I've seen that argument before, and it struck me as a bit of apologia -- kinda like, "well, our symbol is reeeeally powerful because it's the oldest and best before it became ours," or some implied logic like that.
That, and the concept of a sun-cross just seems... counter-intuitive to me. I mean, the sun is a circle. That's what children the world over draw, it's what we see when we look at it (before we scream and clutch our eyeballs), so someone would have to work extra hard to convince me that a neolithic etching of a vertical with a horizontal bar is supposed to be the daytime sun. (Although I might accept that it's, say, the sun's path crossing the horizon, but that's not the same thing as the symbol-of-the-sun; that's a symbol of dawn or of the sun's work/path.)
ANYWAY. Ahem. Yeah, in fiction it really does boil down to "hey, you write it, you make the rules for it." My point here is just that sometimes we accept pre-written rules without questioning them. Maybe some of the fiction out there would be more inventive or, uh, deeper, if those background rules weren't accepted so blindly.
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Date: 26 Nov 2008 11:05 pm (UTC)That, and the concept of a sun-cross just seems... counter-intuitive to me. I mean, the sun is a circle. That's what children the world over draw, it's what we see when we look at it (before we scream and clutch our eyeballs), so someone would have to work extra hard to convince me that a neolithic etching of a vertical with a horizontal bar is supposed to be the daytime sun. (Although I might accept that it's, say, the sun's path crossing the horizon, but that's not the same thing as the symbol-of-the-sun; that's a symbol of dawn or of the sun's work/path.)
ANYWAY. Ahem. Yeah, in fiction it really does boil down to "hey, you write it, you make the rules for it." My point here is just that sometimes we accept pre-written rules without questioning them. Maybe some of the fiction out there would be more inventive or, uh, deeper, if those background rules weren't accepted so blindly.
Shorter broomsticks and all that, y'know.