The Archdruid Report: Waiting for the Sunrise.
By the time many of my readers get to this week’s essay here on The Archdruid Report, it will be Christmas Day. Here in America, that means that we’re finally most of the way through one of the year’s gaudiest orgies of pure vulgar greed, the holiday shopping season, which strikes me as rather an odd way to celebrate the birth of someone whose teachings so resolutely critiqued the mindless pursuit of material goodies. If, as that same person pointed out, it’s impossible to serve both God and Mammon, the demon of wealth, it’s pretty clear which of those two personages most Americans—including no small number who claim to be Christians—really consider the reason for the season.
A long time before that stable in Bethlehem received its most famous tenants, though, the same day was being celebrated across much of the northern temperate zone. The reason has to do with one of those details everyone knew before the invention of electric lighting and few people remember now, the movement of the apparent point of sunrise along the eastern horizon during the year. Before the printing press made calendars ubiquitous, that was a standard way of gauging the changing seasons: the point of sunrise swings from southeast to northeast as winter in the northern hemisphere gives way to summer and from northeast back to southeast as summer gives way again to winter, and if you have a way to track the apparent motion, you can follow the yearly cycle with a fair degree of precision.
