North and South never used to exist

 

Purely speculative but before we thought about compasses and North and South directions we had rather the Sunrise and the Sunset so basically East and West. And rather than being a physical direction it was also a spiritual direction for the Sun emerges into the land of the living in the East and then in the evening the Sun descends into the darkness of the Underworld where we bury the dead and where our ancestors live. So the movement of the Sun across the sky mapped out the key points of a life also from Birth to Death and from Light to Darkness.

An odd quirk of ancient thinking is that when the Sun went into the Underworld and things went dark so the underworld was dark also. In a modern way of thinking the Sun creates the light and so were it to travel into the underworld we would become dark and the underworld would become light. The Underworld is never bathed in sunshine. This is wrong. Our ancestors clearly did not see things like this. The Sun didn't make the light. In Genesis God makes the Light. He doesn't make the Sun to issue light like a candle. So when the Sun enters the darkness of the Underworld everything becomes dark. This appears to be the original view on things. The existence of light at dawn and dusk when there is no Sun and the very unclear way that the Sun makes the sky bright all combined probably to draw attention away from the idea that the Sun was the cause of light.

Now the Sun does not always rise in the East and set in the West. In the Summer it rises far North and in the Winter is rises far South. But it never actually rises in the North or the South. It reaches at peak at the solstices and then scans back to the other peak passing the East and the West at the equinoxes. Unlike the North and South the Sun actually does rise and set in the East and West at solstice.

I wonder whether this made the Equinoxes the actual important points of the year, higher even that the much celebrated solstices of today. The North and South have no spiritual meaning, they are abstract and separated from the actual story of the sky.

It is true that people find solstice alignments in stone circles, and in other arrangements. Certainly solstices were important as the world depended upon the Sun returning and in Winter especially the end of its decline spelled the return of light.

But equinoxes are the mid points around which everything changes the true positions at the heart of the Sun's movement and the true gateways to and from the hidden land of the ancestors upon which the land of the light and the known and the living stands. In support of this the Christian church chose to place its main festival at Easter which is the Spring Equinox when the Sun descends and rises from the underworld on its return from the depths of winter. This also coincides with the original start of the year which is preserved in the financial calendar. And the East is not even forgotten during the winter solstice with the magi following a star in the East which heralds the birth of Christ.

Isn't this the original cosmology and spiritual and physical manifestation of the meaning and order of things and the truth?