max Muller and thoroughly criticised since, is an example of how badly that assumption can go wrong. What can be said is that the Sun is the most conspicuous object in the sky, that its annual movement governs agriculture everywhere, and that its symbolic weight, as source, as centre, as sovereign, as the light by which things are seen, recurs for those reasons rather than by diffusion from a single source.
One astronomical point cuts against the symbolism of the Sun as the regular measure of things. Its apparent motion along the ecliptic is not uniform. The Earth is nearest the Sun in early January and furthest in early July, so the Sun appears to move fastest in the northern winter and slowest in the northern summer, and the four seasons are of unequal length: about 92.8 days from the March equinox to the June solstice, 93.6 to the September equinox, 89.8 to the December solstice and 89.0 back to March. The sovereign of the sky keeps an uneven clock, and every calendar that divides the year into equal quarters is approximating.