The Winter Solstice

Peekaboo!

As I write this, tomorrow at 10:03 am EST is the winter solstice. I try to remember to mark it on Facebook every year.

What disturbs me is the common inference that in doing this I am celebrating a pagan holiday.

Pagans have no special claim to the solstice. It is a natural phenomenon. All cultures have always found it deeply symbolic. If you believe in the Christian God, he fashioned it, and it is a manifestation of God’s power. It is God speaking to us.

A friend who visited Machu Picchu was told, or deduced, that the Intihuatana stone there, aligned with the sun at the solstice, was intended as an anchor to prevent the sun from disappearing. Supposedly the shamans harnessed the sun from here and pulled it up from the horizon.

I do not believe ancient peoples were that stupid. Of course they knew the sun was going to rise again without human intervention. The point of the stone, and the solstice, was to symbolically harness the Earth to the Sun, not the Sun to the Earth. The solstice, to them as to us, is the promise that, like the immortal skies, we too might rise again.