We need grounding. 6th November 2024 is the day when Americans woke to the political triumph of feelings over facts. It’s another victory for post-truth populism, with swathes of humanity in pell-mell retreat from a reality we are all reluctant to face.
November 6 is also the exact midpoint between equinox and solstice. Neolithic man used the solar calendar to mark out the annual cycle as a ‘wheel of the year’, observing the four big events of solstices and equinoxes and also the ‘cross-quarter days’ between. These have come down to us in Celtic form, placed in the modern calendar on pinch-punch days: Beltane (1 May), Lughnasadh (1 August), Samhain (1 November), and Imbolc (1 February).
Subsequent religious observances have accreted to create festal seasons, so we have just been through Halloween, All Souls, Diwali and Bonfire night as well as – if we are neo-pagan – Samhain. Our prehistoric ancestors this past week were transitioning from summer to winter pasturing, burning and clearing, and sensing the liminal space between living and dead to be porous.
The origins of this 8-fold division of the year was first recognised by James Frazer in the Golden Bough (1890), the religious (Christian) implications of ancient, even prehistoric, antecedence “said-not-said”, as Robert Graves put it. He traced the continuity more explicitly in The White Goddess (1948). Perhaps these 45-day ‘supermonths’ are more baked-in to our collective subconscious than we realise, and are there to help.
We need grounding. We are urban and technocratic now, armed with astonishing new knowledge and skills, yet somehow panicking, airborne in a fog of empty rhetoric, disconnected from Earth in a way that those negotiating the Neolithic revolution of 10,000 years ago were not.
And that reality we cannot face? Man-made climatic and ecological breakdown of course.
Our innovative creative collaborative technical selves are still capable of sustainable solutions to planetary damage. But even as we fix things, the political sphere holds us back: today is another manifestation of this century’s record of retreat from reality and rational debate, the influence of bad actors and delusionists holding sway in democracies and elsewhere.
EQ’s principal message is simple: we are equal-under-the-sun at equinox, but using the solar calendar also connects us with our individual actions to the Big Picture whole. So, at the cusp of the final supermonth of the year, here’s a macro-micro report:
6th November: the Earthshot Prize awarded – £1 million each to 5 worthy winners. Yea!
7th November: Copernicus announces 2024 virtually certain to be the warmest year and first year above the line-in-the-sand 1.5°C. Hm.
Meanwhile, we went to Westonbirt Arboretum (featured image) to witness autumn there. We joined a guided walk, during which 25 strangers were invited to ‘forest bathe’ in silence for a moment under the trees.
And our water filter now has a refillable cartridge, to save plastic. The change is every 45 days rather than a month. That’ll be today then: solstice, Imbolc, equinox, Beltane, solstice, Lughnasadh, equinox and Samhain thereafter.
We need grounding.
© Martin Nelson 7th November 2024