Reasons and Seasons

Ever since I took a class on religions of the West at Purdue, I have known this basic difference between the Western and Eastern religious traditions:  Western religion are outward looking whereas Eastern religions are inward looking.  Western religions emphasize rebirth and resurrection, Eastern ones an eternal cycle of reincarnation.

In my Astronomy class, I am always lecturing (in a good way; the academic style lecture rather than the moralizing one) my students about how all these things we take for granted about time actually evolved slowly from primitive ideas of astronomy: "Moonths", turning a 10 month calendar into 12, the usage of 12 and 60 for hours of daylight and minutes in an hour.  I tell them about how holidays that are not fixed in date on our modern solar calendar are holidays associated with lunar cultures etc.  How we carefully manipulate time to keep our solstices and equinoxes in the same place because the seasons are so important to us.  But I missed the very existence of seasons (or not) as playing a role in picking solar or lunar calendars in ancient times!

When I worked in the family winery 12 hours a day, every day for 8 weeks straight, I began to thing about everything in winery metaphors.  Children are like the grapes and adults are like the wine.  Education is like a destemmer and a crusher... well, you get the idea.  What's interesting is not the metaphors themselves but that my brain readily adapted its own private symbolism based on my everyday experiences.  Our metaphors don't spring out from nowhere!

What I recently learned (shout out to my man Joseph Campbell), is that the religions of the West all grew out of traditions established in regions of the world where the seasons play an important role.  The seasons roll right into their religions from their mythologies which are already steeped in seasonal symbology (including the springtime theme of rebirth and resurrection). Eastern religions, on the other hand, grew out of tropical zones (India for the most part) where seasons are muted.  Instead, stillness and eternalness are baked into their founding metaphors and myths.

AI art "Western myths meet Eastern myths"