The solar mythology of Eastern Asia and other regions

One of the main clusters of episodes in the mythologies of East and Southeast Asia describes the appearance of multiple suns, whose heat threatens life. The archer shoots down all the suns except the last one. This article examines the geographical distribution and frequency of combinations of these and other solar motifs. The dominant notion of the sun as a woman in the northeastern half of Eurasia only formed in the Holocene. It contrasts with variants typical of the Americas, Oceania, and Africa. The motifs of multiple suns, shooting at the suns, and rectifying the peculiarities of the original sun combined at the same time. A similar set is reflected in ancient Chinese monuments and in the folklore of China and Southeast Asia, but in America, these motifs are rarely interconnected. In southwest Eurasia, the sun in the form of a man or a woman occurs with almost equal frequency, which is characteristic of ancient mythologies in the Near East. In general, the percentage ratio of variants in southwest Eurasia is close to the world average, while in all other regions, it is skewed in favor of one of the variants. The myth of how the moon provoked the sun to eat its children was brought by early migrants from Africa to the Sunda subcontinent. At the end of the Pleistocene, a marine transgression displaced part of the population to the north, giving rise to the genes of the Malay Negritos and the myth of the sun-eaten children in Central India. Exclusive parallels between the Balkans and Shaanxi (“The Sun Refuses Marriage”), as well as between the Balkans, India, and Madagascar (“The Cancelled Cosmic Marriage”), remain unexplained.

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