CHAPTER 9
The Meaning of the Solstices
THE SOLSTICES ARE INTRINSICALLY meaningful cosmic-terrestrial events, and at the same time powerful symbols for the deepest processes of transformation in the individual and collective human psyche.
At the heart of the ancient Solstice festivals was a profound regard for cycles. Every cycle—whether a day, a year, a human lifetime, or the life of a culture—has a beginning, a middle, and an end; and nearly every cycle is followed by another. Wisdom consists in knowing one’s place in any given cycle, and what kinds of action (or restraint of action) are appropriate for that phase. What is constructive at one time may be destructive at another.
It was this kind of sensitivity to cycles of change that served as the basis for the ancient Chinese philosophy embodied in the I Ching, the Book of Changes. We read, for example, regarding the hexagram called Fu (The Return, or The Turning Point):
The time of darkness is past. The winter solstice brings the victory of light.…After a time of decay comes the turning point. The powerful light that has banished returns. There is movement, but it is not brought about by force…the movement is natural, arising spontaneously. For this reason the transformation of the old becomes easy.…
The idea of RETURN is based on the course of nature. The movement is cyclic, and the course completes itself. Therefore it is not necessary to hasten anything artificially. Everything comes of itself at the appointed time. This is the meaning of heaven and earth.…
The winter solstice has always been celebrated in China as the resting time of year.…In the winter the life energy…is still underground. Movement is just at its beginning; therefore it must be strengthened by rest, so that it will not be dissipated by being used prematurely.…The return of health after illness, the return of understanding after an estrangement: everything must be treated tenderly and with care at the beginning, so that the return may lead to a flowering.1
While some cycles are obvious—in human development, in the seasons, and in the motions of the Moon and Sun—others are subtle. Moreover, we tend to be aware of cycles to the degree to which we pay attention to them and move with them. As we have seen, ancient cultures participated in the seasonal cycles that shaped their daily lives and their yearly calendars. We in the modern industrial world have far more precise scientific knowledge of the motions of the planets and of biochemical cycles in plant, animal, and human physiology. And yet our knowledge is sterile. We observe the dance of life in rigorous detail, but we have forgotten how to move with the beat.
Ancient peoples believed that it is dangerous and foolish to ignore cycles. Perhaps we are discovering the truth of that bit of wisdom the hard way. In many areas of human affairs we have convinced ourselves that there should be only constant, unending growth. Our population can only increase. Our economies must expand. Civilization must spread. Technology must proliferate and complexify. In each case, we have decided that contraction would mean disaster. And yet further expansion and growth means disaster, too. Is it possible that our dilemma results partly from our ignorance of natural rhythms?
In even the most diverse cultures, the Solstice has been equated with the idea of world renewal—the understanding that at periodic intervals nature and human affairs reach a point of ending and of beginning again. The Solstice itself is such a time, but it is also a symbol of even greater turning points.
Communities, cultures, and civilizations germinate, blossom, and die. But this is a fact whose implications we often seem determined to ignore.
For centuries, religious prophets have been warning that the world is about to end. They were usually right. Many worlds have ended. The Middle Ages was a world that ended. Likewise Imperial China. Pre-Columbian America was a world our archaeologists are only beginning to appreciate; its ending was recorded by some of the people who helped bring it about. New worlds have begun, as well. One could cite the dawn of the industrial age, the colonial era, the electronic age, and so on, all within the past five centuries.
We today are living in a world that is in the process of dying and renewing itself. In our case, because we have achieved something like a global civilization, this death and this birth are on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. Nevertheless, from a sufficiently distant historical perspective, it may be possible to see this gargantuan, tempestuous transformation as the end of a grand cycle, perhaps composed of many smaller cycles all winding down at once; a cycle whose beginning reaches back many millennia to the origins of agriculture, centralized government, and organized religion.
The ancients, in their wisdom, believed that the principles at work in the births and deaths of world ages have their analogies in the beginnings and endings of much smaller cycles, such as the ones bounded by dawn and dusk, and the summer and winter Solstices. They would tell us that rejoicing and mourning are both necessary aspects of life. We may want youth to last forever, but it doesn’t; and maturity and even death carry their own essential meanings. When the time for disintegration and death comes, it is important to acknowledge the fact, to mourn, and to let go, so that there is clear space in which to welcome new life.
Our civilization has grown far in certain directions. Like a revered old general, we have many victories to recite: we have gained extraordinary control over nature; we have created awesome military power; we have developed an abstract and flexible market economy that is capable of producing and transferring wealth in quantities and at speeds that boggle the imagination. But there are natural limits to further conquests along these lines. The world in which these achievements made sense is coming to an end. If we are wise, we will acknowledge the fact and mourn, leaving space for something new.
These days, many people scoff at the term New Age, apparently because they believe that the present age will somehow continue indefinitely. How people who have grown up amid the furious and accelerating political, economic, social, and technological changes of the twentieth century could hold such a view is a matter for discussion elsewhere, possibly in the context of an exploration of the psychological phenomenon of denial. That there will be a New Age is beyond doubt—only its character is in question. As the ancients knew so well, the health of a nascent cycle is largely conditioned by the way in which the previous cycle was released: whether gently or violently; with compassion or animosity; with courage or fear.
The theoretical desirability and necessity of letting go of the past and welcoming the new is so obvious as to require little comment. We all know that the world is constantly changing and that we must adapt if we are to survive. We also know that change—in the forms of birth, death, the formation and dissolution of relationships, learning, aging, and so on—is inevitable in our personal lives, and that in most cases to resist such change is futile and foolish. In their festivals and rites of passage, ancient peoples ritually said goodbye to people, relationships, and experiences that were passing away, and opened themselves to receive whatever life now had in store.
By and large, we have lost these rituals, with the negligible exception of New Year’s Day and its half-hearted resolutions, school graduations, and weddings. It might at first thought seem paradoxical, then, that it was the ancients, with their pervasive rites of change, who lived in stable societies with ordered and natural rhythms; while we, with few such rites, live in a whirlwind of social, economic, and technological metamorphosis.
Often change overwhelms us. For example, we tend to acquiesce without thought to the introduction of relatively untested technologies that alter the very fabric of our lives—from television to computers to nuclear energy to biological engineering. Theoretically, it should be possible for us to delay or control such far-reaching technological innovations—to subject them to scrutiny and agree together whether to go ahead with them, to wait until their side effects are better understood, or to reject them altogether. Yet we seldom exercise this theoretically possible control. We regard technological innovation almost as a force of nature; its implications for our children and our children’s children are hardly even a matter for discussion. It is apparently impossible for us to “just say no” when it comes to technology.
Perhaps our fundamental cultural relationship with change itself has become dysfunctional. We have few social means for the expression of grief either for personal loss or for our collective losses—the loss of lands, lifestyles, and traditions that are disappearing wholesale with the onrushing technological and economic transformation of the planet. And just as we seem unable to give closure to the past, we seem equally unable to formulate any coherent vision of the future, and we often seem to lack both the courage and the imagination to initiate changes that are obviously needed in our personal lives and in our institutions—changes that would help end racism, violence, the abuse of nature, and extreme economic inequality.
It would be simplistic to suggest that the world’s problems would be solved if only we all celebrated the Solstices together. But perhaps we could begin to refocus our attitudes toward change on these occasions, if we regarded them as opportunities to ritually release our grip on ideas and lifestyles that are clearly putting future generations at risk, and to commit ourselves to desperately needed personal and social action.
Our current global situation corresponds in some ways analogously both with the summer and with the winter Solstices. As at Midsummer, when the length of daylight finds its peak, our technological domination of nature and the sheer size of the global human population are near a peak. Present trends cannot continue much further (more than, say, another few decades). Both population densities and rates of resource depletion will decline in the next century, whether by deliberate plan or as the result of famine and environmental collapse.
Meanwhile, as at Midwinter, when the Sun is low in the sky, the innate life energies of the planet have been driven underground (figuratively, if not literally); and the spiritual light of the world’s indigenous cultures is dim and close to the horizon of extinction.
Historically, it is at junctures like these that cultures undergo fundamental transformations. It is possible, for example, to draw many analogies between our civilization and that of Rome at the time of its fall. Like us, the Romans were facing crises of overpopulation and resource depletion; like us, they were saddled with an unresponsive governmental bureaucracy. The city’s population approached one million at its height, a level that could be sustained only by extensive colonization, slavery, intensive farming, public works projects, and a welfare program. Virtually the entire known world was systematically pillaged in order to maintain the power and comfort of well-to-do Roman citizens. But the process could not continue indefinitely. Italy’s agricultural system underwent progressive collapse, the military began to absorb more wealth than it could produce through further conquest, and Rome’s bureaucracy ballooned to unmanageable proportions. During the four hundred years after the city’s fall, its population plummeted to only about thirty thousand.
While the collapse of the Roman Empire produced widespread chaos and led to the so-called Dark Ages, people throughout Europe, northern Africa, and the Near East were freed from the yoke of imperialism; they consequently returned to a decentralized and, in many cases, more productive and stable mode of life. For centuries afterward, medieval towns were governed in a relatively democratic fashion by guilds of artisans and served as a bulwark against the centralist power struggles of the church and the nobility.
It is entirely likely that something like this will happen globally in the next few decades or centuries, though of course the enormous difference in scale between the Roman Empire and the industrial empires of the present will strain the analogy in many respects. In that event, it is possible that humanity could recover some of its former sense of the sacredness of nature, and that human cultures might regain some of their variety, vigor, and self-reliance. But it is also possible that the world could simply descend into chaos. Hence the importance of planting the seeds of sustainable culture now.
The winter Solstice has always been a time to pray for the return of order and light, while the summer Solstice is an occasion to celebrate and give thanks for their abundance. But where do order and light come from? We have become accustomed to thinking that they derive from political and religious institutions, but our ancestors knew otherwise. They knew that we human beings exist in much larger ecological and cosmic systems and must abide by the rules of those systems if we are to survive. And the Solstices were ideal times to acknowledge and celebrate our responsibilities to these greater realms of Being.
True, we humans do create order in various forms, but on a limited scale. Our institutions may outlast individual human lifetimes, but they come and go nonetheless. Meanwhile, everything we do exists within another context, with its own inexorable pulsations. We cannot interfere with those rhythms with impunity; when we try to do so, we merely frustrate ourselves. On the other hand, when we honor the deep, abiding cycles of nature and cosmos, our lives are filled with light.
In human consciousness, light appears as inspiration, and it is inspiration that generates music, art, religion, dance, and culture itself. Inspiration cannot be summoned on demand, nor can it be suppressed indefinitely, nor forced fully to conform with prejudices and expectations. Inspiration goes where it wills; it has its own innate agenda. Each new generation has its light, its vision, which the previous generation often finds incomprehensible. Inspiration may shatter previous conventions. And yet this fresh light carries with it the seeds of new order.
Order and light naturally give birth to one another; in the present human world, however, they are often at odds. Our centralized, bureaucratized social order is commonly opposed by fiery radicals, whose flaming rhetoric often yields more heat than illumination. Our challenge, then, is to found a new social order based not in ideology but in respect for the context of which we are a part: an order that does not try to deny or frustrate the light of inspiration, but that allows it free play.
At the Solstices, we humble ourselves to the eternal truth that the real sources of order and light are the Earth and the Sun. We let the artificialities of human institutions subside in importance, and we abandon ourselves to play. We renew the life of our social order by periodically abolishing it and allowing it to be reborn from the womb of nature.
Solstice celebrations have always included children as enthusiastic participants. This is due not only to children’s natural embodiment of the essences of renewal and of light but also to their irrepressible spontaneity. For at their root, all festivals are really excuses to play.
To the sociologist, play is behavior that appears enjoyable but has no obvious survival value. But such a description gives little hint of its profound role as the fundamental activity of exploring, stretching, and transcending the boundaries between beings. The most basic of all borders is that between Self and Other, and our attitude toward this basic existential boundary determines the quality of our experience of life. Are we defensive, aggressive, fearful, or playful?
The young of all birds and mammals play. Play deprivation studies with monkeys, such as those by Harry Harlow and his students, have shown that play is essential for the development of basic social skills, sexual behavior, and parenting.2 As one might expect, the most intelligent mammals are also usually the most playful.
Play therapist Fred Donaldson, in his book Playing By Heart, writes of his years of experience with bridging cultural and species differences—and gulfs in communication between children and adults brought about by Down’s syndrome and autism—through physical, rough-and-tumble play. He has also helped thousands of adults reconnect with their own spontaneous and authentic selves by drawing them into direct, playful, touching encounters in play workshops he has conducted in many countries. He makes the point that play is not just utilitarian (merely a device for teaching children to be better adults), nor is it only a pleasant pastime for the young. Play is a window into the sacred, a way of transcending differences and an opportunity to express the ecstatic energies of life itself. The degree to which civilization has marginalized play is the degree to which it has denied and suppressed life.
In hunting-and-gathering cultures, children are treated indulgently and they play almost continually and without restraint. For a traditional Aboriginal Australian child, life is a constant round of self-directed exploration and imitation, filled with running, throwing, balancing, and swimming. Children are largely left to themselves and come to their parents or other adults for physical or emotional nourishment when needed. Though they receive a minimum of discipline from adults, they tend to be sociable, friendly, and generous with one another, and confident of themselves and of their ability to operate successfully within their environment.3
With technological progress, however, attitudes toward children and play change. Anthropologist Patricia Draper followed the !Kung San Bushmen of southern Africa as their society came into increasing contact with civilization. As the people became more settled, kept goats, and hunted and gathered less, they began to demand more obedience from their children. Childhood gradually ceased to be a time of freedom and became instead more one of preparation for the harshness of disciplined adult life. Still, the !Kung San say of their more “advanced” animal-herding neighbors, who are less indulgent and more strict, “They don’t like children.”4
Children in agricultural, animal-herding, and industrial societies receive far more formal discipline than do those of the “primitive” hunter-gatherers. Regular corporal punishment (which is virtually unknown among the latter) becomes an accepted facet of childhood training. Consequently, play diminishes, and with it the social skills and self-esteem that only play can teach.
At the end of the civilizing process, we have succeeded in creating an adult world that is serious and calculating, in which time is money and play is a waste of time. We have formalized the learning process in bureaucratic schools, “learning factories” that routinize children’s daytime activities, while much of their remaining attention is devoted to the hypnotic glare of television. The joy of free interaction with other children of varying ages in a complex natural environment has largely disappeared.
As a substitute for spontaneous play, we civilized adults have created games: competitive, serious contests with winners and losers. We teach these contest-games (in which, according to Donaldson, “every victory is someone’s funeral”) to our children, in an effort to prepare them for life in our highly competitive, stress-filled adult world. Having denied and suppressed our own and our children’s innate playfulness, we have created a society in which low self-esteem and poor socialization generate increasing crime and an array of self-destructive addictive behaviors.
The Solstice festivals were intended partly as an antidote to these illnesses of civilization and as an invitation to return to play. By ritually abolishing laws and hierarchies and by indulging in singing and dancing with childlike abandon during their seasonal celebrations, ancient peoples kept the formalities of adult life in perspective. No matter how earnestly they pursued their political and economic goals during the rest of the year, come festival time rich and poor alike returned (temporarily, at least) to the free, equal, anarchic status of the First People of the mythic Golden Age.
The freedom and playfulness that characterized the Solstice festivals often found expression in orgiastic or ritual sex. This sanctioned and coordinated release of procreative energy served two important functions: it strengthened the bonds within the community, and served to stimulate and revitalize the land.
As Dolores LaChapelle notes in her book Sacred Land, Sacred Sex: The Rapture of the Deep, “World Renewal Festivals always include human sexual rites: the renewal of life cannot occur without sexual contact.”
In most traditional cultures human sexual activity was part of the on-going whole of all of life in that particular place. It had specific effects on the whole: positive when it contributed to the overall fertility of life as humans added their sexual activity to the ritual “increase ceremonies” of animal or plant life in that place and negative, when humans failed to keep the number of children within the limits of what that place could feed without damage. In the latter case, naturally, humans destroyed the basis of their own on-going life. Few traditional cultures did this for very long. They either died out or moved elsewhere or learned the rituals to enable them to stay. This is the basis of “sacred sex.”5
In Europe, until fairly recent times, it was customary for rural couples to make love in their fields around the times of Beltane and Midsummer in order to ensure a bountiful harvest. This was a survival of much older fertility rites in which whole communities participated. But, as Mircea Eliade once wrote,
…we must beware of misinterpreting these licentious excesses, for what is in question here is not sexual freedom, in the modern, desacralized sense of the term. In premodern societies, sexuality, like all the other functions of life, is fraught with sacredness. It is a way of participating in the fundamental mystery of life and fertility.6
LaChapelle writes that “there’s no sacred sex without sacred land.”7 As anyone who has spent much time in the wilderness will attest, nature is sexy. When the forces of life are coursing through trees and flowers and animals, similar currents tend to flow in us as well. Ancient peoples believed that the process was reciprocal: just as a beautiful spring day can arouse our amorous feelings, they believed that by the free expression of those feelings we evoke more of the same in nature. They saw life and sexuality as good and sacred, and so their rituals and festivals were occasions not for pious sanctimony but for ecstatic self-expression.
Our modern, Western industrial civilization retains only the merest vestiges of these ancient rites in the forms of mistletoe kissing and New Year’s Eve dances. For us, sex has become an object, a problem—something profane and private, always to be practiced indoors. We seldom think of sex as sacred; it is never public or communal, except in a voyeuristic or pornographic sense; and it is hardly ever enjoyed outdoors, so we give no thought to its possible effects on the land. In our crowded, impersonal cities, intimacy carries so many risks of abuse and disease that it inspires more feelings of fear and dread than of celebration, playfulness, joy, or worship. How different was the experience of tribal peoples, like the Aboriginals of Australia. Robert Lawlor, in Voices of the First Day, writes that
Aboriginal ritual sexuality, whose dynamism is so boundless that it excites and vitalizes all of nature, is based on a love for the earth and earthly life. It is not a love instigated by exploitative desire, conservationist zeal, or environmental piety. It is a love for the earth that expands from sexual passion.…8
Perhaps the recovery of seasonal festivals offers an avenue for the return of the joy and sacredness to sexuality. For the time being, full genital sex carries so much cultural baggage that it is nearly impossible to ritualize it publicly without invoking abuse and censure. Nevertheless, if such is the intent of the participants, it is unquestionably possible to promote a healthy expression of sexuality in the context of a modern Solstice celebration by way of dance, play, and humor. But this requires that, for the duration of the festival, those concerned give themselves as fully as possible to the collective drama without taking their feelings personally. In other words, each man must willingly set aside his own persona (as much as possible) and become an embodiment of the divine masculine; and each woman, an embodiment of the divine or archetypal feminine.
Every ancient culture had a creation story that told how the world began. But this story was not only an account of what happened in the distant past; it was also a description of the way creation occurs in the eternal present. Often the creation story told how the One, the universal primordial Being, split into two cosmic principles—masculine and feminine, Heaven and Earth—which then made love and gave birth to the Universe. In most ancient cultures, the sky was regarded as masculine, the Earth as feminine. Sunlight, lightning, and rain were seen to come down from the celestial Father to fertilize the the body of the Mother (our word matter comes from the Latin mater, meaning “mother”), which in turn gave birth to life in all its various forms.
As times when the cycles of Earth and sky reach their extremes, the Solstices were occasions that brought the divine masculine and feminine principles to ritual focus. The ancient Chinese, for example, believed that at sunrise on the winter Solstice the yang (masculine) principle was born into the world and commenced six months of ascendancy. It is more than coincidental that Christians celebrate the birth of a divine male child at the same time of year.
Again according to ancient Chinese Taoist traditions, the most propitious time to worship the Earth goddess is in the early morning on the summer Solstice. This is because “at this time the yin (female) principle is born and begins to wax strong. The yang principle begins to wane in power.”9 That there is no corresponding Midsummer Christian festival of the divine feminine is, perhaps, an indication of the degree of imbalance between cosmic-sexual principles in our civilization.
All cultures agreed that the first era of the world was a Golden Age of harmony when women and men, humanity and nature, and Heaven and Earth were united in loving understanding. But that time of harmony came to a tragic end, and ever since then division and strife have plagued us. For ancients, the Solstices were times to celebrate the polarities, to bring them into healthy relation, and thereby to recapture some of the harmony and joy of the Golden Age. We, having discarded these occasions for world rebalance and renewal, see consequences in the form of abusive, broken relations between women and men, between cultures, and between humanity and nature.
The solution to these imbalances and misunderstandings must come individually as well as collectively. Each of us must discover and nurture a sense of self-worth that comes from the core of our being, rather than from our physical appearance or worldly success. From that base of inner security we must learn to speak honestly about our needs and fears, our visions and dreams, without blaming others for our own feelings or expecting them to change to suit us.
When a man ignores and denies his feminine side, or a woman denies her masculine side, then each tends to project those undeveloped qualities onto others. For example, a man might see an attractive woman as the embodiment of everything he wants and needs; he will “fall in love,” feeling that he can’t live without her. But he is only seeing the projected image of his own needs; he cannot see the woman for who she really is. Or a woman may project the negative aspect of her undeveloped masculine side onto a man and find herself hating him—when what she really hates is the rejected part of herself. By coming to understand and accept ourselves, we also open the possibility of coming to understand others for who they really are.
The same principle holds true for cultures, and for humanity as a whole in its relations with nature. We will stop destroying Mother Earth only when we stop projecting onto her the longings and fears we feel toward the denied or repressed feminine aspects of ourselves and our culture.
The recovery of the seasonal festivals could play a significant role in assisting the healing and reconciliation of the divine feminine and masculine in human society. As Dolores LaChapelle has written, “The great seasonal festivals, as done in traditional primitive cultures…balance[d] out the male and female in each person.”10 In the festival, the masculine and feminine divine essences were worshiped, embodied, and reconciled. And this was perhaps the greatest reason for these celebrations’ effectiveness in maintaining the stability and vitality of the communities who held them.
For us in the modern world, perhaps the first priority in cultural renewal should be the revival of the Midsummer festival of the divine feminine. It is the true and natural Earth Day, a time when we can focus our attention on healing the denied and abused aspects of ourselves and the world, and on celebrating the nurturing, intuitive, ecstatic powers of archetypal woman.
In the context of our modern industrial civilization, the discussion of Solstice celebrations seems perhaps interesting from an antiquarian perspective, but otherwise inconsequential. When we adopt a broader historical and cross-cultural vantage point, however, it is industrial civilization itself that appears strangely out of step.
Obviously, we have gained a great deal through the progress of the past few centuries. Our scientific knowledge of ourselves and of our world has expanded vastly, and a small portion of the human population now enjoys unprecedented power and wealth. But we have lost much, too.
For the ancients, the sky was a constant source of awe. One could hardly escape it. The constellations and planets, the phases of the Moon, the position of the Sun, all were noted throughout the day and much of the night by virtually everyone. Now we insulate ourselves from the lights in the sky. On a clear night (that is, when the smog isn’t too thick or the city lights too bright), the typical modern has a hard time picking out more than one or two constellations and perhaps a single planet. The position of the Sun and the phases of the Moon are of little or no concern.
The same with our planetary home. Once, we saw the Earth as sacred and alive. The animals and plants were intelligent beings, our intimate companions whose songs and habits were woven into the fabric of our lives. Now we tend to think of the Earth as the sum of our economic resources, or as a political map.
We who have grown up in industrial civilization are accustomed to regarding it as the inevitable product of cultural evolution. We see factories, highways, and cities as natural and ordinary. Why not? This is all we have known. It is so easy to forget that civilization itself is a recent, unusual, and unstable development in the history of our species. Yes, we have grown during these past decades and centuries, but we have grown so fast in one direction that we have become lopsided. And so our very survival may depend on our ability to grow in unaccustomed ways, to recover some of what we have lost, and thereby to rebalance ourselves.
As has happened so many times in human history, we may find that our next step forward will be inspired by a deepened appreciation of the past. Of course, we we are not prepared, as a society, to go back to ancient patterns of life in any literal sense. What is gone is gone, and there is wisdom in making use of what we have learned over the past centuries, rather than in repudiating those experiences and discoveries. But at the same time, we might acknowledge that in many respects we have gone off course. Cultural renewal means not a slavish imitation of archaic practices, but a change of direction back toward sustainability, decentralization, freedom, and responsibility. If some ancient cultural forms do seem worth reviving, we can be sure that they will be changed simply by the new consciousness we bring to them.
In many ways the Solstice festivals serve to symbolize the essence of what we have traded for civilization’s advantages—our formerly intimate relationship with nature and cosmos. And so they may serve as ideal starting points for the recovery of culture.
In this book, I am suggesting that we bring our modern sensibilities to bear on the creation of new festivals that honor the intrinsic meanings of the Solstices in ways that are relevant for ourselves and our world. As scientifically educated people, we know that the Solstice isn’t part of a cosmic ball game, as the Chumash envisioned it; we know that the seasons will continue to follow one another in an orderly rhythm even if we fail to build bonfires at the appropriate moment. Yet we still have an innate need to celebrate. We need occasions to come together, and we need to feel a part of something larger than ourselves and our families, something more intrinsically meaningful than our nations and corporations. As nearly all cultures have known for thousands of years, the celebration of the Solstices is the ideal way to fill all of these needs.