2000. Thurston, Hugh. Early Astronomy, 84–109. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1994. Walker, Christopher, ed. Astronomy before the Telescope, 245–268. London:
British Museum Press, 1996.
Xu Zhentao, David Pankenier, and Jiang Yaotiao. East Asian Archaeoastronomy: Historical Records of Astronomical Observations of China, Japan and Korea. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 2000.
Christianization of “Pagan” Festivals
Wherever a ruling elite seeks to impose or stimulate a change in the dominant religious beliefs of the populace, as when controlling a new population following a victory in war, they may tear down old places of worship and build different ones on the same sites, replace existing sacred myths and stories with ones that reflect the new ideology, and introduce novel rites and ceremonies in the hope of eliminating the existing ones. This is as true of the spread of Christianity as of any other religion. Throughout history, new Christian churches have been placed on the sites of “pagan” temples. This process is particularly evident in the Republic of Georgia, where the conversion to Christianity occurred as early as the fourth century C.E., and archaeologists excavating under early churches are wont to discover pre-Christian temples built several centuries earlier. Where indigenous religious festivals were timed in relation to the calendar, or tied to particular astronomical observations, it made sense to schedule the new Christian festivals to coincide with them, thereby upstaging them. A well-known example of this is the timing of Christmas to coincide with pre-existing winter solstice festivals; likewise, the feast of St. John is scheduled close to the summer solstice.
The result was the transformation of pagan festivals into Christian ones, but the original meaning was not always lost. In Mexico, for example, the feast day of St. Michael, as observed in the village of San Miguel del Milagro in the state of Tlaxcala, preserves some aspects of ancient observances relating to mountain and fertility gods.
It has been supposed that the timing of certain Christian feasts on mid-quarter days reflects the Christianization within Europe of earlier Celtic festivals dividing the year into eight equal parts. The best known of these is the feast of All Saints, which takes place on November 1, on the traditional date attributed to the Celtic festival of Samhain. The notion of a Celtic calendar that was widespread through western Europe in the Iron Age and provided an accurate division of the year into eight equal parts is problematic. Yet there is no doubt that a significant pagan “start of winter” festival somehow became transformed into a Christian festival. Its main association now, in many parts of the world, is with the dead, but this probably came later.
See also:
Celtic Calendar; Mid-Quarter Days. Cacaxtla; Mithraism. Solstices.
References and further reading
Hutton, Ron. The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, 247–341.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
———. The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain,
360–370. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
McCluskey, Stephen C. Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe,
60–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Ruggles, Clive, and Nicholas Saunders, eds. Astronomies and Cultures,
100–123. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1993.
Church Orientations
Christian churches generally point eastwards. Liturgical traditions dating from medieval times associate the direction east—the rising place of the heavenly bodies and particularly of the sun—with the resurrection of Christ and the dawning of the “day of eternity” for righteous souls. Worshipers therefore face, symbolically, their eventual home in paradise.
“East,” however, evidently did not necessarily mean “due east.” The orientations of many churches actually deviate from true east by considerable amounts. In modern times church builders were often constrained by the space available within densely populated towns and cities, so this is scarcely surprising, but in earlier centuries and in rural settings such limitations seldom existed. Given the care and attention that were afforded to many other aspects of a church’s construction, it seems inconceivable that their orientations were merely poor attempts at facing due east. The question, then, is how the direction in which a given church should face was determined in practice. What motives and procedures led to the resulting orientations is seldom clear from surviving historical accounts or liturgical texts, and the question has fascinated a number of scholars in recent years.
There have been various suggestions, the main ones of which nearly all relate in some way to the rising sun. One is that churches simply needed to face within the eastern quarter of the horizon; the details were not important. A second is that they needed to face within the solar arc—toward a point on the horizon where the sun would rise at some time in the year—but again, the actual position within this range was not important. A third suggestion is that they faced the rising sun on the day when the foundations were set out. A fourth: they faced sunrise on the feast day of the saint to whom the church was dedicated. A fifth: they faced sunrise on the equinox. And a sixth possibility: they faced sunrise at Easter. The list is not exhaustive, and it is not at all improbable that different traditions and practices held sway in different places and at different times.
Occasionally, we have historical evidence of a particular practice. For instance, there is clear support for the third suggestion in seventeenth and eighteenth century England. Historian Sir Henry Chauncy, in a book describing the historical antiquities of Hertfordshire written at the end of the seventeenth century, reported a common practice of aligning the foundations in the direction of sunrise. Over a century later, the poet William Wordsworth graphically described a similar practice far away in the county of Westmoreland. Those who were charged with building Rydal Chapel kept vigil through a whole night, waiting for the sun to appear, at which time they carefully laid out the foundation stones and thus ensured that the building— and especially the high altar—would be correctly placed. The night concerned was not chosen arbitrarily: it was the night preceding the feast day of the church’s patron saint.
Nevertheless, it is possible that Chauncy, Wordsworth, and others were merely expressing a romanticized notion rather than hard evidence. For that, we need to measure the orientations of particular churches and compare them with sunrise on the day when construction began, or with sunrise on the patronal feast day. Sadly, the date when construction started was rarely recorded; what mattered was the date of consecration of the completed church. Identifying the patronal feast day can also give us problems, since we do not always know the saint to whom the church was originally dedicated. Even where the church is still in use, the modern patron may not be the same as the original one.
In most cases, the only evidence remaining is from the orientations of the churches themselves. Here we must be careful, since so many churches have been partially rebuilt, extended, or altered since their original construction. It is certainly necessary to pay strict attention to historical records of construction phases where they are available. How can the orientations themselves help us choose between the six possibilities already mentioned? The answer is that if we observe a large enough group of churches conforming to a common practice, then the resulting spreads of orientations should be distinctively different. At all but the most northerly latitudes (above about 55°N), general orientation within the solar arc would result in a narrower range of orientations than general orientation within the eastern quarter, but both practices would simply result in a fairly even spread of orientations within this range, perhaps concentrated toward the middle. Orientation on sunrise on the day of laying the foundations would also result in a spread of orientations throughout the solar arc, but concentrated toward the ends if the foundation dates were spread evenly through the year. This is because the change in the sun’s rising position from day to day is much smaller close to the solstices.