It is conventional to conceive of the material and spiritual as being decidedly apart, separated by a veil which cannot be pierced except perhaps by Ascended Masters and Ipsissimi of occult orders. However, in prehistory, antiquity, and many pre-modern cultures the two instead appear as one, intimately tied together. This animism survives even the homogenizing onslaught of global capitalism throughout the world across societies, from the Shinto practices in Japan to the folk religions of the Dravidians, to the traditional beliefs of the Kongo people. In this way the tendency of the masses of the world to find the spiritual in the material serves as the foundation for a potential ecumenical faith - an economic religion which celebrates the universal source of all wealth and luxury.
The Sun appears as a primary object of reverence in countless cultures, and the monolatrous center of worship in several faiths: the Inca Empire revered the sun god Inti as the supreme being and the sovereignty of the Sapa Inca as derived from Solar descent. Throughout the Roman Empire at its height, soldiers embraced the mystery cult of Mithras, the solar yazata of Indo-Aryan origin, centered around the movements of the Sun and other celestial objects. As far back as the New Kingdom of Egypt, where solar deities such as Ra, Amun, and Horus were already predominant, the pharaoh Akhenaten instituted one of the first recorded montheistic religions in the worship of Aten, the Solar Disc represented not by an anthropomorphic personification but by the simple image of the Sun itself, its rays descending upon the Earth to nurture the emergence of life. Across every biosphere inhabited by humanity, the Sun is consistently a presence which makes habitation possible.
There is a fundamental truth in the Atenic myth of the Sun, reflected in the sciences of biology and political economy. Through the energy which it exudes, without gain or expectation, the Sun nourishes the vegetation of the Earth, the plantlife which in turn feeds the beasts of the field, forest and sea and ultimately humanity, transmitted through chains of consumption. Through industry, the human being’s role as homo faber, the energies of the Sun are taken and used to produce the wealth of the world: the labor power which is embodied in all products of artifice is, ultimately, solar power. And are not the black ichor, the obsidian jewels brimming with solar energy the gifts which the Sun has given to the Earth? They are treasures given to the underworld, and for disturbing the subterranean vaults to harness the powers of the dead, for practicing the sin of necromancy in such excess, we are punished by the Sun and Earth. We require a Solar Priesthood in order to ensure that the Sun’s gifts are used in such a way that does not invoke divine wrath and is conducted in accordance with the principles of general economy. That is to say, there must be an economic vanguard, trained to understand the potential and limits of growth and how best to allocate the excess energies of the world so that they do not turn on the masses. These Priests of the Sun are true aristocrats, chosen for the responsibility of leadership for their excellence, but at the same time they are servants of the people, bound by incredible social obligations and faced with incredible penalties should they fail in their duties. In this religious and economic duty, they are like the Vestals who attended to the sacred hearth of Rome, for they tend to the divine hearth which warms all of humanity, the center of the grand economic household.
These concepts were observed by Georges Bataille in his essay on political economy, The Accursed Share. While particular individuals suffer from the scarcity and poverty of wealth, the embodied energy of the Sun, in general there is in fact a superabundance of wealth, the luxurious excess of our solar sovereign which with each innovation humanity harnesses in the pursuit of growth and expanded production. However, just as this energy is the waste of the Sun, offered without gain upon the Earth and its inhabitants, soon the expansion of production outpaces the potential for growth available to humanity and we too must “waste” the gifts of the Sun. We are faced with two options: to deliberately spend it luxuriously upon great works of art and spectacle, grand monuments, hedonistic excess and great beautiful wastes, or to continue the pursuit of growth and face catastrophic destruction instead through the outbreak of violent conflict and the collective ruin of the commons. The only way that this cycle can possibly be broken is to organize the world according to the principles of a Solar economic order: the vast accumulated wealth held by the imperial metropoli must be taken and redistributed across the globe to the impoverished provinces wherever “underdevelopment,” the deliberate denial of growth, remains, while the remaining excess is dedicated to the propagation of aesthetic beauty and free time above all else. We see ways in which these Solar economic practices have been emulated, though not understood, in both the past and the present. The Marshall Plan and the Molotov Plan saw a great outpour of excess energy into the reconstruction of devastated Europe which was paired with rising living standards, and today the People’s Republic of China, in its unparalleled rate of growth, distributes its excess wealth through the Belt and Road Initiative to cultivate a new economic order independent of the existent Atlanticist thalassocracy.
The Sun, in its mythic role as our spiritual Sovereign, might be regarded as both the figure of the ideal monarch defined by generosity in the distribution of wealth, too righteous to exist perfectly among mere human beings, and the primordial “good mother,” the ancient source of nourishment which provides without gain. It is for serving these roles that the Sun is worthy of religious reverence, even beyond one’s fundamental view of reality: from the animist who thanks the Solar spirit, to the monotheist who regards it as among the Universal Architect’s greatest gifts, to the materialist who simply appreciates those things which make existence possible. If we organize ourselves in accordance with the principles of the Sun, recognizing it as the ruler of the human oikonomia, so that we might direct the excess wealth and energy of the world towards desirable, rather than destructive, ends. Ultimately, the personification of this Sun is not a singular figure, not a monarch, but the masses of the world, brimming with the solar power of labor, who the Solar Priesthood must serve and bring to understand the nature of their very power. When realized the sovereignty of the Sun, the Universal Solar Religion, is the sovereignty of the laboring masses over all matters of economic production and consumption with full consciousness of their actions. In this sense the realization of the Solar Economic Order is humanity, the Divine, coming to understand itself.