Bright Sky

Yes — your intuition is basically right, but there is an important linguistic refinement: Dyēus did not originally mean simply “the sun” or even “sunshine.” It is better reconstructed as the bright/daylight sky, and the deity-name arose from that conception.

The page you’re reading in Eliade is pointing toward a very deep Indo-European semantic chain:

shine → brightness → bright sky → daylight → heaven → celestial being/god

And Sanskrit preserves this chain unusually well.

1. Start with the reconstructed PIE root

The standard reconstruction is approximately:

PIE dyew- / dey-

→ “to shine, be bright”

→ “bright sky / daylight sky”

From this comes:

*Dyēus = the bright/daylight sky, personified as a divine being.

M. L. West, whom Eliade cites elsewhere, explicitly describes the name as originating in the semantic sphere of “brightness of heaven, heaven, daylight, day.”

So your equation:

div = shine → dyaus = day → god = sunshine

is very close, provided we change the last part to:

god = the divine/numinous bright sky of daytime

rather than “god = the physical sun.”

That distinction matters.

2. Sanskrit is extraordinarily revealing

Look at the Sanskrit forms:

Sanskrit

Basic meaning

dyáus द्यौस्

sky, heaven; the sky-god

div / dyu

shine, brightness / sky-related forms

divás

of/from heaven; also day in related formations

divā

by day

divi

in heaven, in the sky

dyumán

shining, radiant, luminous, heavenly

devá

god, divine being

These aren’t accidental similarities. They belong to a very old Indo-European morphological family.

The Vedic noun Dyáuṣ is particularly important because it can mean the visible heaven/daylight sky itself, while Dyáuṣ Pitṛ́ is literally “Sky/Heaven Father.” Its Greek counterpart is Zeus Patēr, and its Latin counterpart is Jupiter, from an older form meaning essentially “Sky Father.”

So we get:

Vedic Sanskrit

Dyáuṣ Pitṛ́

= Heaven/Daylight Sky Father

Greek

Zeû Pátēr

= Zeus Father

Latin

Iūpiter < Djous-pater

= Sky/Daylight Father

That’s one of comparative Indo-European linguistics’ strongest deity correspondences.

3. But here is the really fascinating part: “day” and “god” split from the same conceptual root

This is what your photograph is getting at.

From the ancient dyew-/dei- complex, different Indo-European languages developed words in several semantic directions:

BRIGHTNESS

Sanskrit dyumán-

shining, radiant, luminous, heavenly

This is almost a linguistic fossil preserving the original association between heaven and luminosity.

DAY

Latin:

diēs = day

English ultimately gets a huge family through Latin:

diurnal, diary, meridian, quotidian, etc.

The comparative evidence connects Latin diēs to the same ancient complex.

SKY / HEAVEN

Sanskrit:

dyáus = heaven, sky

Greek:

Zeús

Latin:

Jovis / Iuppiter

GOD

A derivative:

PIE *deywós

came to mean something like “celestial being / divine one.”

From it come:

Sanskrit deva = god

Latin deus = god

Latin dīvus = divine

Lithuanian dievas = god

and related forms throughout Indo-European.

And deywós itself is built from the older sky/brightness complex.

So linguistically we can almost draw a conceptual tree:

             PIE dyew- / dei-

              “shine / be bright”

                       │

            ┌──────────┴──────────┐

            │                     │

       bright heaven          daylight

            │                     │

        Dyēus                  diēs

            │                     │

      Sky/Heaven God             day

            │

        *deywós

            │

        “celestial one”

            │

     Sanskrit deva

       Latin deus

      “god/divine”

That is the historical-linguistic phenomenon Eliade is exploiting.

4. So was the Indo-European “God” literally the Sun?

Not exactly. And this is where comparative mythology can easily go too far.

The original Dyēus appears to have been associated primarily with the luminous daytime heaven, not with the solar disk itself.

Think of looking upward on a clear day.

You don’t necessarily experience:

“There is the Sun.”

You experience:

the enormous luminous heaven above you.

The Indo-European conception seems to have made that—the bright celestial realm—divine.

The Sun was a phenomenon within the heavenly sphere.

This distinction is particularly important because Indo-European traditions subsequently developed separate solar deities. Greek Helios, for example, is not simply Zeus. Vedic religion likewise has Sūrya as the Sun.

So:

Dyáuṣ ≠ simply Sūrya

Rather:

Dyáuṣ = Heaven / luminous celestial expanse

Sūrya = Sun

5. And this makes “deus” much more interesting than simply “god”

Latin deus looks to us like an abstract word meaning “God.”

Historically, however, it is connected to the much older Indo-European idea of the celestial/brilliant one.

Compare:

*dyew-

“shine / bright sky”

↓

*deywós

“celestial one / divine one”

↓

Latin deus

“god”

↓

Sanskrit deva

“god, divine being”

The Sanskrit deva is therefore extraordinarily revealing.

And there is a beautiful semantic parallel in English:

divine

divinity

deity

all ultimately descend through Latin from this same Indo-European family.

So when your handwritten note says:

DIEUS — div (shine) — dyans?

you’re actually circling around a very important historical-linguistic observation.

6. There is an even deeper Sanskrit connection

The Sanskrit div family produces words associated with:

sky → heaven → daylight → shining → divine

And that makes Vedic poetry particularly interesting.

When a Vedic poet speaks of dyu, div, or dyáus, the semantic field isn’t necessarily as sharply divided as our modern dictionary categories.

Modern English forces us to distinguish:

sky

heaven

daylight

day

divine

god

The ancient Indo-European vocabulary preserves a period when these ideas were semantically adjacent.

Not identical—but overlapping.

That’s probably the most important insight for what you’re reading in Eliade.

7. And this changes how we should understand Eliade’s sentence

Eliade says:

“The Indo-European supreme god, Dīēus, denotes both the celestial epiphany and the sacred…”

That’s an extremely compressed statement.

He is essentially saying:

The sacred was encountered as luminosity.

Not merely metaphorically.

The sky appearing in its overwhelming brightness was itself a manifestation (epiphany) of the sacred.

That fits Eliade’s larger concept of hierophany: something ordinary becomes the manifestation of something transcendent.

So the semantic history gives us something like:

light → visible heaven → transcendence → sacred → deity

And that is why his examples—Tengri, T’ien, Anu, Dyaus, Zeus, Jupiter—are being assembled in that paragraph.

He is identifying a recurring religious pattern in which the sky’s verticality, luminosity, transcendence and power become associated with the supreme divine.

One caution

I would not say:

“The Indo-European word for God literally means sunshine.”

I’d say something more precise:

The Proto-Indo-European divine name Dyēus is historically connected with the root dyew-/*dei-, “to shine/be bright,” and originally referred to the bright or daylight sky. From this same semantic complex developed words for heaven, day, celestial/divine beings, and ultimately “god,” such as Sanskrit deva and Latin deus.

That is a much stronger linguistic statement—and it is actually more fascinating than simply saying “God = Sun.”

And notice how beautifully it connects with your earlier interest in Chidakash: there too the conceptual field involves ākāśa/space and consciousness/luminosity, although Chidakash is a much later Sanskrit philosophical construction and *should not be etymologically derived from the Indo-European Dyēus. The comparison is conceptual, not genealogical.