Well, fwiw, personally I think it could well've been both. If it was one or t'other, I agree with your views & largely for the same reason.

Not saying yr wrong, but I can't say I noticed that the midsummer was 'favoured' by the prog - other than that midsummer was what was being celebrated at the time etc. Both midsummer & midwinter were certainly mentioned & the possibility of it celebrating both too.

love

Moth

I find it difficult to see any reason for our ancestors to celebrate the mid-summer solstice when it marked the moment that the sun would oncemore begin its descent in the sky and the inevitability of winter. Newgrange is good evidence that the winter solstice was far more important to people struggling against nature at that time. Perhaps we prefer to celebrate the mid-summer event because it is more comfortable to do so in our centrally heated lives.

My gut feeling is .. what do we celebrate NOW?

Midwinter or midsummer.... when do the greatest feasts/celebrations occur in OUR calendar.

Obviously it is in the YULE period :Christmas and New Year.....

There are no great universal midsummer festivals

and SO .... as with our forebears.

love and peace to you all

FTC

Do you think we could persuade a highly paid TV crew to stand on Salisbury Plain in Midwinter with large lumps of polystryene being blown about all over the place ?

Mr H

FW says >>May Day? Lammas/Lugnassa. There's a lot of summer festivals.

We have Easter in the spring & harvest festivals in Autumn.

Some of these may not be that important now, but they were more so when I was a kid.<<

Yes, I'm aware of those, but as I said, there are no great universal summer (solstice) festivals.
Universal, as in the way that the Christmas/New Year celebrations are universal.
You say there are lots FW, but you didn't mention any ;-)

The notion of a Midsummer solstice festival only took hold when those crazy modern druids, wearing their Mum's best linen bed sheets, got it all wrong at the beginning of last century and started to worship at Stonehenge back to front!

MIDWINTER (solstice) festivals are/were and always will be the primary celebration throughout the west/Europe, even under the present Christian context; the midwinter festival is firmly ingrained in the western psyche as the prominent event in our annual calendar.
And so it would have been with our ancestors.

As to whether Stonehenge was primarily built as a great astronomical predictor and observatory, this is very unlikely. Certainly, it was built following the conventions of the age and that involved various solar, lunar and compass alignments, that's for sure, as are modern churches, but most laymen of the time would have been unaware of its astronomical capabilities. Ask your average Joe in the street what are the conventions regarding the compass points of a modern church and I'm sure 99% won't have a clue! As it is now, so it was then.

When our ancestors wanted to predict and measure the seasons they just needed to look around, berries, birds, flowering plants etc' these were their calendars, and if they wanted to be exact, a couple of sticks in the ground would suffice. They really did not need to go the bother of lugging 50 tons sarcen stones over Salisbury Plain.

Whatever Stonehenge may or may not be, one thing is for sure it was an expression of power.
Great power. It was intended as a statement. "Look at us! Aren't we something?"

And we are still looking, with wonder and in awe.

"but feel that the most important time was midwinter sunset. "
December 21 2012 midday to be precise.

mike