There are two suns, summer and winter, bright and dark or stormy, and these are seen daily when the sun crosses the heavens bright, then sinks to the west darkening and remains dark through the night until dawn. The sun god therefore exists as twins—a bright twin and a dark twin. The god of the full year—the complete annual movement of the sun though the zodiac—is divided into its two half yearly parts—the good god, and his twin, the evil god. In solar mythology, the sun god has two twin sons.

These gods represent the summer and the winter but which is which depends on where you are. In the northern climates, the good god is the bright and light summer sun, while the wicked god is the dark and cold winter sun. In the ancient near east, the good god was the stormy sun of winter which brought the rains, while the wicked god was the fiercely burning hot sun of summer that scorched the earth and parched the vegetation. Either way, their lives are intertwined in the annual cycle, and give us the dualistic ideas that preceded the regression to monotheism. The crucified one, in the ancient near east, paradoxically, is the dark twin which is why saviour gods often have a dark or black complexion.

The summer “bright” sun god is born at the winter solstice, and the increasing hours of lightness in the day show him growing in strength until he reaches his greatest power, the summer solstice—the longest day. The winter “dark” sun god, is born at the summer solstice, and the increasing hours of darkness show him growing in strength until he reaches his greatest power, the winter solstice—the longest night. As one twin grows in power, the other declines in power in an endless battle between light and darkness and good and evil. John the Baptist gives us pause for thought when he says of Jesus:

He must increase, but I must decrease.

Jn 3:30

A relic of the original belief in the dual solar nature of the Christian myth, it must have been said at the birth of the summer sun at the winter solstice, for, in this myth, John is the winter sun, as his association with water makes clear. He is Oannes, the Babylonian equivalent (Ea), born at the summer solstice and dying at the spring equinox. 24 June, the end of the summer solstice, was supposedly the birth date of John the Baptist in the Christian calendar, who was born six months before Jesus, according to gospel tradition. In fact, “Jesus” is not a separate god but a title of John—Saviour. The gentile Churches deliberately confused the tradition to distinguish Christians from the followers of John the Baptist. Both were Nazarenes and both had the same sun god, but the Christians had to distinguish their god from the Baptists’. So they made John the Baptist the herald of Jesus.

In the gospel stories, Jesus actually has a twin called Thomas but that is not his name. It simply means twin, as does his New Testament surname, Didymus. He takes no part in the drama except to doubt the resurrection for which he demands proof and is allowed to put his hand into the god’s spear wound. This is the mythical relic of the spear wound being caused at his hand.

The gospels also count among the apostles John and James of Zebedee who are brothers and rivals. John is the same winter sun. James is a rendering of the Hebrew Jacob, and Jacob in the Jewish scriptures is the twin brother and rival of Esau. Jacob is said to mean supplanter—he supplants his brother—and Esau is said to mean hairy. John the Baptist dressed in rough clothing of camel’s hair. Christian images remarkably show John the Baptist as horned like Moses—explained away by Christians as horns of light—and even with the limbs of a satyr and cloven hooves. Esau therefore equates with John, and they are emblems of summer fertility, effectively the classical god of woods and fields, Pan. The reason is again astronomical. John the Baptist is, of course, the water carrier of Aquarius, but the summer rains in Palestine extend over December and January and so include the month of Capricorn. He is therefore also the Goat.

Like Esau, Jesus has a brother called James who supplanted him—he becomes the leader of the Nazarenes after him. He has the title, “The Just”, justice being a solar function, and perhaps particularly the harsh summer sun’s. Thus, the two solar gods of the original Christian myth are revealed as John the Baptist and James the Just, the winter and summer suns respectively, John being the Saviour—Jesus. The biblical books try their best to disguise the solar meaning underlying them, but leave enough tantalizing clues to make it evident, if not clear. The real life of a patriotic Jewish bandit has been forced into the container of this solar myth to give us Christianity.

In the complete original solar myth, each god dies when slain by their twin at the equinoxes. The winter dark sun dies at the spring equinox, when the daylight hours exceed the night time ones, while the summer bright sun dies at the autumn equinox, when the night time hours exceed the daylight ones.

In Welsh mythology, as Mike Nicholls has shown, Gronwy slays Llew and Llew slays Gronwy at each equinox in turn. Gronwy, Llew’s dark self, strikes Llew with a spear, but Llew is transformed into an eagle, an interpretation of the sun in Scorpio—the autumn equinox. Llew is the Welsh god of light, and his name means “lion.” The lion is the symbol of the bright sun god because Leo is the constellation of midsummer—the summer solstice. The goat is the symbol of the dark winter sun, being strongest in Capricorn—the winter solstice. Later, Llew kills Gronwy with a spear to have his revenge, while he is standing at the same spot, not literally, but the equivalent spot, the other equinox—Gronwy is the winter sun.

Other examples are Gwyn and Gwythyr, Balder and Hoder/Loki, Gawain and the Green Knight, Lugh and Balor, Balan and Balin, Romulus and Remus, Prometheus and Epimetheus, Merodach and Haman, Krishna and Balarama, Esau and Jacob, James the Just and John the Baptist (Jesus).

Their mode of death is by crucifixion, by transfixing with a spear, or perhaps an arrow, against a tree which thereby makes the shape of a cross with the projectile, or by being burnt on a pyre. In practice, one half of the myth is often suppressed to put more emphasis on the other which leads to salvation.

Solar myths were mixed up with the vegetation myths, the seasonal cycle that required the priests to tell the farmers the proper time to start ploughing. This needed the equinoxes to be noted easily. There is no actual cross in the sky that lets anyone know directly when the equinoxes happen, so the priests found proxies for them. The main one was the start of the year, the autumn equinox. This was noted as when the sun was in Virgo, and its sign was when the sun rose heliacally as if it was replacing the star Spica, which gave its name to the month originally (Chaitra). Spica is significant at the other equinox too because it rises just as the sun sets. The vernal equinox was when the sun was in Aries but there was no clear star marker for it. In Yehud, the sign will have been when the shafts of the dawn sun illuminated the Holy of Holies, and the orientation of the temple will have been fixed to capture the heliacal rising of Spica in Virgo. It meant that the temple was not oriented directly east but about 85 dgrees from the azimuth. H Van Dyke Parunak's revised estimate (Was Solomon's Temple Aligned to the Sun?) was 84 degrees.

More widely, the deity whose death brings on the death of vegetation is Kore at Eleusis, the daughter of Demeter, the corn Goddess. Yet elsewhere it is a dying god, Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, Osiris. The Persian religion is also unclear because Mithras and the goddess Anahita were so closely connected that Herodotus mistook Mithras as the goddess. Mithras killed the primeval bull which is likely to be the sun rising heliacally in Taurus, suggesting that Mithras is the summer half year, and the good sun of the northern tribes. Anahita does not seem to have been introduced until the Persians entered the near east in which case she would have been the Virgin sun heliacally rising as Spica in Virgo, and standing for the winter sun, the good, sun of the hot near eastern climates. Anahita was a water goddess which would mean she was associated with the winter rains that fertilised the earth. Mithras had been considered a good god in the north but now had become the bad sun of the hot season. The Persians in the fifth century swapped their calendar and made the day for celebrating Mithras an autumn day, in September. Thus the God and the Goddess stood for the same period of time, the wet season of winter.

Spica is the sheaf of corn held by Virgo, and the September sunrise might have been seen originally as the birth of Mithras, the winter sun. Virgo will have been Anahita seen as walking the land preparing it with her water, and Mithras the benevolent sun fertilised it with the water of life—semen. In spring, the winter sun died, crucified as the hot sun of the dry season rose into the sky. Anahita sacrificed a bull, the heliacal rise of Taurus, to bring back the winter sun to life, and since Mithras was the winter sun, this will be likely to have been where Herodotus made his error. The priests or priestesses of Anahita sacrificed the bull for Mithras.

In the Cybele myths, Attis is said to have been revivified as a goddess, seeming to combine the female and the male vegetative principles. The good winter sun was crucified or castrated in spring and the Virgin goddess was revived in autumn, giving birth to the good sun as the heliacal rise of the sun in Virgo. The goddess is both mother and lover of the sun god, their mutual love causing the plants to grow. She is also the old nurse, in many myths such as those of Eleusis, so that she appears in her triple aspect of Maiden, Mother and Crone.