[Author’s note: This is a reprint from June 2007]
We just passed the Summer Solstice. The longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. In today’s hectic world it has little meaning to the average person living in this interconnected, instant communications, driven life
But once upon a time it was a deadly serious business. No one knows exactly when or where humans began tracking sunrises and sunsets. The neolithic peoples that built Stonehenge knew of it and probably built it to track the rise and setting of the sun, so surely its older than that 5000 year old structure
Knowing when the days became shorter or longer was key to a society that had just come out of hunting and gathering. Crops would not grow in the cold dimly lit days of Winter so knowing that the days were getting longer would be essential to knowing just when to plant crops. To mark the importance of this priests and shamans would encourage festivals to be held on these key days
Of course nowadays with calendars, satellites, and precision timing devices it’s just taken for granted but even so we cant shake these ancient pagan roots.
The Summer festival isn’t as important to us but look at the Winter festivals. Halloween, originally the Celtic New year marking the beginning of the dark season. Appropriated by the Christian Church into All Saints day, or All Hallows Eve.
Thanksgiving, a thoroughly american holiday, or is it? The day of giving thanks for the fall harvest, yet another agricultural legacy that hasn’t left us.
Christmas. Most probably Christ’s birth date wasn’t in December, probably it was closer to March or April, however the German and Celtic tribes celebrated the Winter Solstice on the 22nd and the Church appropriated this as well
Even in Texas traces of these Winter rites are seen. We used to have a large bonfire at my university for the texas football game every year. Large logs were cut and stacked and on the night before the game the huge pyre was lit, thousands would stand in the cold and rain and sing and chant. Standing in this throng of people lit by the glow of a gigantic fire I couldn’t help but make the comparison to ancient crowds circling bonfires thousands of years ago chanting in the dark.
Even Easter. Named after the Anglo Saxon goddess of Spring Ostern. Possibly Ostern herself was a corruption of ancient near east goddesses like Ishtar or Astarte, both goddesses of fertility and new life.
Ostern’s festival was the vernal equinox or the start of spring when crops could be planted. The Anglo Saxons would perform a ritual on that date. They would take out a cage made out of wheat stalks they had harvested the year before containing the corn spirit. They would set this on fire and release the spirit to bring the world back to life after the long Winter. A recognition of the cyclical nature of life.
We have co=opted many of the traditions of these ancestors. The rabbit and the eggs. The rabbit was the totemic animal of the goddess Oster. A small bird laid its eggs in wheat fields, when hunters saw rabbits in the fields and chased them, they often found these eggs and assumed the rabbit had laid them, thus the tradition of hiding eggs was born. The church explained the egg as a symbol of new life. The corn spirit was left out but the idea of the rebirth of the world after a long cold winter was maintained.
The summer solstice itself may have lost much of its importance in this modern world but though we have covered ourselves with a hard veneer of technology and draped ourselves with our modern point of view we are not all that much removed from those ancestors that once lit bonfires and chanted in the middle of the night.
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