Amaterasu

The rain has gone away - for the moment - and myself, and this very wet, green world I live in, must take a moment to welcome the sun. The image above - The Loom of Amaterasu - was created in 2009, around the same as Botticelli's Blue Egg and, in a sense, is its sister image. Both were reformatted and revised in 2010.

Taken from the New World Encyclopedia (linked above): "The idea of the sun as a goddess, instead of as a god, is rare and it may be a survival from the most archaic stage of world mythology. Amaterasu was seen as the highest manifestation of Kunitokotachi, the unseen, transcendent yet immanent, spirit of the universe. Her myths are the most important of the indigenous Japanese faith, Shinto, "the way of the gods," a set of ancient beliefs and observances which have remained comparatively unchanged over the past millennium, despite the importation of Confucianism and Buddhism."