Happy Midwintersday!

Happy Midwintersday. This is the day that the spiritual and the physical join in agreement and look forward to new beginnings. The photo below is of a mount in Ireland built by the ancients. It is a physical manifestation of their spiritual beliefs. The whole structure is dedicated to detecting the winter solstice, or the longest night and the darkest day.

I will be writing much more about this subject later. But if you have any thoughts about Midwintersday, or what it means to you, please dive in. I just wanted to start the day with a good thought.

This large mound is called "Newgrange" and it is estimated to be over 3,200 Years old.

At the very lowest point the the sun reaches in the winter sky, a beam of sunlight shines though the opening above the entry and shines on a mark all the way back into the central chamber.

I read somewhere that they used to sacrifice humans at the winter solstice, but the catholic Church stopped it. I guess they figured that human sacrifice was their prerogative.

Some of my ancestors are from Ireland, so I find the Early Irish to be, at least, as fascinating as the Early American Indians. Indeed there are many similarities in the two people. They were both extremely creative. They both used stone tools, and many of their legends and stories were the same. They both had rebirth or renewal celebrations. They based many things on information passed down from generation to generation. Neither of the two people had written language. The French gave Britton their written language in about 650 AD.

At one time my accumulated knowledge and memory would have been considered to be very valuable. An old person back in stone age times was the ancient equivalent to Google today. If you needed to know something, you had to converse with the elders. Elders were the most revered people of all of the culture back then.

The modern Irish estimate The Newgrange Structure to be between 5,000 and 5,200 years old. The mound is not more than 10,000 years old, because all of the British Iles were covered with a glacier before that. As the glacier melted stone age man moved northward. Unlike modern day man, they looked forward to global warming. But that was the period where global warming was slowing down considerably.

One of the things that made me realize that all people are the same is the similarities in the stone writing. The spirals, circles, boxes, and zigzag lines are found in all Neolithic stone carvings. The carvings could easily been done by our local Indians.