Curiosities of Olden Times
The sun is lost; it sets, and the trolls, the spirits of darkness, play with it under the bed, that is, in the house of night, beneath the earth.
But the sun is not only a golden ball, but it is also a shining stone; and here at the outset we tell our secret: the sun is the true Philosopher's Stone, that turns all to gold, that gives health, that fills with joy.
In primeval times, our rude forefathers were puzzled how to explain the nature of sun and moon and stars, and they thought they had hit on the interpretation of the phenomenon when they said that the stars were diamonds stuck in the heavenly vault, and that the sun was a luminous stone, a carbuncle; and the moon a pearl or silver disk. Even the classic writers had not shaken off this notion. Anaxagoras, Democritus, Metrodorus, all speak of the sun as a glowing stone,[1] and Orpheus[2] calls the opal the sunstone, because of its analogy to that shining ball. So Pliny also.[3] The old Norse spoke of the stars as the "gemstones of heaven," so did the Anglo-Saxons.[4]
But perhaps the clearest idea we can have of the old cosmogony is from the pictures preserved to us of the world of the dwarfs. When a superior conception of the universe was general, then the old
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