21st of December 2025 in the northern hemisphere is the ‘Winter Solstice’ and in the modern era possible to measure the exactitude in minutes, which this year on Greenwich Mean Time was 3:03pm when the Light of An Ghrian, Helios, the Sun, Ra, Sol, is in the pause above 23.5’S, named the Tropic of Capricorn, does pause for a few days. This is not to take time out and consider whether to return north or just continue south and soon leave the Earth is an awful cold and dark, not to mention spinning off somewhere in space from the lack of gravity, but from the tilt of Earth which creates this slight shift from north to south hemispheres. Helios will be born again,
It all makes sense from the bigger picture when the human sees the models, or nowadays on a digital screen, and can see how from a northern latitude’s position the corresponding exact equal and opposite is experienced in the southern hemisphere (half – of Earth) because geometry is geometry, and luckily gravity holds it all in place.
So 3:03pm GMT, or UTC now but between Helios and Earth the name of the line is irrelevant and the human drawn line of longitude Pole to Pole only states the fact that Winter Solstice in northern hemisphere equals Summer Solstice over the equator and down into the south Pole. This is the fact.
However, it could be said that in the exactitude of modern measurement now down to 3:03pm for us in GMT, the word Solstice itself has got lost. Like so much in the Protestant ‘west’ which has gone further and further into detail and data and data and detail, the Heliostasio for the Greeks and the Solstitium for the Romans was not a minute or an hour or a day but as the name says, the stand still, the pause.
The latitude of Athens at 38’N and Rome 42’N is itself a difference, but in the geographical Mediterranean lands the history is interconnected and the necessity to observe celestial movements was not a pass time but for maritime navigation, agriculture, observing civic functions, etc., none of which correlate to the modern era when information appears at the touch of a button (until the next Big Solar Flare). Because the facts are still the same of Sunlight falling onto the Earth surface as it spins in space, the now obscured word of the standing still, or the pause (fortunately to come back again) would once a long time ago have been a different societal time than the 3:03pm of last Sunday. a trajectory follows through to the present time of 2025. However, when the pause of Helios is where Bamako in Mali at 12.5’N
Bamako in Mali at 12.5’N has only a short pause because Nay, as the Dogon tribe call the giver of Light and warmth, is not greatly angled above. The shadows do not fall long, and about 11.5 hours of sunlight are given at deepest midwinter. Up to Oran, Algeria, at latitude 35’N, and about 9.5 hours of Light came to Earth. Up again to Caen, and the busy ferry port where 8 or so hours of Light are experienced by the humans at that place on the Earth. Over La Manche and up to Hull, at 54’N (rounded up or down), with 7.5 hours of Light, and then its into open sea as the GMT line heads east of the ‘UK’, not correlating with dry land until the Svalbard archipelago under Norwegian governance. Longyearbyen on Svalbard, (on because although all humans are ‘on’ the Earth, it is said that a human is ‘on’ a small island, and ‘in’ a landmass) at 78’N has daylight hours at Winter Solstice of ….. zero. Not only is it zero ‘on the 21st December’ but it is zero for the whole of December, and the month either side of November and January. That is where the pause of Helios becomes the standstill. This is common knowledge, facts do not need to be referenced here because it is geographical fact.
However, this blog is very interested in the correlation or not of human society on geographical fact, and Solar fact, and this measurement of hours of Light in the Winter Solstice (and equally the opposite in the southern hemisphere) compared with universal time where anyone can sit on a computer or a smart phone and do the same thing via digital tech is the most stark evidence of a society’s departure from the facts. Until the worldwide web of time and info created the disembodied communication zone, a society measured only to its allocated hours of Light and the physical food, water, shelter, language, clothing materials from that.
Here in mid latitudes of the British Isles and Ireland, between 55′-56’N, allocated Light at Winter Solstice is about 7 hours, and a few days later it is really not much difference as An Ghrian is a long, long way south, and it could be under the definition of stand still rather than pause with several more weeks of Deep Midwinter before almost imperceptibly the hours of Light start to lengthen again. The western world is certainly not now constructed upon Solar time and the length of that pause …. or stand still for days …. but if it was, if the whole of society paused or stood still with Helios, laid low, slept, reset its circadian rhythms, feasted around a fire, sang and recited poetry, observed the winter stars, and caught up with kith and kin, how wonder-full that would be.