Far above the human activity on Earth, all is well in the celestial spheres and Spring comes to the northern hemisphere once again.
This pagan blog is written within 54′-56’N, and the inhabitants of these lands and islands of Britain and Eire-land breathe a sigh of relief that the wet winter is behind, and from the security of Helios and gravity and the tilt of Earth on its orbit giving us the beauty of seasonal change at this latitude. Those in 54′-56’S of course have the equal and opposite because that’s what equations do, they have to balance, and Earth balances perfectly within the greater cycles allocated by Helios and gravity.
Alban Eilir, or Ostara, the balance of Night and Day, when the Light of the Sun returns to our half of the Earth, is a cause for celebration for all us pagans in this part of the world, whether Norse, Celt or Irish, Pict or Manx. Happily, so far, the certainty continues, and the Light months lie ahead.
On the Earth’s surface, however, all is not well. South of this blog’s habitat, down at 40’N, Naples is waiting for the cataclysmic eruption of Campi Flegrei, the neighbouring massive volcano to Vesuvius. We have all heard of Vesuvius, the eruption which buried Pompeii in 79CE, and from which the excavations have given us so very much information on life back in those times, preserved as it was in the sudden freezing of time under the mountains of ash and lava. Volcanoes are cataclysmic, the human society is gone underneath it.
The last time the Campi Flegrei erupted it was 1538, when the population was not the 3 million humans that now live in the surrounds of the Bay of Naples.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a24475/campi-flegrei-supervolcano As this article in Popular Mechanics by Avery Thompson in 2016 states, the massive eruption 35,000 years ago triggered an ice age and may have been the destruction of the Neanderthals. The 1538 eruption, its most recent, lasted for 8 days even though not the largest explosion in its history.
In April 2010 the volcanic eruption on Iceland of the long name which for a dyslexic is too hard to spell, caused the immense disruption to air flights over a large area of Europe. Iceland is far to the north, 64’N of Reykyjavik, and the resulting ash and visibility affected that large area. If the Campi Flegrei were to blow, in the central Mediterranean position of the Bay of Naples, what would happen to all the human activity in the region, immediate, surrounding Mediterranean, Africa, Iberia, Germania, and the Middle East of present day Egypt, Israel, Jordon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Turkey?
What Trumps what? Helios-Earth-gravity trumps all. With the beauty of liminal seasons comes the reality of physical life on Earth.