news article i found on WINTER SOLSTICE08:13 Dec 27 2010
Times Read: 969
There Goes the Sun
us=them
By RICHARD COHEN
Published: December 20, 2010
WHAT is the winter solstice, and why bother to celebrate it, as so
many people around the world will tomorrow? The word "solstice"
derives from the Latin sol (meaning sun) and statum (stand still),
and reflects what we see on the first days of summer and winter
when, at dawn for two or three days, the sun seems to linger for
several minutes in its passage across the sky, before beginning to
double back.
Indeed, "turnings of the sun" is an old phrase, used by both Hesiod
and Homer. The novelist Alan Furst has one of his characters nicely
observe, "the day the sun is said to pause. ... Pleasing, that idea. ...
As though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day
off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down."
Virtually all cultures have their own way of acknowledging this
moment. The Welsh word for solstice translates as "the point of
roughness," while the Talmud calls it "Tekufat Tevet," first day of
"the stripping time." For the Chinese, winter's beginning is
"dongzhi," when one tradition is making balls of glutinous rice,
which symbolize family gathering. In Korea, these balls are mingled
with a sweet red bean called pat jook. According to local lore, each
winter solstice a ghost comes to haunt villagers. The red bean in the
rice balls repels him.
In parts of Scandinavia, the locals smear their front doors with
butter so that Beiwe, sun goddess of fertility, can lap it up before
she continues on her journey. (One wonders who does all the
mopping up afterward.) Later, young women don candle-
embedded helmets, while families go to bed having placed their
shoes all in a row, to ensure peace over the coming year.
Street processions are another common feature. In Japan, young
men known as "sun devils," their faces daubed to represent their
imagined solar ancestry, still go among the farms to ensure the
earth's fertility (and their own stocking-up with alcohol). In Ireland,
people called wren-boys take to the roads, wearing masks or straw
suits. The practice used to involve the killing of a wren, and singing
songs while carrying the corpse from house to house.
Sacrifice is a common thread. In areas of northern Pakistan, men
have cold water poured over their heads in purification, and are
forbidden to sit on any chair till the evening, when their heads will
be sprinkled with goats' blood. (Unhappy goats.) Purification is also
the main object for the Zuni and Hopi tribes of North America, their
attempt to recall the sun from its long winter slumber. It also marks
the beginning of another turning of their "wheel of the year," and
kivas (sacred underground ritual chambers) are opened to mark the
season.
Yet, for all these symbolisms, this time remains at heart an
astronomical event, and quite a curious one. In summer, the sun is
brighter and reaches higher into the sky, shortening the shadows
that it casts; in winter it rises and sinks closer to the horizon, its light
diffuses more and its shadows lengthen. As the winter hemisphere
tilts steadily further away from the star, daylight becomes shorter
and the sun arcs ever lower. Societies that were organized around
agriculture intently studied the heavens, ensuring that the solstices
were well charted.
Despite their best efforts, however, their priests and stargazers
came to realize that it was exceptionally hard to pinpoint the
moment of the sun's turning by observation alone - even though
they could define the successive seasons by the advancing and
withdrawal of daylight and darkness.
The earth further complicates matters. Our globe tilts on its axis like
a spinning top, going around the sun at an angle to its orbit of 23
and a half degrees. Yet the planet's shape changes minutely and its
axis wobbles, thus its orbit fluctuates. If its axis remained stable and
if its orbit were a true circle, then the equinoxes and solstices would
quarter the year into equal sections. As it is, the time between the
spring and fall equinoxes in the Northern Hemisphere is slightly
greater than that between fall and spring, the earth - being at that
time closer to the sun - moving about 6 percent faster in January
than in July.
The apparently supernatural power manifest in solstices to govern
the seasons has been felt as far back as we know, inducing different
reactions from different cultures - fertility rites, fire festivals,
offerings to the gods. Many of the wintertime customs in Western
Europe descend from the ancient Romans, who believed that their
god of the harvest, Saturn, had ruled the land during an earlier age
of abundance, and so celebrated the winter solstice with the
Saturnalia, a feast of gift-giving, role-reversals (slaves berating their
masters) and general public holiday from Dec. 17 to 24.
The transition from Roman paganism to Christianity, with its similar
rites, took several centuries. With the Emperor Constantine's
conversion to Christianity in the fourth century, customs were
quickly appropriated and refashioned, as the sun and God's son
became inextricably entwined. Thus, although the New Testament
gives no indication of Christ's actual birthday (early writers
preferring a spring date), in 354 Pope Liberius declared it to have
befallen on Dec. 25.
The advantages of Christmas Day being celebrated then were
obvious. As the Christian commentator Syrus wrote: "It was a
custom of the pagans to celebrate on the same Dec. 25 the birthday
of the sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity ....
Accordingly, when the church authorities perceived that the
Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and
resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnized on that day."
In Christendom, the Nativity gradually absorbed all other winter
solstice rites, and the co-opting of solar imagery was part of the
same process. Thus the solar discs that had once been depicted
behind the heads of Asian rulers became the halos of Christian
luminaries. Despite the new religion's apparent supremacy, many of
the old customs survived - so much so that church elders worried
that the veneration of Christ was being lost. In the fifth century, St.
Augustine of Hippo and Pope Leo the Great felt compelled to remind
their flocks that Christ, not the sun, was their proper object of their
worship.
While Roman Christianity was the dominant culture in Western
Europe, it was by no means the only one. By millennium's end, the
Danes controlled most of England, bringing with them "Yule," their
name for winter solstice celebrations, probably derived from an
earlier term for "wheel." For centuries, the most sacred Norse
symbol had been the wheel of the heavens, represented by a six- or
eight-spoked wheel or by a cross within a wheel signifying solar
rays.
The Norse peoples, many of whom settled in what is now
Yorkshire, would construct huge solar wheels and place them next
to hilltop bonfires, while in the Middle Ages processions bore wheels
upon chariots or boats. In other parts of Europe, where the Vikings
were feared and hated, a taboo on using spinning wheels during
solstices lasted well into the 20th century. The spinning-wheel on
which Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger may exemplify this sense of
menace.
Throughout much of Europe, at least up until the 16th century,
starvation was common from January to April, a period known as
"the famine months." Most cattle were slaughtered so they would
not have to be fed over the winter, making the solstice almost the
only time of year that fresh meat was readily available. The boar's
head at Christmas feasts represents the dying sun of the old year,
while the suckling pig - with the apple of immortality in its mouth -
the new.
The turning of the sun was perhaps even more important in the
New World than the Old. The Aztecs, who believed that the heart
harbored elements of the sun's power, ensured its continual well-
being by tearing out this vital organ from hunchbacks, dwarves or
prisoners of war, so releasing the "divine sun fragments" entrapped
by the body and its desires.
The Incas would celebrate the solar festival of Inti Raymi by having
their priests attempt to tie down the celestial body. At Machu Picchu,
high in the Peruvian Andes, there is a large stone column called the
Intihuatana, ("hitching post of the sun,") to which the star would be
symbolically harnessed. It is unclear how the Incas measured the
success of this endeavor, but at least the sun returned the following
day.
Yet above all other rituals, reproducing the sun's fire by kindling
flame on earth is the commonest solstice practice, both at
midsummer and midwinter. Thomas Hardy, describing Dorset
villagers around a bonfire in "The Return of the Native," offers an
explanation for such a worldwide phenomenon:
"To light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of men when, at the
winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout nature. It
indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against the fiat
that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness,
misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the
earth say, 'Let there be light.' "
So there is good reason to celebrate the winter solstice - but maybe
that celebration is still touched with a little fear.
Richard Cohen is the author of "Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of
the Star That Gives Us Life."
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