Modern Worshippers of an Ancient God

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 756, 31 August 1929, Page 22

Modern Worshippers of an Ancient God

The Sun Cult Attains the Proportions of a New Religion . . . Men and Women, the World Over, Seek Health in the Open

Whatever mar/ be the state of the weather when this article appears, the calendar tells us that *‘fair spring is retvruing” and soon the beaches will be dotted with bathers in search of tan.

The following article discusses, in a breezy way, the amazing growth of the modern sun-cult. SHE sun, that mighty deity whom the ancients worshipped, Is claiming a new host of 20th century devotees. He who was known as Mithras of the Persians, Phoebus Apollo of the Greeks, Kinich-Ahau of the Nahua Indians, Ra of the Egyptians and the crossword puzzlers, Hhs become the god of debutantes and stenographers, bank clerks and the garment industry, writes Mildred Adams in the New York “Times.”

The modern sun cult has attained almost the proportions of a new religion. In „it.y and country it numbers its members by the hundreds of thousands. It has its miracles of healing and its known stigmata, its ritual and its anointing oils. The making of its ceremonial garments absorbs whole industries.

The worshippers lie for hours prone before the majesty of the sun. They wear garments specially designed to bare to his rays as much of their bodies as their consciences or the police will permit. They anoint themselves with oil sold at a high price. They indulge in dances and caperings of a peculiar type. And they sing the praises of the sun or writhe under his ministrations according to temperament and the composition of their skins.

Even those who cannot go to beaches join in this rising tids of worship. Every backyard garden, every window that opens to the morning snn has its possibilities. And for those unfortunate ones who live all day without the touch of a single ray, there are always the “sunlight” lamps. It is a nice question as to what forces picked up the idea and spread a sudden desire for sunshine and its visible effects over the entire world. Idealists would like to believe that the people, investigating medical doctrine and accepting It as sober fact, went deliberately forth to get what was good for them, and took to sun baths with an avidity they had never shown for splnch, sleep or orthopaedic shoes. Observers of feminism link It up with the whole trend toward sports for women, freedom of movement and the casting off of hampering clothes.

Cynics say dryly that it was the force of commerce concentrating on a new fad and using medical phrases as a camouflage to sell expensive equip ment, and new sets of clothes. Moralists, less concerned with causes than with conditions, murmur portentous things about "irresponsible tendencies toward exhibitionism.” Whatever the causes, the fact remains that the sun is definitely de regueur. It is the most fashionable of heavenly bodies. The tan that it imparts to its devotees is an integral part of smart costumes for morning, noon and night. Women who used to go bathing in stockings and long sleeves, who played tennis in hats veiled to protect their complexions, have now thrown away hats, sleeves and stockings and cut the necks out of their dresses. One must be tanned, naturally if possible, or if the skin protests too much, artificially. The smartest girls come into town looking like figures moulded in old Cordovan leather. And advertising, that banner and barometer of the mode, displays it 3 loveliest ladies with the aid of a mysterious process which gives them faces and arms and legs as dark as those of the much photographed Amanullah of Afghanistan. It is generally agreed that the fashion came from Europe and started in the summer of 1925. In that year a certain fashion scout, hot on the trail of novelties that might be made and sold by the hundred gross, went to Deauville, which was that year the most fashionable resort on the most fashionable Continent. To her astonishment she found the erstwhile lilywhite princesses, the exiled countesses and the wealthy Americans parading skins of the deepest tan. On the beach in the morning, in the Casino, the restaurants, on the dance floors, they looked like bare-armed, stockingless, unveiled Moorish beauties. And to heighten the effect they wore a great deal of white, which, against their brown skin, took on an air of exotic beauty. * Although as iu most modern religions it is the women who have borne the brunt of the work in this sun cult, the men have not escaped. Even its youngest disciples toddle about in the scantiest play suits that ever shortened trousers to the vanishing point and made what pretended to bo a blouse out of a skeleton webbing of straps. If modern educators are correct in claiming that the course of a child’s life is fixed by what happens to him before he Is six, there should arise ten years hence a young army

of crusaders bent on spreading the doctrine of few clothes and much tanned skin over all lands and among all peoples. Modern sun worship demands of its neophytes certain sacrifices in the way of peeling noses and shoulders that shrink under tweed coats. But it was much severer with its ancient subjects. It is told of the priests who sacrificed to the Mexican sun on the great pyramidal temples of Chichen Itza that, not content with giving up the outside of bodies to be burned, they tore out their hearts, and offered them up, still beating, as a living sac rifice to the giver of life. The great sun dances of the American Indians have been in great measure stopped by the ’government because of the torture to which they gave rise. So far no one has thought of legislating against the clerk who gives up his body to an all-day blistering in the hope of acquiring a week-end tan. The sages of the Chaldees and the men who built the Tower of Babel were sun worshippers. So were the Egyptians, and the stunted, woollyheaded folk who scuttle among the Australian bush. To the Dravidians of India the sun was as much of a malignant demon as it is to the man who tries to put a stiff collar around a sunburned neck. But the modern fashion of worship by exposure w-ould meet with little favour among the ancient subjects of the sun. Desert people, many of them, they knew his wrath and feared his stroke as surely as they did that of the lightning. To most of them he was the god of fertility, the power that made their fields green, that, brought the fruitfulness of summer after the barren cold of the winter. On their cops and their animals they asked his blessing, but his was no power with which a careful man would trifle. He could send down delicious warmth, but he could also scorch the young leaves and send fever and famine to slaves and cattle. They would think it blasphemy to ask of him only the tanned skin which was theirs by right of birth. But the modern, be he lifeguard or manufacturer, is a pragmatist. To him the cult is business and he cares only to know if it works. A tanned skin, his own or" that of the populace, is fashionable and will earn him admiration and profit. Therefore he does his bit to encourage the cult. And the great city beaches strewn with human joints and sides in every conceivable position, look to unaccustomed eyes like nightmare butcher shops. The streets are thronged with distressingly bumpy aukles and discoloured legs that even the sheerest stockings disguised. It all calls for stoicism of the hardiest variety. Under pain of ostracism one must not sigh for vanished illusions or the lost charm of draperies. For this is 1929, and at all costs one must be frank I and free.