Imagine that it is a couple of million years ago—the Paleolithic era. Lately the days have been cold and short. You and your band of fellow hunter-gatherers struggle to find food while there is still light to look by. You spend the long, often hungry night huddled around a fire while predators roam outside the circle in the dark.With each dawn, the sun is falling lower and lower on the horizon. The days are getting shorter too. What’s happening? One of these mornings, is the sun just not going to come up at all?
Then one night, one of your friends says, “Tomorrow the days are going to start getting longer!” Several band members scoff. One (there's always one) says, "Things will never get better. This is it. We're all going to die."
But it turns out that your first friend was right. The days do start getting longer. You and the rest of your band feel as though your lives have been saved. Things are definitely looking up. Your friend gets a promotion, maybe to Shaman.
In fact, all your friend did was to observe nature. In this case, she has observed that the sun does the same thing every year on the same schedule. She knows that in the middle of winter, just when it seems as though the earth is about to be plunged into endless night, on a day that can be predicted from the position of the stars at night, the sun will start to move upward in relation to the horizon. And the days will start to grow longer.
This moment of change is the Northern Hemisphere’s Winter Solstice, when our part of the planet is tilted furthest away from the sun. Though there are many dark, cold nights ahead, it marks the beginning of the end of winter. Winter Solstice always occurs around Dec. 21 in our hemisphere. In 2008, it occured on Dec. 21 at 7:04 am Eastern Standard Time--5:04 am in Chicago and just past 3 am on the West Coast.
Human beings have always treated Winter Solstice as an important event. Almost as soon as religion began to appear among us, celebrations of the Solstice seem to have been a part of religious practice. Commemorations of the Solstice have been found in archeological remains throughout the globe dating at least as far back as the Neolithic Era 12,000 years ago.
At Solstice, a sun that seemed to be dying seems to be restored to life. Thus for most of human history, celebration of Winter Solstice seems to have been associated with the theme of rebirth, with many cultures telling stories about the birth or arrival of a “divine child” at this time of year.
In folk religions, the arrival of the divine child may be regarded as an historical event, the child being called Ameratsu (Japan), Deygan (Persia), Inti (Inca), Dyonisius (ancient Greece), or any number of other names, some of which are familiar to us here in the West.
In mystical or contemplative traditions, however, the divine child is often understood as a metaphor, a metaphor for a new self that can be born within any human being at any time. This self is born whenever one of us emerges from the “darkness” of an ordinary human life dominated by fear and desire to the “light” of a life identified with something larger and more long-lasting than our individual selves--for instance, that "wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe" spoken of by the American poet Robinson Jeffers in the quote above and to the right.
However you choose to understand the celebrations that surround the Winter Solstice, may it be a season of rejoicing. May you emerge from darkness and leap joyfully into the light.
“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, there is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. That’s how the light gets in.”
—From “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen
Drawing above courtesy of Dover Publications.
