Chesterton set one of his murder mysteries, The Eye of Horus, among a sun-worshipping cult. Sungazing, with all its suggested Icarean hubris, is a crisis of common sense. No, honey, never look directly into the sun.

And then you say it once more, repeating your parentsвЂ™ words, and theirs, in an unbroken tradition going back God knows how many millennia. You learn it, you internalize it, and never really think of it again until you have kids of your own. As unquestioned ideological precepts go, itвЂ™s enormously effective.

Not to look directly into the sun is (at a guess) one of the first lessons everyone is taught by their parents. All the old rites and superstitions that once warded off mystical evils have been condensed into one single command, so vast and monolithic weвЂ™ve forgotten that itвЂ™s even possible to disobey: DonвЂ™t look directly at the sun. The only way to stay sane under its light is to not look at it, to almost pretend that it doesnвЂ™t exist. ThereвЂ™s one right there, up in the sky it passes over our heads every day. And then they all died, one after another, flashing into life and withering away again for tens of thousands of years - but it lived on. The ancients knew about it, all the way back to the grubby screaming infancy of the species. A being that is absolutely here but whose immenseness extends out into the cosmic distance of a fevered incomprehension. There are vast burning demons, things from far beyond our tiny world, things that you canвЂ™t even look at without going incurably mad.

Staring at the sun benefits