there that their bites were lethal. Eventually, the City of Sun was never built, and all the funds for this ambitious project literally went into the sand.
Besides the many localities in the vast spaces of the former Soviet Union and beyond that bear the name “sunny,” there are also a number of unbuilt Cities of Sun, for which we never stop to blast out the rocks. They are called utopias: in a long historical tradition, the idea of the possibility of organizing a settlement according to certain rational principles, with the infrastructures designed as perfectly as possible to satisfy human needs and desires and to make their collective life to the fullest extent bright and happy, is associated with the image of our central star. From Plato’s Republic, to the modern-day Solarpunk speculative fiction and the prospects for more ecological sustainable economies provided by renewed energy expansion, the spirit of solarity frames the most elevated political projects for the future.
The paramount importance of the sun for our utopian imaginations is accounted for by its radiation, which is the ultimate source of all life on Earth. That is why in antiquity it was worshipped as a demiurge, or one of the supreme gods: Ra in Egypt, Tonatiuh in Aztec culture, Surya in Hinduism, Sol Invictus in the Roman Empire are just a few names for this multifaced deity. All over the place, there were numerous gods of the sun, of both genders, corresponding to different seasons of the year and different times of the day. Just like Helios in Ancient Greece, the Slavic early deity of the sun rides the sky in a golden chariot carrying with him a bright fire shield. His name is Dazhbog, or giving-god. He gives everything: light, warmth, and wealth. In one version, he is getting old and dies every evening, but is reborn every morning; in the other, he dies in December, and then is reborn after the winter solstice. Our ancestors welcomed their sun gods returning from the darkness of the night. For them, the radiant circle observable in the sky was literally the body of god, whose rays enabled each new day.
Remaining in general faithful to the broad tradition of sun worship, Plato, the author of the reputedly first political utopia, introduces new content to this mythic worldview. In Book VI of the Republic, Socrates explains to his interlocutor, Glaucon, that there are actually two suns: the one that we see and the one that we don’t see. The sun that we see reigns in the world of visible objects. It is itself a visible object, which differs, however, from all other objects in that it also presents the source of their visibility. Why do we see objects? First, because we have eyes. Second, because there is light. Third, because there is sun, that dispenses light. Socrates addresses the sun as one “of the gods in heavens,” whose gift of light “enables our sight to see so excellently well, and makes visible objects appear.”1 The same holds for the intellectual world: just as the faculty of sight comprises the dialectics of the sun, the light, and the eyes, the faculty of thought aggregates the highest good, truth, and knowledge. Moreover, just as the physical sun gives to the objects of the visible world “not only the faculty of being seen, but also their vitality, growth, and nutriment,” so the spiritual sun gives to the objects of knowledge “not only the gift of being known,” but also “a real and essential existence.”2
Book VII of the Republic famously begins with the primal scene of philosophy which can be traced back to the age of cave dwelling. A group of people is confined in a cavern that most notably resembles a cinema theater. They are shackled and can only sit still and look at the wall in front of them, where they see the shadows of what is going on above and behind their backs. There is a fire there, and a roadway nearby with some other people who carry with them figures of men, animals, and other items. Socrates suggests that the people in the cavern who take the shadows to be real things are we ourselves. The one who manages to unchain themself and leave the cavern will see the true sun “as it is in itself in its own territory,” as well as the true world exposed to its light. If this person returns to the cave and tries to describe what he saw on the outside, fellow prisoners, accustomed to the darkness of their chamber, will not believe him, and might even try to kill him. As if soothsaying his own death in Athens prison, Socrates invites us to compare the first, visible world, to the cavern, the light of the physical sun to the fire, the reflections of which we see on the screen of shadows, and the upper world outside to the intellectual region of the highest good discovered by the soul.3
Besides the dialectic of visible and invisible suns, there is another novelty introduced by Plato in these fragments, which I find extremely important. Namely, for Socrates, the sun is not an adorable thing out there in the sky. Instead of treating it as an external object, he suggests that there are solar elements within humans themselves – like the eye and sight for the physical sun, and knowledge and reason for the spiritual one. Without being identical to the sun, a human eye bears resemblance to it. We can look at this object and see it because in certain aspects we are akin to it. The sun and the eye communicate as if they are looking into each other through the layers of things encompassed by light, and the one reflects the other. A dark pupil in the center of the human eye is surrounded by a colored iris. If we try to look at the sun during the day, we can see that it, too, has a kind of pupil, which is dark, and a bright “iris” that glances from behind it. Just like the human eye, the eye of god has therefore a kind of blind spot at its very center. It is as if the sensual sun was that dark pupil that obscured from us the divine radiance of the iris of truth.
The doubling of the sun in Plato’s Republic is tricky: it turns out that we cannot see the true sun, which is the highest good, because it is shielded from us by its representative in the sensual world. We are therefore not only endowed with vision by the sun that we see, but coincidently blinded by it. The greatness of Socrates is that behind the visible sun he discerns the invisible, and praises both. As Marsilio Ficino comments in his Book of the Sun (1494):
When he was in military service Socrates often used to stand in amazement watching the rising Sun, motionless, his eyes fixed like a statue, to greet the return of the heavenly body. The Platonists, influenced by these and similar signs, would perhaps say that Socrates, inspired since boyhood by a Phoeboean daemon, was accustomed to venerate the Sun above all, and for the same reason was judged by the oracle of Apollo to be the wisest of all the Greeks. I will omit at present a discussion about whether the daemon of Socrates was particularly a genius or an angel – but I certainly would dare to affirm that Socrates in his state of ecstasy had admired not just the visible Sun, but its other, hidden aspect.4
In Ficino’s interpretation, the sun adored by Socrates not only duplicates, but triplicates: it embodies the idea of the Christian trinity fantastically interlaced with Neoplatonism, Hermetic tradition, astrology, and renaissance magic. Taking as a starting point Plato’s comparison of god and the sun, he makes subsequent parallels: on a downward spiral, god dispenses goodness and love, just as the sun dispenses light and warmth. Note that all these things can be understood as different kinds of energy, which both the god and the physical sun generously distribute around the world. Ficino insists on the hierarchical relation between the god and the physical sun: one shouldn’t worship the sun as the author of all things because it is in fact only a shadow of the God who is the fundamental creator. Yes, the sun shines brightly, but the light it spreads, according to Ficino, is not even fully its own. The sunlight as such, according to its basic settings, is obscure, as are other celestial bodies that emit their own natural light, which is not that bright. The excessive shine that radiates from the sun is, according to Ficino, a gift that it receives from god: “Indeed the Sun offers that innate light which is somewhat obscure, then immediately another light most evident to the eyes like a visible image of divine intelligence and infinite goodness.”5
A tendency to portray the two suns as God and his material substitute is further developed by another renaissance thinker and perhaps the most famous writer of the solar utopian tradition, Tommaso Campanella, who, in The City of the Sun (1602), describes the religion and the rites of the residents of the ideal state:
The sun and the stars they, so to speak, regard as the living representatives and signs of God, as the temples and holy living altars, and they honor but do not worship them. Beyond all other things they venerate the sun, but they consider no created thing worthy the adoration of worship … They contemplate and know God under the
