Tag Archives: James Judge

In days past, the sun’s rays at noon on winter solstice were carefully marked, attended.  The sun in northern American latitudes would be at the lowest place in the sky for a year, thereafter rising higher daily to the summer solstice noon in June.  These two times, winter and summer solstice, were known as meridian passage.

Elsie Clews Parsons made note of the Isleta Pueblo marking light on winter solstice day.

In the roof of the ceremonial room there is a hole through which at noon the sun shines on a spot on the floor near where the chief stands….All sing the song of “pulling down the sun.”…This is noon time when for a little while the Sun stands still [1].

Humans, singing,  help pull the sun down.  And, by singing again, humans push the sun up.  Although scientifically un-plausible, the ceremony embeds connection with the sun in a metaphorical sense that, in turn, reflects the empirical, august, palpable unity that people need with one another to sing their lives into another yearly cycle with nature.

Notes

[1]  Elsie Clews Parsons, Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology for the Years 1929-1930, pp. 193-466.  Washington, D. C.: 1932.  From Anna F. Sofaer and Rolf M. Sinclair, “Astronomical Markings on Fajada Butte,” in John B. Carlson and W. James Judge (eds.), Astronomy and Ceremony in the Prehistoric Southwest, Papers of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, No. 2, 1987, pp. 63-64.

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