By Teresa A. Martin
'Tis the season. Yes, 'tis the season to reflect. Celebrate. Remember. Feel sorrow. Feel joy. Whatever holiday you embrace, may you embrace it well!
Since the dawn of time, we've been embracing this time of year as a mystery of our world. The days grew shorter and shorter, darkness descended. Our cultures celebrated some type of ceremony of light and the days began to grow longer again and the sun returned. The process worked.
The night sky was spectacular last night, the stars a mosaic of sharp white and yellow pinpoints on velvet, the cloth of the heavens stretching from the land out over the bay, tucking into a horizon line far beyond. For eons we have stared at our sky, watching the shows, gazing in wonder and inquiry. And seeking to understand.
The word for the day is archaeoastronomy. That is the study of culture and astronomy. The Great Pyramid at Giza, the Mayan Palace in the Yukatan, Stonehenge, Anasazi Valley dwellings, the use of solar and lunar eclipses as magic, the medicine wheels of the Great Plains ... these are just a few more dramatic examples of 'technologies' that grew out of ancient scientific observation or as tools developed to aid in scientific inquiry about the great mysteries of the universe.
The wonder of the skies and our attempts to explain and manage them shaped human culture. As a species we are natural technologists - that is, we seek not only understanding but also to apply that understanding to control our world and our destiny.
In the process, the offshoots of that astral exploration create techniques that change our interaction with daily life on the planet. NASA takes a lot of lumps. Its programs have created triumph and tragedy and created new edges of exploration. But its greatest benefits have been the mundane earthy applications, the applied use of knowledge, that brought us high efficiency insulation, fireproofing, water purification, freeze dried food, dialysis, and hundreds of other techniques. I expect that 1000 years hence future archaeoastronomists will no doubt be exploring this work as the subject of a doctoral thesis.
How could we not question the happenings of the skies, especially at this time of year when the daylight appears to be fleeing the world? How could we not create myth and ritual, to ask that the sun return?
Myth and science blur and the stories combine the two in an oral tradition that we pass from generation to generation. Does it really matter if winter and darkness arrives because Demeter is sad for her daughter Persephone, who must return to Hades each year ... or because the orbit of the earth moves us away from the sun? Is it the light of the Christ-child that brings light back to earth, or is the miracle of light that burned for eight days that keeps us going until light returns to the world?
All the stories share the same base and the same need - the world grows dark, we grow fearful, we need to do something to return the sun and the warmth back to us. That something may take the form of inquiry and investigation, it may be the development of a solar tool, or it may be the following of a ritual. These actions are all part of the continuum of human being, all variations on the ways that brains and hands strive to shape our world
As long as we make it through the year without splintering the planet to its core, some things will remain eternal. The sun and earth will dance with each other, moving into the shortest day of the year this week, moving into lengthening days the next week.
And the year of 2007 will be upon us.
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year One & All! The Packet will be in hiatus next week and will return after the start of the new year.
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