The Lotus is the symbol par excellence of the sun. The Scarabreus or Sacred Beetle symbolised divine, self-created power. The early Egyptians believed that it had no female but deposited its generative seed in round pellets of earth which it rolled about, thrusting backward by means of the hind-legs, thus imitating the sun which moving "from west to east turns the heaven in the opposite way." Thus the beetle was born anew from the egg which it alone had created, and was so highly reverenced by the Egyptians as a symbol of self-existent being, that the wings of the winged sun disk have been interpreted by some as being those of the Scarabreus instead of the hawk.
The Chinese regarded the sun as the concrete essence of the masculine principle and the source of all light.
