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If anyone noticed, recently it was the Summer Solstice.
Technically, this is the day of the year that has the longest hours of daylight- and of course it has a cyclical counterpart in the winter, where there is a day with the shortest.
But it is also very much more than that.
In ancient times as people began to notice and mark these calendric rounds of celestial events, as best evidence suggests in babylon, egypt, and probably china, and we see a flourishing of megalithic architecture and mythology representative of these understandings from various world mountain structures like pyramids and ziggurats, or things like stone henge, as people began to think that it is natural and best to be in accord with these cosmological observations...mythology eagerly devoured these observations and reconstituted them into the systems from which our own modern myths descend.
Stunningly, many of these disparate and far flung cultures developed many of the same exact mythic structures. The meaning of the bull and [censored] in the nativity scene would not be lost on some observers! While there seems quite a bit of evidence about cross cultural pollination, such as between South America and China for example, and Babylon, India, and Egypt etc. what seems lost is the connective tissue between ancient times and modern manifestations of these mythic themes and structures...for example why is Dec 25th Jesus's birthday? And lost too, are the fascinating astronomic, cosmologic, and astrologic observations upon which so much of our cultures have become based on.
Is it any wonder though that our world myths take on the task of explaining these cycles, and take on the ideas of death and rebirth, or why we have so many dying God myths, returned from the dead myths, and all various permutations between...
Technically, this is the day of the year that has the longest hours of daylight- and of course it has a cyclical counterpart in the winter, where there is a day with the shortest.
But it is also very much more than that.
In ancient times as people began to notice and mark these calendric rounds of celestial events, as best evidence suggests in babylon, egypt, and probably china, and we see a flourishing of megalithic architecture and mythology representative of these understandings from various world mountain structures like pyramids and ziggurats, or things like stone henge, as people began to think that it is natural and best to be in accord with these cosmological observations...mythology eagerly devoured these observations and reconstituted them into the systems from which our own modern myths descend.
Stunningly, many of these disparate and far flung cultures developed many of the same exact mythic structures. The meaning of the bull and [censored] in the nativity scene would not be lost on some observers! While there seems quite a bit of evidence about cross cultural pollination, such as between South America and China for example, and Babylon, India, and Egypt etc. what seems lost is the connective tissue between ancient times and modern manifestations of these mythic themes and structures...for example why is Dec 25th Jesus's birthday? And lost too, are the fascinating astronomic, cosmologic, and astrologic observations upon which so much of our cultures have become based on.
Is it any wonder though that our world myths take on the task of explaining these cycles, and take on the ideas of death and rebirth, or why we have so many dying God myths, returned from the dead myths, and all various permutations between...