Light and Life from the Sun God Helios

SCIENTIFIC PAGANISM

Evaggelos Vallianatos

 June 24, 2026

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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 13^th 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.

Evaggelos Vallianatos, Ph.D., is a historian and ecological-political theorist. He studied zoology and history, Greek and European, at the University of Illinois and Wisconsin. He did postdoctoral studies in the history of science at Harvard. He worked on Capitol Hill and the US Environmental Protection Agency; taught at several universities, and authored hundreds of articles and several books, including Poison Spring (2014), The Antikythera Mechanism (2021), Freedom (2025) and Earth on Fire: Brewing Plagues and Climate Chaos in Our Backyards (World Scientific, 2026).

Animals in the Universe

Laurel Thompson

 June 24, 2026

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Image by Arnaud Mariat.

Fatal physics

Astrophysicists analyzed light and energy into their components, and figured out how they work together to form stars, black holes, supernovas. Observation of a red shift showed them that galaxies are moving away from us faster than previously thought. If all objects started from the same point, the universe is 13.58 billion years old and will probably exist for another 19 or 20 billion years when star formation will have ceased and galaxies will have burned out. It will continue expanding indefinitely, collapse into a hot nuclear state like the one that preceded the Big Bang, or else be torn apart by the mysterious gravitational force of dark energy. Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, so it appeared relatively early in the universe’s life, and is now halfway through its expected existence. Multi-celled animals appeared 600 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion. Homo sapiens emerged roughly 800,000 years ago. Irrespective of global warming, the Sun will get hotter and brighter as it ages. It will evaporate the oceans, degrade the atmosphere and eventually engulf Earth. The last animals will die out as early as 500 million years from now.

Fatal abundance

Unless there is an emergency like an earthquake or a flood, it is the world of images and words that dominates peoples’ attention in a fast-moving powerhouse like the North American economy. An interesting and absorbing secondary reality replaces the one around us that we see and touch and depend upon to survive. This secondary reality is made of language and is built upon models controlled by people who own property. It portrays government as the dutiful partner to investors who must be kept happy so that so that they don’t leave the country, and working people can continue to have jobs so that they earn the wherewithal to buy more things. Fast talkers monitor the abundance of man-made objects that spill out of shops and fill peoples’ vision as far as the eyes can see. They tell stories that advertise the use of products, and manicure the boxes that greet your eyes when you open up on Google. After the Civil War, abolitionists were defenceless against aggrieved white landowners who persuaded Andrew Johnson to change the outcome of the battle they had fought so hard to win. Plantation owners re-asserted their right to determine the fate of former slaves. They had the President’s ear, and since not enough programs were put in place to help freedmen and freedwomen get on their feet and start a new life, white peoples’ hokum made people forget about the reality of whips and chains until the 1970s.

People can both sense and talk at the same time, you might argue, but talking uses linguistic representations, and they belong to a different form of knowledge from sense perception. Representations belong to language, and language is a tool for promoting self and getting control over the world. Perception, on the other hand, is not about control. It just receives what exists. Listens. Savours. Perception is sensing what is there. It registers the reality of what exists and picks up on patterns in it. What exists is the universe.

The two behaviours are very different, representing and receiving, yet representations tend to take precedence when you are surrounded by talkers, and live in a place where manufacturing and selling objects are key to survival. The whole project of North America is a race to manufacture things that can be sold on the market so that you earn enough money to keep a roof over your head. Except for Mennonites and Doukabours, there is no other vision except make a buck.

And manufactured objects are attention traps. They are interesting to look at. They take attention to get working. They require attention if they do not work. They require energy to keep on functioning. They heat up the atmosphere. Their demands steal time away from sensing where you are. The yawning freezer on the other side of the horizon, and the endless kilometres you must travel before you meet a dust particle or a chunk of rock? Hidden by the abundance of things floating around in your field of vision, or else waiting to be put away in the front living room. North Americans have so much stuff, they don’t need reality anymore.

Fatalistic thinking

Capitalist formation occurred early in Europe’s history because the habit of extraction and exploitation created a strong push towards upward wealth redistribution. Persuaded by punishments like the rack, and property-owners’ voices, peasants found it hard to resist co-optation into a system of hierarchical control. Industrialization simply reinforced deeply structural and historical relations. Colonized by the British and the Normans during the 12th century, Ireland was under Catholic rule when Oliver Cromwell chopped off the head of Charles I and used his New Model Army to confiscate large amounts of Royalists’ land, much of which he gave to Protestant settlers in the form of plantations. Thousands of Catholic peasants were shipped to the Caribbean and North America as indentured servants.

Karl Marx read William Howitt’s Colonization and Christianity (1838) at the British Museum, and later on, Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) gave him a lively account of Iroquois culture in North America. Maybe nations didn’t have to go through the stage of capital formation first if they could find a way to resurrect indigenous communalism? By 1880, several colonial revolts e.g. Haiti, Algeria, Taiping, Sepu, Ireland, Africa, told him that peasant populations were capable of figuring things out on their own. In the Russian mir he found a form of communalism that was still viable.

Marx and Engels analyzed the American Civil War for the New York Tribune, but they never actually visited the United States. Despite its not having a feudal past to pave the way for capitalist development the way Europe did, North Americans would not be where the first socialist revolution would occur, in any case. Cheap land gave workers an outlet for their frustration. Slavery undermined solidarity across racial lines. White supremacy emerged victorious after the Civil War. Capital accumulation was on a fast track where work was key to wealth, and wealth was the only object of work. Indigenous people had been severely reduced in number. Given the fast turnover in products, inventors could reach a high standard of living simply by pinching pennies and working hard. After 1776, American capitalists would go to war at least 400 times in search of new markets i.e. the Mexican War.

Socialism didn’t stand a chance. Fake diamonds. Fake croissants. Fake penicillin. Anything to make a buck. No sales tax on financial asset exchanges means that stocks can be sold easily at no cost. When private equity firms purchase companies that went bankrupt there is no requirement that they take responsibility for the purchased company’s liabilities. Patent monopolies protect inventions from being copied by competitors. Lax laws hand enormous wealth to a tiny group of mostly white Europeans.

A legitimate question

So why did the universe encourage fish, elephants and whales to evolve on Earth if American settlers were going to duplicate Europe’s class system, steal resources from the Global South, and change the climate with their manufactured products? Why did it even bother to invent horses and giraffes in the first place if they were going to get asphyxiated in half a billion years when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere gets too low for photosynthesis to occur so all the plants will die. Is the universe some kind of fiend?

This question becomes pertinent as European nations convince themselves that a sick ethno-state is worth protecting from international law, and that re-armament is necessary to thwart an attack by Putin who has the nerve to dislike seeing Russian schools punctured by Ukrainian drones. What virus infects Merz’s brain to make him so paranoid he wants to start a war with the most nuclear-armed country on the planet, that lost 27 million people fighting the Nazis during World War Two, and for whom any attacks on its soil are existential? Does he want to kill all animals prematurely?

Fatal physics, fatal abundance, and fatalistic thinking have led Northern Europeans to a place with no exit. Long before frogs and rabbits will have a chance to croak their last croak and hop their last hop, they submitted themselves to vision of racial and intellectual superiority that reduced the universe to a machine, that destroyed the climate, and made citizens subservient to fascists, Zionists and tech bros. Meanwhile, the universe just watches. It is looking for evidence of awareness of its ominous presence, but all it hears are more speeches, and more bombs. 500 million years is a long time, long enough to wake up and get control over the insidious ideology that made white people think they are the smartest folks in the room. Would the universe have liked them better if instead of words and images, they’d followed the Moon the way indigenous people do? The universe doesn’t do likes. You have to like it.

This is part one of two.

HOMOEROTIC VIOLENCE

Ritual, Power and the Weekend Arena

Gary M. Feinman

 June 24, 2026

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Trump meets with UFC fighters in the Oval Office, on May 6, 2026. Official White House Photo by Molly Riley.

In a March 2026 paper published in the journal Science Advances, which focused on variability in governance along the autocratic-democratic axis, my coauthors and I found that one of the strongest associations for the 40 case observations, which were part of our study, was between the nature of rituals and the concentration of power.

For this global sample, autocratically organized societies were characterized by spectacles that foment fear and awe, while participatory rituals predominated in more democratically organized contexts. For example, in the region where I study (Oaxaca, Mexico), when governance was typified by distributed power relations, the pre-Hispanic rubber ball game was played in a large court adjacent to a broad, flat open plaza, the Main Plaza at Monte Albán, a space that could accommodate many of the settlement’s inhabitants. Later, however, as political power became more concentrated, the size of ball courts was reduced, access to them became more restricted, and some were even built immediately adjacent to the houses or palaces of ruling families.

Social scientists have long recognized that communal rituals are a universal human experience that binds people together in various ways. Spectacles, often rich in disorienting noise, shock, and awe, tend to captivate observers through the powerful figures at the center of the spectacle, who inspire fear and wonderment, reinforcing authoritarian cults of personality. In contrast, participatory rituals like communal dancing, singing, or chanting tend to instill camaraderie among participants, solidarity, and trust among those involved. As a student of history and a sports fan, the mirrored reflections of the past provide an analytical perspective about the final Knicks game on June 13, a sports agenda that cannot be ignored.

During the 2026 National Basketball Association playoff between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs, Madison Square Garden, the storied home of the Knicks, once again became like a civic commons after a 53-year championship drought. The competitiveness of the Knicks during the playoffs elevated the space from merely being a site of entertainment to a participatory ritual arena. The crowd did not passively observe; it chanted, rose, groaned, anticipated, and collectively willed momentum into existence. One needed to only look at the faces in the stands—season ticket holders and first-timers, celebrities and subway riders alike—to notice that the sight was closer to what might be considered an integrative ritual: one in which meaning is not imposed from above but generated, often with spontaneity, among participants.

Basketball, by definition, is a team sport, but this is typified by the game that the Knicks currently play. It is not about consistent domination by a central figure. Even the most celebrated player, Jalen Brunson, depends on coordination, timing, and trust in his teammates. The drama unfolds collectively, and its outcome remains contingent on who makes a foul shot and who grabs a rebound. Participation matters—not just symbolically but materially. The arena amplifies the idea, however imperfectly enacted, that communal engagement shapes outcomes. And these outcomes transcended the arenas where the Knicks games were played, stimulating joy and collective actions, and bringing people together in the desire for a common outcome.

By contrast, the spectacle of an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, staged in a garish steel cage, on the grounds of the White House on June 14 operated on a fundamentally different ritual logic. It was not designed for mutual participation but for spectacle: with the concentration of attention onto a staged center, where one-on-one conflict and mayhem are distilled into physical dominance and symbolic submission. The audience’s role is not to join but to witness—to be awed, to see blood and hear pain, be unsettled, and ultimately to orient themselves toward the figures who command the stage and oversee the event.

The choice of venue was not incidental. The White House has long functioned as a site of state ritual. But traditionally, those rituals—press briefings, public ceremonies, even contentious protests beyond its gates—are tethered, at least aspirationally, to norms of decorum, accountability, and public engagement. Introducing a choreographed combat spectacle into that space shifts its symbolic significance. It recasts a locus of governance into an arena of performance, where the aesthetic of dominance and self-promotion, by a small network of cronies, overshadows any ethical prospect of leading to wider participation.

This is precisely the distinction our comparative work on governance and ritual helps illuminate. When power is broadly distributed, rituals tend to be inclusive, iterative, and co-constructed. They require participants to see one another as collaborators in a shared process, even when competition is involved. In contrast, when power is tightly concentrated, rituals often become spectacles—staged experiences that reinforce hierarchy, channel emotions toward a focal point, and reduce the audience to spectators instead of actors. The Knicks, for all the commercialism of modern sports, still lean toward the former model. Their playoff games invited identification not with an owner but with a collective—however abstract—called a team, a city, a fan base. Victory was widely shared across an entire metropolitan area, communally. The ritual binds laterally, person-to-person.

A UFC spectacle staged in the orbit of political power points in the other direction. It binds vertically. The emotional energy of the crowd is drawn upward and inward, toward a center that is insulated from participation. The unpredictability of sport is replaced by an orchestrated spectacle; even the violence, ostensibly raw, is framed and contained to produce maximum symbolic effect. None of this is to suggest that one form of ritual is wholly virtuous and the other entirely malign. Spectacle has always been part of human societies, and participatory rituals can exclude to the same extent as they can include. Madison Square Garden is not immune to hierarchy, nor is fandom evenly accessible. But the contrast remains as glaring as instructive because it reveals not just different entertainments, but different models of how people relate to power—and to one another.

At stake is more than this season’s recreational programming. Rituals, whether ancient ball games in Mesoamerica or modern sporting events in New York, are not peripheral to political life; they are constitutive of it. They shape how individuals experience belonging, authority, and agency. They encode assumptions about who acts and who is meant to watch. The event at the White House reinforces values such as “might makes right” and life is a “zero-sum game.”

Alternatively, in an era when democratic practices often feel attenuated, the spaces where participation is still enacted—even imperfectly—carry heightened significance, thereby fostering shared aims and emphasizing the potential win-win-win outcomes that interdependence and collaborative action can generate. The roar of a crowd that believes its collective voice matters stands in quiet contrast to spectacles that ask only for attention, passivity, and allegiance.

We would do well to recognize the difference.

This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Gary M. Feinman is a MacArthur Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois.