THE SUN AND THE SON

The Summer Solstice (June 20 or 21) was once the joyous day of celebration in the native societies of Northern Hemisphere. Midsummer, as its is called in English, marks the beginning of modern Summer on U.S. calendars. This reflects the difference in environment between the British Isles and New England, with the possible exception of Cape Cod, where the earliest colonists farmed most successfully with Old World methods. 

Pagan Midsummer is associated with Stonehenge, a Neolithic (3000-2000 BC) solar mapping devise. Its construction occurred in the same human era as the first Egyptian dynasties, the developing Aegean cultures and pre-dynastic China, the first date of the Mayan calendar, rock paintings in Africa. The environmental challenges of the northern reaches of Europe explain early inhabitants' attention to solar movement. While the Mediterranean cultures were advancing in architecture, politics and written language, northern  (and far southern) cultures were more closely bound to the seasonal fortunes and misfortunes of a harsher environment.  

Northern Europeans of the Neolithic Period, including the far reaches East and West, resembled native Northern Americans more than they resembled Southern Europeans and North Africans. This could be said to have been true until the expansion of The Roman Empire. The Nature-orientation of these societies was so entrenched that they rapidly reverted back to it after the Fall of Rome. This so-called Dark Age was a return to tribalism and Nature-worship. 

The second wave of Roman conquest, Christian conversion/colonization, marked the slow demise of native Nature-focused cultures across Europe. And it eventually led to the same result, marked by genocide, in North America. Divorcing Christianity from the persecution and eradication of Nature-oriented civilizations in Europe and North/South America is a revisionist sanitizing of Western history. One of the last of these cultures in Northern Europe, Lithuania, was not conquered until the early 13th century AD. To this day, Baltic nations revere their pre-Christian pasts more than their Western European brethren. 

Modern conservatives may rightly defend the traditions of the arc of joint religious and cultural development in Europe and subsequently in the Americas from paganism (Nature-religions) to human-identified polytheism (Aegean-Roman) to human-identified monotheism (Judeo-Christian). However, the deep agricultural, herding and forestry traditions of Northern Europe, rooted in the Nature-religions of ancient times, have greatly contributed to the advancement of human existence in that part of the world and beyond. In other words, beginning your appreciation of the foundations of modern civilization in The West with The Greeks or The Hebrews is, at the very least, nearsighted. 

We are living in a time of media-amplified cultural polarity. Jordan Peterson's application of Order-vs-Chaos to understand human society on so many levels is helpful. But the alternative to industrialized urban overpopulation is not chaos. This prejudice against Nature-based ideals contributes to denial of environmental decimation of Earth. It is woven into Judeo-Christian-Islamic thinking as much as it is woven into post-industrial Marxist nihilism. Moving away from acute attention to Nature's interaction with our species has led to our getting lost in our own sense of superiority. Shifting the focus from The Sun to The Son (of God), due to proselytizing Christianity and reaction to it, has brought benefits but has also eroded a certain humble awe and respect for The Universe itself.