Ra

Ra (Re) is the Egyptian sun god and, in many traditions, the creator and king of the gods. Each day he sails across the heavens in his solar barque, and each night journeys through the perilous underworld, doing battle with the serpent of chaos, to be reborn at dawn — a daily drama of death and renewal at the heart of Egyptian religion. In time he was fused with the great god of Thebes as Amun-Ra, supreme lord of the pantheon.

As the radiant source of life and order, Ra was the Egyptian counterpart of the Greek Helios, and the two were readily identified as the cult of the Sun spread through the Greco-Roman world. The solar theology that the philosophers built upon Plato's image of the Sun as the offspring of the Good found in Egypt's age-old worship of Ra a kindred reverence for the visible light as a token of the divine.