The solar calendar marks the annual cycle as a ‘wheel of the year’, observing the solstices and equinoxes and also the ‘cross-quarter days’ between, creating eight ‘supermonths’. This is a revision of a blog originally written on 6th November 2024 – the morning of Trump’s reelection – to delve further into these fixed calendar events and articulate EQ’s philosophical basis. 6th November is the exact midpoint between equinox and solstice.
The cross quarter days have come down to us in Celtic form, placed approximately in the modern calendar on pinch-punch days: Imbolc (1 February), Beltane (1 May), Lughnasadh (1 August), and Samhain (1 November) – but marking these eight events long predate Celtic or any other spoken or written culture. The observance of sun and moon sunrises and sunsets was surely the first intellectual exercise of Neolithic peoples as they settled into their fixed landscape. That is barely conjecture: we have the alignment of henges, barrows, stone circles and other prehistoric monuments worldwide to confirm.
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). The featured image is JMW Turner’s The Golden Bough 1834 which depicts the incident in Virgil’s Aeneid from which Frazer develops his thesis.
These 45-day ‘supermonths’ are more baked-in to our collective subconscious here in the mid-latitudes than we realise, marking as they do the passage of seasons for a settled agricultural community. But 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 12,000 years ago were not.
[MN: I need to express the philosophical ‘grounding’ of EQ equal-under-the-sun here – how equinoxes are grounded back into our deep past, but equipping us to recognise delusional thinking (logic-based) and inspiring everyday and innovative changes to negotiate the climate-nature crisis. The original blog paras are stacked below for reworking]
6th November 2024. Today 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. We need grounding.
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.
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.
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 (Gregorian calendar) year, here’s a macro-micro report:
6th November 2024: the Earthshot Prize awarded – £1 million each to 5 worthy winners. Yea!
7th November 2024: Copernicus announces 2024 virtually certain to be the warmest year and first year above the line-in-the-sand 1.5°C.
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 Nov 2024, rev 6th Jan 2026
® registered to WMO Nelson
® registered to Equinoctial Days Ltd.