The Winter Solstice: The Backbone Of World Religious Celebrations

Many today still call the celebration of the Winter Solstice a pagan ritual full of sex, and while a bit of that is true, they don’t realize that the ritual that is Christmas is in itself drawn largely from the ancient ritual that celebrated the earth’s tilting on its axis, where the daytime hours are weaned to a minimum and the night is longer in the northern hemisphere {in the southern hemisphere it’s the opposite}. In 2007, the Winter Solstice takes place on December 22 at 6:09.

Also called Saturnalia, Yule, the Long Night, and by most, Christmas, the Winter Solstice has a long and varied history. In prehistoric times, winter was seen as a very difficult time. Tribes had to live off whatever they could store and the animals they could catch.

The months were long and very cold and the Aboriginal peoples had the belief that as the sun sank lower at noon, they would be left in total darkness. But spring and warmer weather would always return, thus the idea of birth, death, and re-birth was born. The Aboriginal people were able to notice the slight elevation in the sun’s path within days after the solstice, perhaps before December 25th, even without the advanced instruments and equipment used today, hence celebrations were timed about the 25th. Full Story

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