{"id":3550,"date":"2014-12-26T09:10:34","date_gmt":"2014-12-26T14:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=3550"},"modified":"2014-12-26T09:10:34","modified_gmt":"2014-12-26T14:10:34","slug":"the-archdruid-report-waiting-for-the-sunrise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=3550","title":{"rendered":"The Archdruid Report: Waiting for the Sunrise"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca\/2014\/12\/waiting-for-sunrise.html\">The Archdruid Report: Waiting for the Sunrise<\/a>.<\/p>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\">By the time many of my readers get to this week\u2019s essay here on\u00a0<i>The Archdruid Report<\/i>, it will be Christmas Day. Here in America, that means that we\u2019re finally most of the way through one of the year\u2019s 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\u2019s impossible to serve both God and Mammon, the demon of wealth, it\u2019s pretty clear which of those two personages most Americans\u2014including no small number who claim to be Christians\u2014really consider the reason for the season.\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\">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.<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\"><!-- [if gte mso 9]><xml>\n <w:WordDocument>\n  <w:Zoom>0<\/w:Zoom>\n  <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0<\/w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>\n  <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0<\/w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>\n  <w:UseMarginsForDrawingGridOrigin\/>\n <\/w:WordDocument>\n<\/xml><![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><a name=\"OLE_LINK1\"><\/a><a name=\"OLE_LINK2\"><\/a><span style=\"mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK1;\"><span style=\"font-size: 13.0pt; font-family: LucidaGrande; color: #282828;\">&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><!--EndFragment--><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Archdruid Report: Waiting for the Sunrise. By the time many of my readers get to this week\u2019s essay here on\u00a0The Archdruid Report, it will be Christmas Day. Here in America, that means that we\u2019re finally most of the way through one of the year\u2019s gaudiest orgies of pure vulgar greed, the holiday shopping season, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7],"tags":[150,161,196,263],"class_list":["post-3550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-survival-2","tag-collapse","tag-consumerism","tag-decline","tag-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3550"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3551,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3550\/revisions\/3551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}