Light and Life from the Sun God Helios
SCIENTIFIC PAGANISM
Silver tetradrachm (4 drachmas) of the island of Rhodes depicting Sun god Helios, 205-190 BCE. Courtesy Ebedokle Collection, Numismatic Museum, Athens.
Prologue
A Greek friend from Canada, Dr. Nikos Chrystodoulou, sent me an article about an American company, Cambrian Nuclear, working with Athlos Energy, a Greek nuclear company founded in 2024, and the Greek government, potentially planning to build a nuclear power factory in Greece. But because Greece is not free of earthquakes, most likely these companies are recommending to Greek government officials a floating nuclear power plant on the waters of the Aegen Sea. Dr. Chrystodoulou, a nuclear power engineer with 22 years of working experience for the Chalk River Nuclear Labs and 6 years for Canada’s Nuclear Safety Commission, said to me in an email that the announcement about nuclear power plants in Greece must have been some kind of a joke. However, before I address the irresponsible and dangerous nuclear electricity proposal, I will travel back in time to see how the ancient Greeks treated the Sun, source for life-giving, inexhaustible and harmless energy.
Sun God Helios
For thousands of years, the Greeks expressed their ευσέβεια / eusebeia / respect / veneration for several gods. Homer and Hesiod, great epic poets of the late 13th century BCE, defined the gods. They were divine anthropomorphic beings, icons of the enormous powers of nature and the Cosmos. They were human-like polymaths, which sometimes specialized in a major interest or field of knowledge or what Greeks called πολιτισμός / civilization.
For example, the chief god and father of the Olympian gods, Zeus, mirrored immense power and everlasting justice. He protected the family, foreigners visiting Greece, Panhellenic games like the Olympics, and civilization. His daughter, Athena, was the goddess of intelligence, war and freedom. She protected Athens. Hephaistos was the personification of metallurgy, engineering and advanced technology. Demetra, sister of Zeus, was the Earth herself, Gaia / Ge. She inspired and helped Greeks to cultivate wheat and other bread-making crops. She was family farming and prosperous countryside. The Greeks credited her for their agriculture and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Dionysos, son of Zeus, was, like Demetra, a pillar of rural life and Hellenic civilization. He was wine, theater, tragedy and freedom. The theater of Dionysos was for centuries a school of democracy and freedom. Other gods included Apollo, god of light, prophesy and music; Aphrodite, goddess of love; Artemis, goddess of wildlife and the natural world; Hermes, god-messenger and god of music, and Ares, god of war.
In addition to these Olympian gods, there were demi-gods like Herakles and countless lesser divinities all over the land and waters. The Greeks also worshipped the natural world and the Cosmos. The stars were gods. This devotion to the stars also explains the Antikythera Mechanism for an exact knowledge of the eclipses of the Sun god Helios and the Moon. More about the celestial computer bellow.
The Sun god Helios was by far the most important of all gods. He gave light and life to humans, the natural world of the Earth and the Cosmos. Helios married the Nymph Rhodos, daughter of the goddesses Amphitrite or Aphrodite. Helios moved to Rhodes with his wife. The island Rhodes honored Helios. It adopted the name of his wife, Rhodos. It built a colossal metal statue of Helios, which was a marvel of technology and sculpture. It was sculpted by Chares of Lindos, an artist from Rhodes, in the years 294-282 BCE. Chares was student of Lysippos who did portraits of Alexander the Great. The statue took the human form of Helios. Its legs stranded the entrance of the harbor of Rhodes.
The Colossus of Rhodes was a huge statue of Helios, patron god of Rhodes. Painting by Louis de Caullery, 17th century. Louvre. Wikipedia Commons.
Rhodes: Pharos / Lighthouse of science and technology
Rhodes probably benefited for its devotion to the Sun god Helios. It shined in science and technology. Hipparchos, the great Greek astronomer of the second century BCE, set up his astronomy lab in Rhodes. He probably designed and built with his technical team the Antikythera Mechanism, an astronomical computer of genius. This toothed-geared Promethean machine was 2,000 years ahead of its time. It predicted the eclipses of the Sun and the Moon, including the date of the Panhellenic athletic and religious festivals like the Olympics. In an article I wrote in 2025, I add that the Antikythera computer also: “brought the heavens nearer to Earth and into human understanding. It served as an accurate calendar of human events and a calendar of the celestial universe, a moving map of the constellations and a mirror of nature and the heavens.”
Modern scientists have been studying the fragments of the Antikythera computer for some 125 years. They have called its front side the Cosmos. At the very center of that Cosmos we see the golden sphere of the Sun, as well as pointers of the Moon and other planets. The front and back of the device is full of inscriptions explaining the Cosmos.
One of those scientists who studied the fragments of the Antikythera Mechanism is my friend and colleague Xenophon Moussas, former professor of space physics and astronomy at the University of Athens.
Inscriptions in gold yellow citing Sun god Helios. The largest surviving gear A, which includes 27 of the surviving 30 gears. Moussas incorporated fragment A, in blue, on the inscriptions. Courtesy Xenophon Moussas.
The fall of ancient Greece
Despite the privileged position of ancient Hellas / Greece in gorgeous art, architecture, science, technology and civilization, and the unprecedented genius, power and influence of Alexander the Great, Hellas fell victim to its own antagonisms and foreign conquests.
The Romans annexed Greece in 146 BCE. Some 500 years later, in the fourth century of our own era, the Roman emperor Constantine started the Christianization of Hellas and the Roman Empire. This was the equivalent of blasting Hellas and Rome with a nuclear bomb: massive destruction of the temples, schools, stadia, theaters, government buildings. Books and libraries went up in flames.
Christianity was a Jewish heresy centered on one god. Telling the ancient Greeks they had to abandon their beautiful gods and gorgeous temples like the Parthenon for a crucified Jew named Jesus was the signing of their death sentences.
The early Christian emperors and heads of the new “Orthodox” church pushed the ancient Greeks off the cliff. They desolated Hellas. Merely 1 percent of ancient Greek writings survived the Christian holocaust. “Christian” Greeks to this day remain somewhat schizophrenic about the authenticity of their civilization. Is it Hellenic or Christian or a marriage of the two? Some of them and genetic science say they are indeed the children of the ancient and medieval (Byzantine) Greeks, that is, Minoans, Myceneans, classical and medieval Greeks. The Science magazine reported in 2017: “The Greeks really do have near-mythical origins.” This recognition is a huge honor and confirmation of history, especially at times that most of Western “scholars” are saying directly or in diplomatic language that modern Greeks have nothing to do with ancient Greeks. Many of these so-called classical scholars study the ancient Greeks for reasons that justify the looting of Hellenic archaeological treasures by their countries and, possibly, by themselves. World-class museums are full of stolen Greek antiquities: like the British Museum in London, Louvre in Paris, the Getty Museum in California, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other major museums in Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and Russia.
In fact, Nazi Germans became model of looting. They occupied Greece, April 1941-October 1944. They came close to wiping out Greece. They also stole thousands of Hellenic treasures from Greek museums and illegal excavations. German museums have the audacity to exhibit these looted treasures. And because a WWII and post-WWII Greece fought a British and German instigated civil war , 1943-1949, it failed to demand the return of its stolen treasures.
Another factor that keeps Greece weak and pilotless was America’s Cold War that brought Greece and Greece’s eternal enemy, Turkey, in America’s military camp of NATO. That political conflict of the US-NATO and communist Soviet Union / Russia paralyzed Greece, allowing the American-licensed Turkey in 1974 to invade and capture half of the Greek island of Cyprus.
Floating nuclear plant in the Aegean?
This very brief overview of Greek history explains even utterly inconceivable events like the Greek and American nuclear companies scheming with Greek government officials for potentially approving a floating nuclear power plant in the Aegean.
My friend, Dr. Chrystodoulou in Canada, is unhappy about such a prospect. He is concerned that modern Greece has zero experience with extremely complicated and dangerous nuclear power. What are they going to do with the “spent” fuel, he asks. It remains “hot” for thousands of years. In an email, he expressed his worries: “Greece has no experience in any of these [nuclear power plant] problems, and given their abysmal lack of safety in trains, what possible trust can one have in a decision to bring nuclear power to this country? They haven’t even automated the system that is designed to avoid head-on [train] collisions, and which could have prevented the Tempi disaster [in 2023], and one can trust them to operate nuclear power plants that are quite complicated machines [?]…. I think this suggestion [by the Greek and American nuclear company of floating nuclear power plants in Greece]… is not well thought out, and frankly, I can only characterize it as a joke or πυροτέχνημα [fire work].”
Those in the Greek government who contemplate such insane proposal ought to immediately drop it. They should remember this most basic fact: Greece does not need nuclear power plants.
They know, or should know, that Greece for millennia has been a solar country. Rhodes was the home of Helios. Christianity has abolished even the name Sun god Helios but cannot do away with geography and civilization — and the current emergency of climate chaos. Like it or not, solar power is the present and the future, no matter what President Trump and the oil companies and petroleum wars say about climate. To design a floating nuclear power plant in the Aegean is to risk catastrophic poisoning of the Aegean and, second, create a perfect target for the genocidal country of Turkey that persist (1) in its occupation of half of Cyprus and (2) keeping up its aggression against Greece to the point of calling the Aegean its “blue homeland.”
Epilogue
The Greek government must finally get serious and accept the historical fact that it is governing Greeks intimately connected to the giants of Greek science and civilization and military genius: Homer, Thales, Lykourgos, Solon, Kleisthenes, Herakleitos, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Demokritos, Miltiades, Themistokles, Herodotos, Thucydides, Aristarchos of Samos, Aeschylos, Sophokles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Pericles, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Alexander the Great, Hipparchos, Ptolemaios, Plutarch, Galen, Plethon, Rigas Pheraios, Adamantios Koraes, Theodoros Kolokotrones, Dionysios Solomos, Ioannes Kapodistrias, Alexandros Papadiamantis, Andreas Laskaratos, K. P. Kavafis, Odysseas Elytes, Kostis Palamas, George Seferis and Mikis Theodorakis.
The implication of accepting this truth is the reexamination of both domestic and foreign policy of the country. The Greeks who fought and defeated the vast Persian empire (in 490 and 480-479 BCE) were patriots whose virtues treasured freedom above all else. Freedom or death was their flag. The Greeks defeated the Italians in 1940 for the same reason. The Greeks of 2026 can do the same thing — should their genocidal Turkish neighbors dare to enter the Aegean.
The same Hellenic thinking leads to the conclusion that toxic imports like nuclear power plants or giant windmills or biocidal farm chemicals must be rejected because they defile Hellas. The Sun god Helios remains the most reliable and appropriate source for energy for Hellas — in 2026.
Recreate the Colossus of Rhodes. Open another Hipparchos school in Rhodes for advanced studies in astronomy and Antikythera-like computers of genius. Invite China to establish a Helios factory in Rhodes and another in Peloponnesos or Thrace. These factories would manufacture electric cars, buses, trains, trams and solar panels for the complete solar electrification and transportation of the country.
