Why We Have Always Worshipped the Light? Long before we had electricity, central heating, vitamin D supplements or weather apps, there was the Sun. It was predictable, powerful and completely beyond human control. It gave us light, warmth and the ability to grow food. It determined when we could work, travel, hunt and rest. Without it, life as we know it would not exist.
It is hardly surprising, then, that since the beginning of recorded human history, the Sun has been treated as something far greater than simply a ball of fire in the sky. The desire to shine.
Perhaps that is why solar imagery continues to appear in fashion and interiors. We aren't necessarily thinking about Ra or Apollo when we buy a sun-shaped necklace, but somewhere underneath the aesthetics is an extremely old human association: Light = life.
If you grew up around the aesthetics of the 1990s, you probably remember the celestial obsession.
The Sun and Moon were everywhere.
Jewellery. Wall decorations. T-shirts. Tattoos. Posters. Home décor. Tarot-inspired designs. Silver pendants with faces carved into crescent moons. Golden suns with human faces. Stars scattered across everything.
There was something wonderfully mystical about it.
The Sun and Moon became a pair - two opposite forces that somehow belonged together.
Day and night.
Light and darkness.
Masculine and feminine.
Consciousness and mystery.
The visible and the hidden.
The celestial aesthetic of the 90s wasn't always particularly deep. Sometimes it was simply beautiful. Sometimes it was gloriously cheesy. But it tapped into something that humans had been fascinated by for thousands of years.
Perhaps that's why the design never really disappears. It comes back every few decades, reinvented for another generation. One moment it is bohemian jewellery, then witchy fashion, then Y2K, then minimalist gold accessories.
The symbols change.
Our relationship with them doesn't.
Because no matter how modern we become, we are still biological creatures living on a planet
There is another reason I cannot think about the Sun without thinking about colour. The Sun is where colour begins.
Technically, sunlight looks white to us, but white sunlight is actually made up of a whole spectrum of visible wavelengths - the colours we know as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. When sunlight passes through a prism, or when it is dispersed by tiny water droplets in the atmosphere, those different wavelengths separate and reveal the rainbow hidden inside what initially looked like simple white light.
In other words, colour is everywhere around us because of light.
And suddenly the Sun isn't just responsible for making the world visible.
It is responsible for making the world colourful.
Without light, colour disappears. Take away the sunlight and the bright red of a flower becomes a dark shape. A turquoise sea loses its sparkle. Green leaves become almost black silhouettes. Gold stops glowing. Even the most colourful outfit looks completely different under dull, artificial light.
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