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The most fundamental astronomical period we experience is day’s journey into night and back again. Deeply imprinted in our biology as our circadian rhythms, the day/night, light/dark cycle sets the ebb and flow of our sleep and wakefulness.24

Concerning the day, we must recognize one vital point in order for our social history of time to make sense: the day’s length varies. The sun spends more time above the horizon during the summer than it does the winter. There is more daylight—more time to work—in summer than in winter. Thus, the natural experience of the day, and the unnatural attempts to slice it up into precise divisions, runs into a conflict: what is one to do with the difference between the length of a summer day and that of a winter day? This conflict would eventually pit the facts of astronomy against the needs of culture. Should the day’s divisions be of fixed length or should they expand and contract with the season? This question is of no small importance if, for example, you are a guildsman paid a wage that depends on accountings of the day’s length. As we shall see, the astronomical/cosmological recognition of the day as a by-product of a spinning Earth emerged during a long transition. It is no accident that this transition accompanied the increasing economic need for an accurately metered day.

The next cycle imposed upon us by nature is the motion of the moon. The lunar cycle has two distinct aspects: a variable position in the sky (where you see the moon relative to the sun each day) and changes in its appearance (its phase). The synodic month, as the astronomers call it, begins with the phase called the new moon, which occurs when the moon crosses the sun in the sky. The synodic month lasts approximately 29.5 days.25 Since the moon shines only with reflected sunlight, a new moon is a virtually invisible moon. But as the days pass, the moon moves eastward in its orbit (relative to the sun’s position at noon) and we see the moon’s transformation from the sickle-shaped waxing crescent phase to the familiar D of the first quarter moon and then on to the full moon, the third-quarter moon and finally the waning crescent.

Next to the day, the cycle of lunar phases defining the month is our most obvious and visceral experience of celestial time. “Many moons” was the preferred means of time reckoning for hunter-gathering cultures. Most early cultures kept lunar rather than solar calendars. Thus it was the round of the moon’s phases repeating themselves after approximately twelve or so cycles that defined a year. The moon provides an easily recognized measure of time cycles short enough to count but long enough to measure durations stretching across many days. It is a great loss to us moderns, with our skies lit up by electric light, that we rarely notice the moon and its passage through a cycle of phases.

The yearly cycle of the sun—or seasons—is the longest repeating period imposed by the heavens that most people experience in a single life.

Few of us are as intimate with the yearly changes in the sun’s position as we are with the daily solar turn of night into day. We may not pay close attention to those annual shifts, but we all feel the effect of the sun’s motion in the sky through the change of seasons. Everyone living in temperate climates knows the feeling of the sun beating down at noon on a summer’s day or of the feeble heat of the winter sun hanging low in the sky. Both experiences are unconscious measurements of the sun’s movement through the sky over the course of a year. On its daily journey, the sun climbs higher into the sky during the summer than in winter. Here, “higher” means closer to directly overhead, a point astronomers call the zenith.

The sun’s daily arc takes it from rising in the east to setting in the west. The changing height of the sun at noontime over the course of a year actually reflects a change in where it appears to rise and set on the horizon (though of course it is the Earth’s turning that creates this effect). Most of us are far too removed from the experience of the natural world to notice where on the horizon the sun rises and sets. Our ancestors, however, couldn’t help but notice. Beginning in the depths of winter they watched morning after morning—the sun rising progressively further north on the horizon as the days passed. Then in the middle of summer the steady northward march of solar risings (and settings) would stop and reverse itself. The sun’s rising begins moving further toward the south on the horizon line until it reached a southern extreme and repeated the cycle once again.

The seasons, the length of day and the strength of the sun’s warmth are all tied to this yearly cycle. The year’s shortest day (December 21 in the Northern Hemisphere) occurs when the sun rises at its southernmost point on the horizon; this is the winter solstice. The longest day comes when the sun is at its northernmost rising, called the summer solstice (June 21 on our modern calendars). The spring and fall equinoxes (September and March 21) mark days of equal length.

The yearly cycle of long days turning to short days, warm months turning to cold months and growing seasons turning to seasons of decay has been the pulse of human life since we were hunter-gatherers. The direct connection between this lived, embodied experience of repeating celestial patterns made time and the sky intimate partners. But it was not only the sun that mattered; the stars themselves acted as the original cosmic metronome.

Like a child being turned outward on a merry-go-round, we humans get a different view of the night sky in winter, spring, summer and fall as the Earth wheels around the sun in its orbit. The constellations we can see each night change with the seasons. By the era of the Greeks at least the ancients had mapped out the positions of the fixed stars on the starry sphere. They were smart enough to imagine the noontime sun set against that background of stars even if those stars were blotted out by sunlight during the day. In this way they knew the sun was tracking a path against those stars in a line called the ecliptic. They saw that the sun, the moon and even the wandering planets stayed close to the ecliptic as they moved across the sky. The twelve distinct constellations the sun passed through in its motion along the ecliptic were called the zodiac. The movement of sun, moon and planets against the fixed pattern of stars, along the ecliptic, was a cosmic dance that anyone could see before artificial light stole the night from us.

The final celestial period imposed on us is one that few other than astronomers would notice today. Each of the five visible planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) makes a slow march along to the ecliptic and against the background of fixed stars. Night after night each planet moves slowly through the constellations, speeding up and slowing down at different times in the year and for different durations. Each planet also steadily brightens and then steadily dims as it completes its motion against the stars. Strangest of all, each planet executes a loop in the sky—called retrograde motion—halting its usual eastward march in a short pirouette that takes on the order of a few months to complete.

FALLING INTO TIME: THE PALEOLITHIC COSMOS

The daily turn of night to day, the monthly cycle of lunar phases, the yearly journey of the sun through the zodiac and, finally, the strange wanderings of the planets—each of these celestial dance steps formed a raw physical encounter with time. It was seen on the sky and felt in the seasonal changes of warmth and cold. It is from this most basic experience that humans built their stories of the cosmos, its origin in time and its meaning for their lives.

The world we inhabit today makes a clean separation between time in our daily experience and the scientifically defined time of our cosmology. No one today connects her 12:15 appointment at the dentist to the fractions of a second in which Big Bang cosmology plays out. Daily time is lived through the digital time on cell phones and our electronic calendars. Cosmological time is the domain of scientists, observatories and university graduate programs. This separation, however, is an illusion.

The arc of cultural evolution has hidden the binding of human time and cosmic time from us, but in the Paleolithic world the separation never existed. The cosmos of our Paleolithic ancestors was of a whole, and that included time. The hunter-gatherer peoples of the Neolithic knew their place in the world, for they had yet to fully distinguish themselves from that world or its movement through time.

Our understanding of the Paleolithic cosmos (and cosmology) relies on an understanding of myth. Myth, in this essential context, does not mean a false story (as in the urban myth of an old lady drying her poodle in a microwave oven). Myth, in the domains of cosmology, is far more essential and powerful. Every culture has its mythology, its potent narratives of origins and endings. To follow the roots of modern cosmological theorizing back in time to the imaginative territories of prehistory we must turn to the universe of myth, for within it we will find the first responses to the mystery linking time and being.

Myth came before all our forms of religion and before the practice of science.26 Its function was to recount “sacred” stories that set human beings into their proper context within the universe. In myth the experience of the world as sacred was codified into stories so old that they embrace the origins of both religion and science. As the great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade put it: “Through myth, the World can be apprehended as a perfectly articulated, intelligible, and significant Cosmos.”27 Thus it is through myth that the cosmos of Prehistory becomes apparent.

Since our Paleolithic ancestors left no written records of their cosmological myths, archeologists must piece together their worldview from other materials. One important source is the repository of mythological narratives transcribed many millennia later, once writing was invented around 3000 BCE.28 These stories contain traces of the cosmological narratives of prehistory. The mythologies of existing hunter-gatherers, such as the Aboriginal people of Australia or the Inuit peoples of the Arctic, provide their own insights.29 From these sources a clear picture emerges of a cosmology that is dominated by ideas of a time without time, and the separation of elements once joined.

The world of the hunter-gatherer does not split cleanly between man and animal, culture and nature. Instead those paired worlds remain integrated. The Mbuti people of Zaire, for example, identify the forest they inhabit as a person. It is not “the environment” but another sentient being, a giving parent or trusted kin.30 The Inuit of Greenland take a similar position with respect to the animals they hunt. The polar bear is not simply a lower animal but is, instead, a member of the tribe. Once it has been successfully hunted and killed it must be treated with the same respect as any other deceased member of the society.31

Just as the separation of man and nature does not exist for modern hunter-gatherers, it likely did not exist in the Paleolithic. As anthropologist Tim Ingold has written, “For modern hunter-gatherers there are not two worlds of persons (society) and things (nature) but just one—one environment—saturated with personal powers and embracing both human beings and the plants and animals on which they depend, and the landscape in which they live and move.”32

This seamless continuity between humans and their environment is also reflected in their conceptions of time and cosmos. The link, however, comes with a twist. Paleolithic narratives of creation reflect the recognition that an immutable separation was imposed on humanity when we awakened in the Big Bang of consciousness. Thus hunter-gatherer myths will often speak of a lost paradise. In the “before” humans were immortal and lived in an ongoing balance with the world and the divine forces that shaped it. Human and animal could speak to each other and transformations from animal to human form were common.

The most important aspect of Paleolithic cosmological myths was the Fall, which was the loss of a perfect, preexisting harmony between humans and the nonhuman world. Somehow, the myths tell us, that harmony was shattered. As Karen Armstrong put it, “At the center of the world there was a tree, a mountain or a pole linking Earth with heaven, which the people could easily climb to reach the realm of the gods. Then there was a catastrophe; the mountain collapsed, or the tree was cut down and it became more difficult to reach heaven.”33

In this myth, the preexisting Eden was a timeless place. It was complete and existed without change. People in the golden age lived either exceedingly long lives or forever. Thus the Fall was also the fall into time. In many myths, when the harmony was shattered, time and death entered the world together. But in these myths the golden age was not truly gone. Instead it remained as an archetypal, timeless state that could be—and needed to be—recovered. The Aborigines of Australia, for example, conceive of returning to the primordial cosmos in the Dreamtime. As Armstrong wrote, “Dreamtime . . . is timeless and ‘everywhen.’ It forms a stable backdrop to everyday life, which is dominated by death, flux, the endless succession of events, and the cycles of seasons.”34

The myth of the golden age and the Fall are all but universal in early human cultures.35 Like the Australian aboriginal emphasis on Dreamtime, the point of these cosmological myths was not to recount history; it was to recover original time. As Armstrong puts it, “Today we separate the religious from the secular. This would have been incomprehensible to the Paleolithic hunters.” These myths had purpose. They “show people how they could return to this archetypal world, not only in moments of visionary rapture but in the regular duties of their daily lives.”36 Thus the time of origins existed not in the past, as we imagine it now in cosmology, but in this ever-present “everywhen.”37 For the hunter crouching low in the brush, waiting for the herd to pause, the time of creation and his experience now were never far apart. For the women filling baskets with wild grain, their actions and the primordial divine acts, which set the world in motion, were always closely paired.

The daily time of Paleolithic people was set against a cosmos that was not “out there” but rather was close by. It was a cosmos without birth or final death or linear time. It was a universe alive with animate and divine powers that were always present, reenergizing the world each day with the return of the sun, each month with the return of the moon to fullness and each season with shifts in light and warmth.

But culture and its needs would change and the powers animating the universe would grow distant and more difficult to engage. Divine entities that were once proximate and personal slowly became remote and willful. It is in this understanding that the sky was the first retreat of the divine. The development of more complex cultures led to myths of the sky as the first and distant domain of the divine. Armstrong notes that the sky god—a distant but powerful first cause—begins to appear in this era. She observes, “The sky towered above them [the Paleolithic people], inconceivably immense, inaccessible and eternal. It was the very essence of transcendence and otherness.” The sky with its wheeling, repeating patterns was the first house of the father god, the original seat of divine power.38

The Paleolithic cosmos was a direct reflection of our first awakened experience of the daily experience of time. As hunter-gatherers, people followed the herds and watched as the seasons ripened the best edible plants. In the Big Bang of consciousness they had begun to watch the cycles of the world around them and from it they lifted out the idea of time. In this way time was a creation of culture, just as culture was a creation of the embodied mind. The enigmatic entanglement between experienced physicality and the symbolic, cultured imagination created a time that existed in both daily life and myth. But as the world warmed, humanity changed, and our universe would change with it. A new kind of time and a new relation to the world would emerge with the next great human revolution. Our focus and our consciousness would be re-created as the Earth was put to the plow.

STAYING HOME: THE NEOLITHIC REVOLUTION

The world would not remain locked in ice forever.

Around twelve thousand years ago, the climate shifted, as it had countless times and countless millennia before. The planet warmed, the glaciers retreated and the Paleolithic era ended.39 But unlike previous interglacial periods, something new was born with the return of climatic spring. Our species learned a fundamentally new way of being human.

As warm seasons lengthened and the ice disappeared, some bands of hunter-gatherers invented a new way of life. They stopped following the herds into warmer pastures. They settled down and began domesticating themselves—switching from hunting and foraging to the deliberate cultivation of grains. They built houses that would last from one year to the next.40 They grouped these houses together to create villages that would endure for generations. All these changes fed upon one another and were possible because people had learned to till the land and reap its harvests. Cosmos and time were each, separately and together, essential facets of this revolution. In this Neolithic era (new stone age), a flowering of human creativity began. It was a time of profound change that would not be matched again until the age of the machine.

The archeologist Colin Renfrew identifies at least seven key features of the Neolithic revolution:41

Each of these cultural innovations required a fundamentally new way of organizing human activities, as well as a new way of imagining culture and its place in the cosmos. And, just as important, each one required a daily engagement with time unlike anything that had come before.

According to some researchers the Neolithic saw the completion of a transition that had its beginnings in the Paleolithic. In the eyes of archeologists such as Renfrew, the artistic revolutions of forty, thirty or twenty thousand years ago were local and uneven. The astonishing cave art found in Spain and France were not universal phenomena spanning the entire human population. In comparison, after the great global warming, our self-domestication and adoption of agriculture rapidly swept across every continent. It was a revolution that transformed almost everyone, almost everywhere. Thus, the Paleolithic might be seen as a long series of skirmishes in a cognitive revolution that found completion in the Neolithic.

What made this final step possible? The answer, which continues to shape culture down to the modern era, is our physical embodiment. We live in the world through our bodies and their materiality.42 What altered the human mind was not simply the introduction of new ideas in our heads but new encounters with the world through what we built with our hands.

Many pivotal inventions were developed in the Neolithic era: planting and harvesting technologies, the construction and deployment of grinding wheels, the mastery of metallurgy. All of these changes represented fundamental shifts in the way people encountered the material world. It was, literally, the act of shaping the raw stuff of the world into these inventions that enabled new ways of thinking and new ways of organizing human activity. This process of material engagement completed the Big Bang of consciousness and is the root cause of all the innovations and revolutions that followed.

Brute facts are where material engagement begins; new ways of being human is where it ends. The early farmers of northern Europe circa 5500 BCE had surpassed the culture of their hunter-gatherer ancestors with new ways of handling material that superseded the natural world. Housing for hunter-gatherers, for example, had “required no more than promoting and combining the existing suppleness of hazel, the stringiness of willow and the sheets of birch bark that grew ready-made.”43 The timber-frame homes the new farmers built required nature “to be torn apart and the world built anew.”

Changes in material engagement redefine culture by altering what are called its institutional facts. Institutional facts define the human world into which we are each born. From punch-clock jobs to jury duty appointments, it’s the institutional facts that define how culture organizes itself and then imposes that system onto our individual lives. But cultural organization derives its power in the mental realm of symbols. Thus the changes material engagement wrought meant more than just a farmer figuring out a new way to fashion a sharpened axe. These shifts in material engagement implied shared understandings within a community that were at once social and cognitive—in that way they drove the creation of new institutional facts. For the farming villages, the materials that made this new life possible were reflected in the day-to-day organization of the community. A Neolithic farmer, looking back across her tilled fields and the chores that defined her day, was moving through an entirely new world.

With the advance of material engagement came new ways of experiencing time. By kneading clay with the hands, pushing iron ore around in a fire and stretching wool across a wooden frame, people engaged with the material world in fresh ways, and time was an integral part of this process. How long did it take for clay to be baked into pottery? How many differently timed steps were involved in forging an iron plow? Just as each invention made new forms of culture possible, cultural imagination also developed alongside the technology. Because time always exists at the interface between the physical and the imagination, it would be closely tied to material engagement and the changes it drove in culture.

Nowhere is the effect of material engagement on institutional facts more apparent than in Neolithic megaliths such as Stonehenge. Megaliths are massive, highly structured stone works. These imposing stone monuments, as well as massive earthworks, are associated with prehistoric cultures across the globe. The construction of megaliths is one hallmark of the change from a hunter-gatherer culture to an agrarian culture. The 260-foot-wide circular mound at Newgrange, about thirty-five miles north of Dublin, Ireland, for example, appeared sometime after the advent of farming in Ireland. The earliest structures at Stonehenge were constructed later but were still part of England’s Neolithic agrarian past.

The construction of these monuments required the intense and coordinated effort of many individuals to transport materials across hundreds of miles. The megalith at Newgrange, for example, is fronted by a quartz facade composed of stones found on beaches near the coast of Dublin, many miles away.44 At the center of the enormous mound is a vaulted central chamber only accessible through a narrow eighty-foot-long passageway. The stone supports for this chamber and passageway also had to be dragged across many, many miles. In a similar manner, the imposing central blocks of Stonehenge, each weighing fifty tons, had to be transported as much as fifteen miles, possibly from quarries at Marlborough Downs.45 Thus, the decision to build these megaliths demonstrates entire communities willing to dedicate time and treasure in the effort to make symbols out of stone. And in that effort time and symbol were reborn.

The construction of Stonehenge likely required more than thirty million hours of labor. So much work that the effort must have spanned generations.46 With this new form of material engagement passing from father to son, mother to daughter, the construction of megaliths was itself an agent for imagining new forms of culture and time. As a direct result of building the megaliths, the monuments became the axis around which a new type of living community would be born.

The megaliths rebuilt culture and time through the very process of their labor and time-consuming construction. And time was always an essential aspect of the megaliths on both a physical and symbolic level. On the one hand, men would be called away from the farms to scramble over tilting stone slabs or bend low in sodden holes dug into the earth. On the other hand, concerns with time in a mythic, cosmological context was undoubtedly a core motivation for building many of these megaliths in the first place.

There is ample evidence that Newgrange and Stonehenge were built to correspond to astronomical events such as the winter and summer solstices. Without a flashlight, the central chamber of Newgrange is darker than death. But for a few days each year near the winter solstice, the rising sun is perfectly aligned with the ancient passageway, allowing a shaft of sunlight to pierce the darkness. For these few minutes, the central chamber glows in warm ochre—a promise of the light and life to come with the approaching spring. Newgrange’s builders constructed their monument with its solstice-illuminated chamber for cosmic rituals whose meanings may now be lost to us but whose astronomical orientation cannot be missed. Thus this solar alignment of Newgrange’s entrance is one potent example of a concern with the raw facts of the sky and its movements.

The megaliths were, however, more than prehistoric calculators. In addition to its many astronomical orientations, Stonehenge may also have been a burial site for chiefs and tribal elders.47 In this way ritual and religion must have been central to the symbolic demands of megalith construction. Their builders were clearly aware of cosmic time and willing to dedicate effort and riches in creating monuments that called to the vaulted sky and its repeating patterns.

TIME AND AGAIN: ETERNAL RETURN AND THE NEOLITHIC COSMOLOGY

The cosmology of a farmer did not look like that of a hunter-gatherer. The material engagement of hunter-gatherers was so fundamentally different from what people in an agrarian culture experienced that the very concept of a cosmos, and the symbols used to represent it, had to change in a fundamental way. The mobile hunter-gatherer lived out in the open amid the forest and plain, populated by free-roaming animals considered equals and cousins. The farmer accepted a tamed, sedentary life with the closed stability of a homestead roof replacing the infinite, dynamic arch of the night sky; for the farmer, beasts of burden were possessions and worked as slaves to the human master. Where the hunter-gatherer lived through time as an unbroken whole, the farmer lived within a time marked by the daily rounds of animal husbandry, home maintenance and village life. Thus time and the cosmos had to change because the ways in which people encountered the material world had changed.

Looking at the change from Paleolithic to Neolithic societies, Karen Armstrong notes that myths that cease to be useful will have to be abandoned. Thus, with the development of farming, new cosmologies and new conceptions of cosmic time would have to be invented.

Agriculture was the product of analytic thought, an early kind of science. But unlike our technological revolutions, the agriculture of the Neolithic farmers was never “a purely secular enterprise.”48 The mythic universe of the Neolithic was a mix of new activities and a changed understanding of the wider universe that surrounded them. Farming was as much a sacred act in the Neolithic as hunting had been in the Paleolithic. Crops, emerging from careful seeding and cultivation, were a new form of symbol and a new representation of time. Cultivated plants grew through material engagement with the Earth and its unfolding powers in time. Thus, crops were both food and divine power. Time acted as an intermediary between the concrete world of farming and the symbolic world of the gods. Unseen energies, manipulated through time, were the focus of new mythic narratives, as the tilled Earth became a fertile womb for the community.

The rites, rituals and myths of the Neolithic peoples responded to the requirements of this new agricultural cosmos. The whole community came to the fields, standing together as farmers ritually discarded the first seeds of the year’s sowing as an offering to the divine powers that would animate the new crop’s growth. Cosmic time was manifested in the fields for these men and women months later when the first fruits were left to drop, recharging the hidden forces animating the agrarian cycle. Ritual sexual union sometimes preceded the planting in order to signify the sacred marriage of soil, seed and rain.49 In all these rituals people were tapping into vast cosmic creative powers that, like the seasons, were clearly periodic in time. The close observation of the world that made agriculture possible had its internal complement in the new sacred narratives of mythology.

Awe and wonder before the sky had led humans to cosmic myths of sky gods in the previous Paleolithic era. In the Neolithic, the Earth became central in the form of a mother goddess. Myths throughout the Fertile Crescent tell stories of goddesses and their connection to farming. The heroic hunter’s journey, which is so widespread in the Paleolithic, gave way to the dangerous travel of the mother goddess descending into the underworld of death and returning to bring new life. These myths expressed both the recurring terrestrial bounty an agricultural people experienced and its devastating alternatives such as drought, famine and flood. Mythology was never a form of escape. It was an honest expression of people’s personal knowledge, and it forced them to face up to the reality of life in the midst of death and transition, a life given meaning in new contexts of agricultural time.

Most important, the new myths were sensitive to the cycles of the agrarian year and its implications for conceptions of time. The yearly cycles of life and death appear, for example, in the myth of Demeter and Persephone, which dates back to the Neolithic era. Demeter controls the fertility of the Earth. When Hades, god of the underworld, abducts her daughter, Persephone, in her grief Demeter starves humankind by shutting down the growing season. Zeus is forced to rescue Persephone. But once the God-King learns that Persephone has tasted the fruit of the underworld, the girl cannot be allowed to return fully and must spend several months of each year with Hades. It is Demeter’s grieving during these months that is meant to explain the bareness of winter. Time, bound up in the seasons, is essential to this sacred narrative’s plot.50

The great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade articulated this development in his work The Myth of Eternal Return. As social arrangements were built around agriculture, time itself was regenerated with each round of the year. “On the occasion of the division of time into independent units, ‘years,’ we witness not only the effectual cessation of a certain temporal interval and the beginning of another, but also the abolition of the past year and of past time.”51

The extended festivals of new harvests and first plantings were more than just an enactment of creation; they were, literally, the recreation of time. Costumed actors would embody the myths as a kind of sacred theater in which the entire community participated. “Every new year is a resumption of time from the beginning,” said Eliade. Thus at every new year, the community repeated, in ritual form, the origins of the cosmos. In many agrarian cultures these rituals of time regeneration required active human participation via the death of the king. The rituals would require the “king” to be felled either symbolically or in actuality. Spilling the king’s blood and returning his creative energies to the Earth enabled time and the cosmos to be born again.

The revolution that put the earth to the plow reshaped human consciousness and pulled us out of a time defined by now, by whatever was happening in the present. Cyclical time and cyclical universes, reborn anew each year, met the needs of our new ways of life and held a powerful grip on the human imagination across these long millennia. Thus in the Neolithic we see, for the first time, the switching of one cosmology for another. With the advent of agriculture a different cosmological time emerged, one mediated by our new material engagement with the world. This story of cosmos and culture enigmatically entangled through material engagement will be repeated again and again to the current day. It is still at work now as we face the end of the Big Bang and our own cosmological revolution.

© 2011 Adam Frank