At around 11 pm tonight (West coast time), this year will come to an end with the arrival of the Winter Solstice. Tomorrow morning the year will be reborn anew, fresh, sacred, as it was the first time, in illo tempore (as it was in the past, at an indeterminate time). This is an archaic designation for the beginning of the New Year, but in primal cultures it existed for millenniums.
I thought this would be a good time for a meditation on the meaning of the New Year, taking recourse in religious anthropology. If I gloss over some steps of logic, it's because I taught this material for a semester in college, so it all feels like common sense to me.
From Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane:
The cosmos is conceived as a living unity that is born, develops, and dies on the last day of the year, to be reborn on New Year's Day. We shall see that this rebirth is a birth, that the cosmos is reborn each year because, at every New Year, time begins ab initio.
The intimate connection between the cosmos and time is religious in nature: the cosmos is homologizable to cosmic time (= the Year) because they are both sacred realities, divine creations. [Pg. 73]
This is a profound insight for those we consider primitive peoples. While it's easy for those of us who are rationalists (or integralists) to look down on ancient, primal cultures as engaging in magical thinking, there are still some profound truths that they lived and celebrated.
Ancient peoples celebrated the cosmogony each year as a "new" event. While we understand that the world is not born anew each year, literally, we can attain state experiences where all time is one time, where we can see the post-logical truth to these ideas. We know this experience as a transpersonal state, while the ancients knew it as reality -- which we now see as a pre-personal and pre-rational stage.More from Eliade:
[J]ust as the cosmogony is the archetype of all creation, cosmic time, which the cosmogony brings forth, is the paradigmatic model for all other times -- that is, for the times specifically belonging to the various categories of existing things. [Pg. 76]
And this:
Since the New Year is a reactualization of the cosmogony, it implies starting over again at its beginning, that is restoration of the primordial time, the "pure" time, that existed at the moment of Creation. This is why the New Year is the occasion for "purifications," for the expulsion of sins, of demons, or merely of a scapegoat. For it is not a matter merely of a certain temporal interval coming to its end and the beginning of another (as a modern man, for example, thinks); it is also a matter of abolishing the past year and past time. [Pg. 77-8]
Many of us still honor this old "purification" tradition for the New Year. We review the past year, taking stock of our successes and failures, cleaning out old files, making resolutions for the coming year, and so on. These are archaic rites that still hold significant meaning for many of us.
We no longer celebrate the more esoteric rites of the holiday, but if we look at these traditions, we can see some semblance of them in our own lives. We still seek to abolish the past year through acts of "stepping out of time."
The abolition of profane past time was accomplished by rituals that signified a sort of "end of the world." The extinction of fires, the return of the souls of the dead, social confusion of the type exemplified by the Saturnalia, erotic license, orgies, and so on, symbolized by the retrogression of the cosmos into chaos. On the last day of the year the universe was dissolved in the primordial waters. [Pg. 78-9]
For those of us who have attended wild holiday parties -- or better, New Year's parties -- we have seen the truth of this observation acted out, even though we have lost any of the sacred awareness of the motivations behind such celebrations. We have some drinks, dance, listen to loud music, and if we are single we often pair off. What happens the next morning is another story, but for that night, we become intoxicated and step out of our normal conceptions of time.Imagine how much more meaningful our year-end celebrations would be if we could reconnect with the sacred nature of our New Year's festivals.
Strangely, it is generally among pagans and pantheists that we see more meaningful New Year's rituals, in whatever forms they may take. These may not be higher state experiences, but it doesn't matter. Those of us who make note of the Solstice and the ensuing New Year are reconnecting with deeper levels of our cultural and psychological history.
Whether we believe it or not, we still have those magical stages of thinking in our psyche. If we can learn to acknowledge and celebrate these connections, we need not abandon our rational thought processes, but we can add depth to them through some form of ritual and festivity.
Image Sources:
1. Winter Solstice
2. Mystical Cosmogony
3. Saturnalia
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