The cult of the Sun God gave the ultimate authority of cosmic fitness and rightness to every earthly manifestation of order, regularity, predictability, and--because of the sun's own position and influence--of centralized power.
Behind this cult lay an ancient perception whose truth farther scientific inquiry has demonstrated; that the phenomena of life are actually influenced by remote forces, many, like cosmic rays, long unperceived, some doubtless still to be identified, over which man himself can have little, if any, control. What was lacking in this original picture was the realization that man himself was also a cosmic event, indeed a culminating one, and possessed powers of mind derived not alone from the sun but from his own highly evolved nature. (p. 51)In this summary, Mumford recognizes a literal and figurative "central figure" to which humans living in societies invest their observation, science, and astronomy--the sun. The sun substantiates temporal realities into regularities stable enough for planning society. The relationship that learned observation of the sun has to the subsequent application of this knowledge is exemplified as it is performed by the Ancient Egyptian priest astronomers. It reveals a consolidation of understanding to a group of specialists who then convey this knowledge as power to a larger group of people. The sun, as an observable phenomenon, stands evident before all; the tracing of its circuit through the sky, over the seasons, for the duration of years is what reveals the deeper significance of the sun as a way to measure time. The observation and obedience to time is something that humans had done up to that point, but it was tethered to terrestrial changes salient to the observer that demanded action or planning. Tied to the sun, time now could reveal its more abstract features, namely the division of time into measurable units, which could be used to sunder people at once from the life cycles that punctuated their existence and toss them to the deeper well of historical time. The difference is one, also, of abstraction. Abstracting up creates the time of many generations, the collective memory of a family, its neighbors, a tribe. Through placement in historical time, persons became a people, their lives became connected to something larger and more abstract. Race, ethnicity, destiny would become the watchwords of a people whose very meaning was wrested from the details of their daily habits and written in the large, heroic outlines of history. Abstracting down creates the motion and time study, the rationalized unit of labor factored into the production of a good. Both are oppressive trajectories. The first places substantive grounding on a person's existence and does so by insinuating the individual by ancestry into an epic origin narrative with moral imperatives. The second places a rational gridwork over abject labor. Either trajectory persists through the use of numbered time whose dually ephemeral (something that passes) and concrete (something that had a duration and was counted) nature gives the observance of time a near mystical appraisal. Most importantly, counting time made it a fungible asset in the coordination of a society and in the exchange of its people's time for something of value.
That's such a subtle distinction to make. In observing the sun, we discover time, through this discovery we administer an increasingly sophisticated society whose very existence relies upon our knowledge of the sun. A sense of anxiety must have been evident to these people who cast their lot with a priesthood who purported a reality outside of their understanding that was conveyed in narrative as a more fateful and compelling feature to their lives. Lives would then have paths, all of which were fateful, and also, which this sun cult now controlled.
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