BROADCASTS.com

b"Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com\\n\\xa0\\nS3E43 TRANSCRIPT:----more----\\n\\xa0\\nMark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host, mark,\\xa0\\nYucca: and I'm the other one, Yucca.\\xa0\\nMark: And today we are talking about all things related to the winter solstice and youe. Happy Yule, everyone, or whatever you choose to call it. Yep. Happy solstice.\\nYucca: It's it's amazing that we're here already. I think we say that about every holiday. Really? Yeah. But we,\\xa0\\nMark: we do, we just can't believe we're getting older. Is is what's happening here?\\xa0\\nYucca: Yeah. Well, December thing seems like it just started and yet here we are already. So, yeah. But speaking of that, this is something that we've been doing for a really long.\\nI think that's a good segue into our first section here is let's talk about what this holiday is because it's based on something very real. This isn't just a day that we randomly assigned some random meaning to. It's something that humans. all over the world have been observing as far as we can tell, for thousands and thousands of years.\\nYes.\\xa0\\nMark: Yes. The, I, I just learned of a new New to me, archeological find in the wheelchair plane, which is where Stonehenge is and so forth. There was apparently a gold plate found with a a v incised on it, a large v, and the V is exactly 82 degrees. The angle is 82 degrees, which is the difference between the summer solstice and the winter solstice on the.\\nHmm. So apparently this plate was. used as kind of a portable observatory in a way where you could shoot the sun on the summer solstice and say, okay, well it's gonna be over there on the winter solstice. I mean, for all we know, it might have been an engineering tool used to help build stone head . Yeah. Because Stonehenge lines up perfectly with the winter solstice, right?\\nWith the sun rising on the winter\\xa0\\nYucca: solstice. Right. And that, that kind of structure, something that we see again all over the world, we see that in the Americas and in Eurasia and, and really all over. That's right. And sometimes it's the winter solta, sometimes it's the summer. But it's the same ideas that we have been paying attention to.\\nWhat the, the relationship between where the sun is in our sky or the it's apparent position and what that means to the rest of the ecosystem that we're in. It'd be very important to.\\xa0\\nMark: Right. Yeah. Right. I mean, we were talking about this before we recorded. I mean, in the, in the case of the wintertime where food is becoming very scarce, not only that, but there are fewer hours in the day to go look for it.\\nMm-hmm. so. You know, noticing when the hours were going to start to get longer again would be a really big deal in terms of your survival. As we get later into history, we see that this is the time when all of the, the harvest that had not been preserved in some way by pickling or drying or smoking or salting or, you know, whatever.\\nHad to be eaten because things were starting to go bad. Mm-hmm. . And we need to get all those calories into ourselves so that we can survive the lean months coming up before eggs start to become available. And some of the earliest greens start coming up and the lambs start being born and all that kind of stuff.\\nMm-hmm. , right? Yeah. . So it's a time That is it. It has kind of an internal paradox in it, right? It's the time to have a big party and eat a lot. So it's a time to get together, celebrate with our loved ones, share food, share, drink, share company in, and sort of keep that light alive through the darkest time of the year.\\nBut it's also confronting the fact that things are gonna get tough. coming up in the next few months. These, these are not gonna be a lot of fun. So this is sort of the last hurrah in a way. Mm-hmm. , before we get to some very, you know, before the advent of modern supply chains and agriculture, these were times when things, things can get pretty\\xa0\\nYucca: dice"