dark hair – as she is indeed often presented; Botticelli, however, painted his famous picture of hers with golden hair.
Similar to Aphrodite is the Celtic figure of “Niamah with the Golden Hair”, whose name means “Sun Tear”; her divine personality is expressed in the story that tells how she led the hero Oisin on her horse to the post-death “Islands of Happiness”. The dark or chestnut haired Celts had also a Sun god named Lugh, who was described as having golden hair that gleamed in the sunlight. Like him, on a 14th cent. French goblin, the figure of the Welsh King Arthur appears with golden hair, even though the Welsh are usually dark haired; the whole picture is infused with the golden atmosphere of the sun. Arthur was originally known as a military leader from the 5-6th cent., and the medieval royal ambiance takes him completely out of his original tribal belonging, putting him instead in a connection of golden regal-divine environment; the Arthurian myths connect him with the dying and reviving Sun god, and even with the figure of Jesus as symbolizing the sun. It is well known that Jesus was consistently painted by Christian artists as having golden hair, in blunt contrast to his Mediterranean origin.
The Sun deity could be, then, either male or female; in Semitic myths there were both the Babylonian Shamash god and the Canaanite Shamash or Shapash goddess. An Amerindian story of the Sun deity is told about a Mexican goddess named Chalchuialico, who was a fourth Sun goddess to rule after the three before her had vanished; but before she became a Sun goddess she was a Water goddess dressed in green, who had copper hair. For hundreds of years that Sun goddess supplied light and heat, while women