From the Society of the Inner Light:
The Winter Solstice represents the Midnight Sun and Solar Power communicating with the human spirit and its drawing in and concentration into the heart of each individual, the incarnation of the spirit, spiritual fire coming down and making intimate contact with the Earth.
The spiritual sub-plane of the Earth Mother is contacted at the Winter Solstice. This contact brings through the highest levels from which Earth first drew her forces. They include the Logoidal powers which operate at Christmas and the great Pan force which operates at the Winter Solstice – the nativity of Mithra as well as of Jesus.
From Wikipedia:
The winter solstice occurs at the instant when the Sun's position in the sky is at its greatest angular distance on the other side of the equatorial plane from the observer’s hemisphere. Depending on the shift of the calendar, the event of the winter solstice occurs sometime between December 20 and December 23 each year in the northern hemisphere, and between June 20 and June 23 in the southern hemisphere, during either the shortest day or the longest night of the year, which is not to be confused with the darkest day or night or the day with the earliest sunset or latest sunrise.
The seasonal significance of the winter solstice is in the reversal of the gradually lengthening nights and shortening days. How cultures interpret this is varied, since it is sometimes said to astronomically mark either the beginning or middle of a hemisphere's winter . . .Though the winter solstice lasts an instant, the term is used colloquially to refer to the full 24-hour period of the day on which it occurs.
1 comment:
Hello Gregory,
This is a link to one of my favourite sites. It is Nasa's archive of a fabulous range of pictures of the universe.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
If you click on the link at the top of the page called "Discover the Cosmos" you will get the archive list. There's a lovely one of the Winter Solstice at Newgrange in Ireland at a Megalithic Tomb from a couple of days ago. They did a live webcast yesterday but unfortunately it was overcast. We had a bit of a sunrise for half an hour before the clouds came over but as usual the weather in Ireland lived up to its reputation.
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