Page 239 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

* zirg<,«eS [1510-1440 B.C.]
and casting it upon the waters with hand upraised to the sun­
god. And a favorite game was to act out the actual daily
journey of the god, galloping with the imaginary horses and
chariot of the day along the northern shore of the inlet as far as

the spit of sand, where they would be met by a raft representing
the boat of the night and paddled back to their starting point,
where the whole journey could begin again.
Their lives were governed by the weather-gods, as were
those of their elders. Even in summer the rain could sheet in

across the open sea and the mists scud low over the hills. The
god of the sea could wield his trident and send the waves thun­
dering against the cliffs, or the lord of the lightning hammer with
his double ax against the towering anvil-shaped thunderheads.

But in summer the mighty lord of the sun always won in the end,
riding his flaming chariot in triumph round the sky.
It was the four yearly festivals of the sun that were the high­
lights of the children’s year, and on any day the height of the sun
at noon could provoke endless arguments and reckonings of just

how long it was to the next. Every festival was so different, and
yet each in its way was a message of hope and a time of good
cheer.
The most solemn was the seedtime ceremony, when the day

and the night were equal. Then the wooden image of the sun
chariot drawn by the horses of the dawn was taken out of the
temple and, mounted upon the creaking ox wagon, was drawn
from field to field, with the priest and his acolytes, wreathed with
new-sprung birch leaves, chanting the litanies, and the gar­

landed men and women following behind. And after the sacri­
fices came the ritual plowing. There the earl of the manor stood
for the king, and he harnessed one of his horses, the only horses

in the valley, to the wooden plow that otherwise only was
drawn by oxen, and, naked as the day he was bom, plowed
the ritual three furrows in the temple field. He used a branch
in new-sprung leaf to urge the horse in its unaccustomed task,
and turned the furrows, of course, in the direction of the sun. And

in the furrows, along with the seed, were sown the crumbs of a
piece of yule cake, made from last year’s harvest and kept all

winter in the com bin.