Sacred Sun

Stylized drawings and carvings of the sun from long ago, from all around the world, often have apparently extraneous rays and circles associated with them. These make for esthetically pleasing graphics, but might they not also be that these added features represent actual optical phenomena associated with the sun? Arcs and circles associated with refraction through and reflection from ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere are well known and characterized, and may be the explanation behind the images. That these depictions are associated with religious imagery also implies that there is something special and out of the ordinary about the depiction.