Sunset Fadeth In The West
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
― from Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare
When Earth was young and Moon was new, the two locked themselves in a gravitational dance. The tidal lock forced the Moon to always show us the same face - that's not such a rare thing among orbiting bodies. But the Moon's gravity was then just right to stabilize the Earth's tilt over billions and billions of years - that is quite a rare thing, perhaps unique. This provided a stable enough place for life to evolve and us to eventually come to be here. That permanent tilt gave us seasons of the year. There is not an organism on the planet that is not in some way or other affected by them.
Today, September 22, is the Autumnal Equinox 🔗, when Earth, in its orbit around the Sun, switches from a relative tilt toward the Sun to a relative tilt away from the Sun. The season of Fall has started.
Many a civilization celebrated this event. In the Northern Hemisphere, where all old civilizations evolved, Spring is usually the time of sowing and Fall is usually the time of reaping. Spring is the time to worship fertility, while Fall is the time to celebrate what you've got and perhaps feast a little.
➤ In Egypt, the ancient Egyptians placed a great importance on such events and built their structures accordingly. On the day of the equinox, the Sun will set exactly on the right shoulder of the Sphinx, framed by the pyramids of Khufu (Cheops) and Khafre (Chephren), carefully oriented the same way.
Note: One has to be careful with making claims about celestial directions used by ancient Egyptians. Firstly, they lived so long ago that the natural, periodic 26,000-year wobble of Earth's axis (axial precession), as well as the gradual change of Earth's orbit (absidial and nodal precession) does make a difference in what they saw in the sky and where and when they could see it. Secondly, their agriculture depended on the flooding of the Nile (due to the rainy season in Ethiopia) and not local seasonal weather changes. So their year had 3 seasons, not 4, and was timed to star observations (heliacal rising of Sirius), and not the equinox or solstice.
➤ In the middle of Machu Picchu, the city high in the Peruvian mountains
built by the Incas and miraculously not destroyed by the invading Spaniards, there is an Intihuatana Stone, carved from the mountain. It is oriented precisely so that at midday of the day of the equinox the Sun will align perfectly above the stone, casting no shadow.
According to legend, when some people touch their forehead to the stone, they are granted a vision into the other world (whatever that might be...)
Note: when I visited those places, I definitely had visions into other worlds. However, they were not induced by the magic of the famous stone, but rather caused by the misery of the infamous altitude sickness that some oxygenationally more feeble visitors like myself can experience. Interestingly, when you visit Machu Picchu, 2,400m above sea level, you will actually descend there from the 3,400m heights of the regional capital, Cusco. When this is combined with a previous visit to 3,800m high Lake Titicaca and the spicy, somewhat suspicious food, it is possible to accumulate a headache that even a moderate descent won't entirely heal.
However, it was also built to interact with the equinoxes, as well as solstices. The sunrises during equinoxes align perfectly with the central, tallest tower of the complex, producing a spectacular sight.
➤ Some moderns cities, like Chicago, have streets aligned 🔗 with the four cardinal directions (North-South, East-West), so on the day of the equinox, the sunrise is spectacular:
In Montreal, the alignment is not to the cardinal directions, but to the curve of the St.Lawrence river, flowing generally from West to East, but not exactly so.
What Montrealers call "South" actually means "toward the river", making Montreal the only city where the Sun can rise in the South.
➤ The French Revolution 🔗, however, went the other way: they started the year of their short-lived revolutionary calendar on the day of the Autumnal Equinox. (But that's understandable, for they had just overthrown the monarchy and declared their First Republic, following their victory at a major battle at Valmy against the Prussians.)
The chief force behind the founding of new republic was Georges Danton, who also became its first president, only to be guillotined a couple of years later, as is to be expected in such revolutionary times. (His buddies, Robespierre and Marat, did not end up much better.)
The French also made a short-lived effort to decimalize time, with 10 hours to the day, 100 minutes to each hour and 100 seconds to each minute.
Their calendar had twelve months of exactly 30 days each, with a 5-day spillover, very much like what the ancient Egyptians had.
➤ The strange Egyptian calendar had 3 seasons, each with four 30-day months, each divided into three 10-day weeks. The year started somewhat irregularly, on the first new moon after the heliacal rising of Sirius, with adjustments being sometimes needed to align it to the schedule of agricultural activities. On day 20 of the first month, named Tekh (about late August, early September), there was a festival of the same name that was meant to celebrate the saving of humanity 🔗.
You see, the "Self-Created One", the god Re, after creating the world and mankind, took on a human shape and observed what was going on. But that meant that he was also aging and people, being jerks, started laughing at his age and misbehaved in other ways, too. Re got pissed and called Sekhmet to inflict punishment.
Sekhmet, being the blood-thirsty monster of a goddess that she was, went on a killing spree. After a while, Re thought that it was enough and asked her to stop, but she was so smitten with the killing that stopping that activity didn't seem to be in the cards for her. She was really out for blood (which she also liked to consume) and some other measures were needed.
So, Re cleverly commanded a red dye to be mixed with beer and when Sekhmet saw what looked like yummy human blood, she drank it all. She became drunk and calmed down. After that, she turned into the Great Cow, Hathor, and showered humanity with love and positivity. It is therefore a story of redemption and love.
Ancient Egyptians celebrated this during the Tekh festival by getting drunk, consuming drugs, having sex and then, in the morning, getting woken by musicians.
It was at that point that they asked the goddess to preserve their community from harm. During the last period of the Egyptian Kingdom, in 440 B.C., the writer Herodotus observed that the festivals drew as many as 700,000 people 🔗 in various states of drunkenness,
including drunken women exposing themselves to the onlookers.
"Egypt has more wonders in it than any other country in the
world and provides more works that defy description than any other
place."
― Herodotus.
➤ For 3,000 years, on the 15th day of the 8th month of their lunisolar calendar, the Chinese, as well as other cultures in East Asia, have celebrated the Autumn Moon Festival 🔗. In 2021 that day is yesterday, September 21.
As the story goes, an excellent archer named Hou Yi once saved the day when ten Suns that originally served the sky misbehaved and rose all at once, scorching the earth. Yi shot nine of them down, leaving just one to keep the light. For saving the world, he was rewarded with an elixir of immortality. But he didn't take it, for he wanted to stay with his wife more than he wanted ascend to heaven as an immortal. But one day, a baddie tried to steal the vial and become a god himself. Yi's wife, Chang'e, saw the danger and to prevent an evil man from taking the elixir, she swallowed it herself. As a result, she rose up to the moon, having to leave Yi forever.
People honour her sacrifice during the Autumn Moon Festival. (There are rougher versions of the story, but I choose to ignore them.)
➤ Slavs celebrate the time of harvest with something called Dožínky in Czech, and named almost identically in other Slavic languages 🔗. That tradition is still very much alive, especially in Southern Moravia, where I grew up.
In Southern Moravia, the history and tradition runs deep. 30,000 years ago, before the last glacial period, it was the crossroads of Europe, with Upper Paleolithic (Late Stone Age) people living there. They even have their own scientific category: Pavlovian culture, after the village of Pavlov nearby. Those people were already anatomically and behaviourally modern, unlike the Neanderthals that preceded them.
The topic of prehistoric people was popular when I grew up. There were museums and books dedicated to them, even cartoons and books for children and teenagers. I fondly remember a book about a "great" leader "Little Mammoth", who was very smart and very exceptional, because he could count to five. His contemporaries could count only to three, so when it came time to hunt a pack of more than 3 animals, the group lead by Little Mammoth had a distinct tactical advantage. As a child I wanted to be like Little Mammoth. Eventually, I ended up studying mathematics.
People in those times still hunted mammoth like the Neanderthals before them, but lived to a much older age, made art and knew how make ceramics. The oldest known ceramic figure, a figurine of an older woman celebrating fertility from about 26,000 years ago, was found there.
It is called Věstonická Venuše, Venus of Věstonice, after the village at the edge of Pavlov Hills, below.
Those hills (colloquially called Pálava) are a fantastic terrain to hike and explore, even climb. I learned much of my rope technique on the attractive little white cliffs I encountered there as a boy and then a teenager.
We
didn't have fancy climbing gear like belays and descenders or even
harnesses. You simply wrapped the rope around your body and hopped off the
cliff. It takes a certain amount of guts and skill, which I liked very much.
Around 20,000 years ago, there was a nasty Last Glacial Maximum, during which carving out an existence got extra hard, and which not much survived. But by about 10,000 years ago it was finally OK to start a serious civilization. People did that, but first in the more southern latitudes.
About 1,500 years ago, the first Slavs migrated, from the East, to the lands of Central Europe, and a few centuries later the Slavs in those areas created Great Moravia, which spanned what is currently Moravia, Bohemia, Slovakia, Hungary, Southern Poland, Western Romania and even a chunk of Germany, Austria and Bulgaria. Two Byzantine missionaries, Cyril and Methodius, were invited to Great Moravia to spread Christianity and education. They founded schools and invented a writing system that captured the strange sounds of Slavic languages.
➤ Southern Moravia is full of vineyards and drinking wine is a common part of life.
In bigger towns, there are celebrations, too,
There are stalls on the streets that serve different kinds of burčák, often directly from the holding kegs or bottles into plastic cups. You sip from that cup while walking around, searching for the next stall to compare the taste. After a while, you know that the world is now a rather friendlier place, as long as you don't overdo it 🔗.
➤ When I was in school (here I will intentionally not reveal my exact age at that time 😉), we formed a rock band with a few classmates. The music was not all that phenomenal, but we had fun, we managed some gigs, and being in a band does improve a young man's prestige with the ladies. Partying becomes a more frequent part of one's life.
When the burčák time of year arrived, the boys in the band (and some others, too) decided that we needed to get some tasting done of that oh-so-fresh young wine. Since some of us lived a bit farther away and the commute was not great, we decided to do it in the middle of the school day, during the lunch break. So no food, only alcohol and then, as it happened, there was our literature class.
In our classes, it was the norm that at the start of every lecture a few students, chosen at random, would be given an oral exam of their literary knowledge and acumen. Standing in front of the classroom, facing the teacher and your classmates, you had to explain the details of a given topic, also chosen somewhat at random from the currently studied themes. The teacher graded your performance and the limited collection of these grades (perhaps together with grades from some written tests, too) determined your final standing. Yes, it was a bit of a gamble to drink instead of studying before the class, but nothing ventured - nothing gained, the young idiot of me would say to this at that time. As the (bad) luck would have it, it was my unfortunate time to be chosen for the exam.
I had a choice: either explain that I can't do it and ask for forgiveness and a chance for a retry at a later day (not granted very often) or face the music and go for it - be the best I can be. I chose the latter, hoping for the best.
He felt ready to face the devil, and strutted in the ballroom with the swagger of a cavalier.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson, The Suicide Club
-- Robert Louis Stevenson, The Suicide Club
I do not have a good memory of exactly what I said, but I do remember my approach. Border-line inebriated, but still holding it together, for the benefit of the sophistication and eloquence of my literary critique to follow, I lowered my usual bullshit guard (the mental block that normally stops you from spewing pretentious drivel) and started on a windy way around the subject, trying to squeeze as much jargon and literary lingo as I could remember without giving much detail that would expose me as not actually all that well-studied for that day's exam. Burčák was a great help in that effort. To my (internal) astonishment, I started talking in ways I never heard myself talking before.
I will paraphrase here; it will be exaggerated, not true in its content, but it will be true in its spirit:
There is some significance in the methodical metonymy used in the expository rising action. It draws us into the metaphorical fable of the ballad-like atmosphere and the surrealistic suspense that follows. The contrast of the protagonist's metaphysical stance on the existentialism and faux hyperboles in the conceited zeitgeist of his youth, offered against the hubris and cliché melodrama of the attempted elegy by his future self, provides for a profound dissonance in the rather paradoxical soliloquy of the final denouement of the story. It was meant to be foreshadowing, yet it seems to be eventually less of a litotes than a verbal irony, perhaps even a parenthetical parody with which the anachronism of the final flashback and epiphany comes out, in juxtaposition to the deus ex machina dynamic and the oxymoron consonance of the blank verse cacophony, mixed with the parallel structure pseudo-form in which the story is being told.
I stopped, exhausted by my effort, but still thinking that I should have thrown more phrases like "grotesque absurdity" or "postmodern relativism" into the mix. Well, what will be, must be. But, behold! I got an A ! (Later that day, we could not stop laughing about it.)
As Henry Ford would put it: "One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn't do."
So, when in doubt, drink burčák! (At least in literary studies, at Fall Equinox.)
➤ Here is an explanation of that old Shakespearean English in the title and poetic introduction:
| That time of year thou mayst in me behold | In me you can see that time of year |
| When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang | When a few yellow leaves or none at all hang |
| Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, | On the branches, shaking against the cold, |
| Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. | Bare ruins of church choirs where lately the sweet birds sang. |
| In me thou seest the twilight of such day | In me you can see only the dim light that remains |
| As after sunset fadeth in the west, | After the sun sets in the west, |
| Which by and by black night doth take away, | Which is soon extinguished by black night, |
| Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. | The image of death that envelops all in rest. |
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