Scarcely less prevalent than sex worship was the worship of the sun. While sex worship was confined chiefly to the generation of human life, sun worship comprehended the generation of all life. The sun was recognized as the generative power of the universe. He overshadows the receptive earth from whom all life is born. I quote from M. Soury: "Amid all these forces, the mightiest is, without contradiction, the sun, the fire of heaven, father of earthly fire, unique and supreme cause of motion and life on our planet. There is no need or reason to understand that the very life, and as it were the blood of our celestial father flows in the veins of the Earth, our mother. In the time of love, when the luminous heaven embraces her, from her fertilized womb springs forth a world. It is she who quivers on the plains where the soft moist air waves gently on the grasses; it is she who climbs in the bush, who soars in the oak, who fills the solitude with the joyous twitter of birds beneath the cloudlet, or from the leaf-lined nests; it is she who in seas and in running waters, or mountains and in woods, couples the gorgeous male with the ardent female, throbs in every bosom, loves in every life. But all this terrestrial life, all this warmth and all this light are but effluents from the sun." (Religion of Israel, pp. 3, 4.) Prof. Tyndall says: "We are no longer in a poetical but in a purely mechanical sense, the children of the sun." "The sun," said Napoleon Bonaparte, "gives all things life and fertility. It is the true God of the earth." John Newton, M.R.C.S., of England, says: "The glorious sun, that 'god of this world,' the source of life and light to our earth, was early adored, and an effigy thereof used as a symbol. Mankind watched with rapture its rays gain strength daily in the Spring, until the golden glories of Midsummer had arrived, when the earth was bathed during the longest days in his beams, which ripened the fruits that his returning course had started into life. When the sun once more began its course downwards to the winter solstice, his votaries sorrowed, for he seemed to sicken and grow paler at the advent of December, when his rays scarcely reached the earth, and all nature, benumbed and cold, sunk into a death-like sleep. Hence feasts and fasts were instituted to mark the commencement of the various phases of the solar year, which have continued from the earliest known period, under various names, to our own times" (The Assyrian Grove). The most prominent deities in the pantheons of the gods were solar deities. Among these were Osiris, Vishnu, Mithra, Apollo, Hercules, Adonis, Bacchus, and Baal. In the worship of some of these gods sex and solar worship were united.