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The Winter Solstice and Ancient Culture
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The reign of darkness is over. The unconquered sun is returning. Its marvelous light will again overcome the fell darkness. New life is coming.
Very few of us in this hectic, high-tech world think this way anymore, but there was a time when many of our ancestors took the winter solstice very seriously.
Known also as midwinter, the solstice is a time when a middling astronomical phenomenon takes on deep cultural significance. This is a time also for you to personally experience the ancient celestial event celebrated for millennia by nearly all people groups in the Northern Hemisphere.
For
the first few days of this week the sun will rise at a heavy slant from
its most southern point of the year. It will skim through the sky rising
barely higher than about 30 degrees above the horizon. At about 4:50 PM
it will set, a mere 10 hours after rising. Ten hours up, fourteen hours
below --- it's almost like it wasn't worth the effort. Which may have
been a concern for people in the elder days.
Imagine living thousands of years ago. You are in an agricultural community completely dependent on the regular life-giving energy of the sun. As time passes from summer to harvest to winter, the sun --- your bread and butter --- is slowly moving south, rising later, sinking earlier, with scarcely enough energy to climb into the sky.
That might be considered a foundation for trepidation.
This concern caused some, by means of religious ritual, to coax the sun to come back, to rise higher and stay longer, to bleed on them again its life-giving energy. Faith that the sun would return to claim the day for another year would be cause for celebrations throughout the North.
And the farther north one travels the more dramatic the difference. In northern Britain, for example, the midwinter daytime is only about 7 hours long. Travel far enough northward, into deep, cold Northern Europe or Siberia, and you'll eventually reach a place where the sun doesn't rise at all during this time!
It is no great leap then to see that a culture that relied on the sun and appreciated its presence would revere the midwinter solstice as a time set apart.
Cold science offers a reason for our deceleration into the solstice, and the lengthening of daytime afterwards. At blame is the venerable tilt of our home planet with respect to the sun.
Regular readers here will know that our tilt is at least partially responsible for all kinds of celestial and terrestrial phenomenon: our climate, the heat of summer, the cold of winter, the cyclical flow of all the seasons, the paths of the sun, moon, and stars across the sky, and so on.
Tilting over and away from the sun at this time of the year is the reason for our disappearing sun. Sunday night at 11 PM the Earth is in the point in its orbit when it is tilted most away from the sun for us in the Northern Hemisphere.
And since we are tilted away, our bright star is low and blinding in the sky in winter.
We may find this week's low sun a nuisance on our freeway commute but peoples in the past esteemed it enough to build vast monuments to it. There are whole sections of ancient edifices throughout the Northern Hemisphere purposely lined up with the midwinter sun.
For
example there is the ancient mound at Maes Howe in Scotland, a tomb where
the setting sun on that special day floods light down the main corridor,
eerily illuminating the passageway.
Newgrange in Ireland, a chambered mound tens of thousands of years old, was built so that a tiny shaft of light from midwinter's rising sun beamed more than eighty feet through the mound to a tiny spiral carving on a wall in the inner chamber.
Other sites built at least in part to align with the sun on this day can be found in England (Stonehenge), France (Gavrinis), Egypt (Karnak), Japan (Hashihaka), China (Gao Cheng Zhen), and even here in North America (Chaco Canyon and Hoveneep in the southwest US, and Chichen Itza in the Yucatan). They are everywhere.
Why these people were so concerned about the alignment is not often clear. Were the alignments used as a call to worship or sacrifice to beckon the sun back? Were they to mark the start of festivities celebrating the returning sun? Perhaps some were just ancient versions of simple calendars, as in "Oh look, mom! The Great Shadow says it's midwinter!"
You and your family can mark the solstice in your own home. When the sun is on the horizon, rising or setting, mark where the shadow of a certain windowpane falls on an opposite wall. You might try placing a stone outside right in the shadow of a tree trunk some distance from it. There may be a hole in the fence where a beam of sunlight can fall on your house and you can indicate that spot in some decorative way.
Then see that every year on the solstice the sun will hit its mark. It may cause you to pause from the annual stress-filled holiday rush for a minute and be thankful --- thankful that the unconquered sun is returning to give its light to everyone. The dark days are ending. New life and hope are ahead.
Mark Ritter teaches astronomy at Temecula Valley High School and can be reached at mritter@firstlightastro.com.
Maes Howe image courtesy of Scottish History Online.
Posted by Administrator at 2003.12.20 12:55 PM | Comments (0)
