Summer solstice is nearly upon us and I am challenging my thought processes about the marking of the day like I have continuously since I started down this little tumble-worn path of mine going on close to forty years ago.
Aside from October 31st, I have largely moved away from the merged eight-fold seasonal holiday structure and compressed it to observing the two solstices in my own way, and giving nod to the equinoxes when I can. The remaining three are a different kind of observed holiday than I am into embracing after all this time of serious pondering. Interesting in their symbolism, but ultimately not part of my crooked, winding path.
That’s another thought for another time.
I was considering the upcoming solstice and I wondered how much of that was truly marked upon by our forebears. Unsurprisingly, when you peel away all of the pop-cultural interpretations and reimaginings of the summer solstice — it still holds that it had a significant cultural cosmologic importance to a number of groups. What was that significance? The correct answer is: “We don’t know”. There are places across Northern Europe and the British Isles that seem to mark the event. And there is ample evidence that it was an event.
But, aside from hypotheses and fantasies, we can’t really know what went on. Nothing was contemporaneous recorded. It was marked. It was an event. We don’t know how or why. It’s funny what a couple of thousand of years will do to the best attempts to capture such things.
What’s interesting, however, is that marking the opposite solstice in the dead of winter was more important the further north you go. This is especially evident in a relatively recent and well-preserved find from over 3000 years ago in the Orkneys, which predates most of what is known of that time and area. Instead of building these markers in the south and transporting the ideas south, as has been the conventional wisdom for year, there is evidence that it might have originated in the Orkneys and migrated south. Whatever the reasoning was for marking the solstices, especially that of the winter months.
Further south, and both solstices were observed. Heading north, it was just the winter solstice. That’s worth noting and sitting with. What does it say? I can only hypothesize and keeping this in line with trying to stick to facts, I’ll keep that hypothesis to myself.
It makes one seriously wonder what was the original basis for observing these liminal periods of the year.
If only the ghosts of our former selves could say.
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