At once greet him with the fiery greeting: 'Lord, hail, great in power, mighty ruler, king, greatest of gods, Helios, lord of heaven and earth, god of gods! Strong is your breath, strong is your power, lord!

The greeting is called the fiery one — not a description of tone but a category: this is how you address a being made of fire, and perhaps how you address him now that you are, for this hour, fiery too. Its form is a king's throne-room acclamation piled high — lord, mighty ruler, king, greatest of gods — the language an Eastern court used for a monarch, turned on the sun. What lifts it past flattery is the repeated line ischýei sou hē pnoiḗ, ischýei sou hē dýnamis: 'strong is your breath, strong is your power.' Pnoiḗ, breath, is the thing the whole rite has been drawing in from the rays; the initiate praises in the god exactly the power he has been breathing into himself. The greeting is a mirror — the mortal, having filled his lungs with the sun's breath, tells the sun that its breath is strong. He greets the god as a near-equal because, for this hour, he has borrowed the god's own substance.