As the various astronomical figures became endowed by the ancients with divine honours, each of these signs became associated with a number of romantic stories, until at length the struggles, victories, and defeats of the gods were told in such a variety of ways that sufficient lore existed to fill, if written down, whole libraries. The zodiacal signs were all gods of great importance; the planets were gods, the sun was a god, the moon was a goddess, and the extra-zodiacal constellations were either gods or heroes; but all were not of equal importance, and, owing to the constant changing of positions, some were powerful and victorious at one time and weak and dying at another. The chief deity, which to the Aryans was Dyaus, the day-father, became in later times a concentrated essence of all the gods, and was supposed to undergo all the vicissitudes to which they were subjected; but, inasmuch as the new-born sun was the life of the world, bringing back happiness, and the vernal equinoxial sign was the one at which his influence began to be felt, these two deities were looked upon as god _par excellence_, a dual deity, separate yet conjoined, and of equal power and authority. So, when the bull was the vernal equinoxial point, the sun-in-_Taurus_ was supreme god; and when the ram, or lamb, was the vernal equinoxial point the sun-in-_Aries_ was supreme God; and, although it was only in March that the sun was at the vernal equinoxial point, yet the bull-god, for two thousand years prior to B.C. 2188, was always supreme, and the ram-god (in Egypt) or lamb-god (in Persia) after that date. On leaving the vernal equinoxial sign the sun passed into the next in order; but, although then not actually in conjunction with the chief sign, it yet was but slightly removed from it, the distance growing larger as each fresh sign was occupied; and never were the sun and the principal sign actually separated from each other in the zodiac, so as to pass into opposite hemispheres, until the autumnal equinoxial point was crossed, after which the sun passed successively through all the winter constellations, being separated for the space of six months from the sign of the vernal equinox. Therefore the six summer signs were accounted specially bountiful and holy, the sign of the vernal equinox being the head and chief of the six, while the six winter signs were accounted less holy, but quite as powerful for evil as the others were for good.