Helios
I am the sun, my sister the moon. I ride through the sky by day. I see and I watch as you live your short life. As you love as you loose as you bleed.
I am bringer of light to your work weary day. I see honor in you, in the life that you lead. As you honor the blessed above with your prayers and your sacrifice.
With your pain and your joy. With your words of thanks to me.
I will watch, I will guard. I will not abandon you. Not now, not ever, you'll see.
The Sun
If there is a prominent feature of our sky, it is the sun. To bright to look upon directly, it gives wrmth and light, it is in many ways the giver of life itself. The sun as an epiphany of a god, then, is not that surprising. All cultures on earth have at one time or another associated a deity with the disk of the sun. What does it mean to us today to hear of a Sun God, knowing what the sun is, and knowing how it works, how do we associate it with the physical manifestation of a deity? The answer is that we do not. Helios is a God, a divine being, that we human beings once associated with the sun. Thus he is to us, the Sun God. This no more makes him the sun than Gaea is the actual Earth, but the sun is a symbol of his power. The all seeing god who watches humanity from a distance, shining his light down upon us.
The All-Seeing
There is something comforting in the thought of a God like Helios watching over us. The all seeing aspect of Helios was explored to some extent in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, where he is said to see all things from his vantage point as he soars high above in his magical chariot. He sees the abduction of Persephone, and is approached by Demeter and Hekate as they search for her. He informs them of what he sees, but also tells Demeter she should be proud to have so great a son in law as Aidoneus. Demeter is not impressed, however, and further falls into the depression that forbids the growth of new life upon the cultivated earth. The all seeing god is accurate in his wisdom, but not a very comforting god to a goddess whose heart is broken at the loss of her beloved daughter. He is a bit distant, and it is, perhaps, in this very distance that we are able to best relate to him. As the disinterested watcher and guardian. Uninvolved and therefore most objective.
The Mysteries of Eleusis
As mentioned above, Helios was the God who saw the abduction of Persephone, as it was Hekate who heard it. What part Helios may have played in the actual Mysteriees of the Two Goddesses, I do not know. Mythologically, he seems to represent a moment of doubt. A moment when the mother must decide if her search for her daughter is to be continued or halted. If she must accept the patriarchal custom of marrying off the daughter to a worthy, by the father's recconing, husband or put her foot down and demand to be heard. The answer, and a refreshing one in a culture like the Greek one, is that she refuses to accept and uses her power to bend the father's will until she is heard. The eventual compromise seems unfair from Persephone's standpoint, but from the perspective of the mother, and this myth is from Demeter's perspective in the end, it is a triumph. Her power cannot be denied, and even Zeus, the king, must bow down to it in this circumstance.
Giver of Light
Helios is a god of light. There is no denying that. He is not, however, a god of light in the same sense as Apollon, whose light is the very light of civilization. He is more clearly a god of actual light, of the energy that emanates from him and empowers life. Unlike Gaea, however, he is not a source of life force, but of energy used by life. Energy that, like the light of the sun, is incorporated by life and transformed into useful energy.