Following the Sun (3 page)

Two days earlier, shortly after debarking from the freighter, I had begun hunting for a room, but since it was late on a Saturday afternoon every place was full. I was sitting in a little public park near the main promenade, watching the bats twist above the gardens and considering the possibility of spending my first night in Spain on a chill park bench, when two boys sped by on bicycles, spotted me, and spun around.

Spanish boys are not shy.

“What bicycle is that?” they asked.

I explained.

Why was I sitting here with this bicycle?

“I am thinking of where to stay.” I said. “I am going to ride this bicycle to Scotland. But tonight I want to stay in Cádiz.”

“Scotland?” they shouted.

“Scotland,” I said with equal enthusiasm.

This led to a discussion of football teams—of which I knew nothing, but feigned some knowledge—and this led in turn to some cousin who was on some team that at some point in the distant past took him into this Scotland to play in rain and even snow, and this in turn led to the story of one boy's uncle who, he said, ran a sort of pension.

“We will take you there,” they said. “He rarely has guests.”

And so the three of us mounted up and I followed them ever inland away from the coast, twisting and turning through high-walled little streets until we came to a small door on a small back street. This door in no way resembled a hotel entrance but they knocked and shouted and pounded and eventually an older gentleman in a cardigan sweater came out and said, yes, he had a room.

It was a dark back room with high ceilings, and a massive old Gothic bed, in which, I later learned, the owner's ancient grandmother had recently perished.

That settled, I went back to the main promenade to meet Dickey and Rafe for dinner.

Rafe knew of a good restaurant that served, so he claimed, the best
anguilas al horno
in town, a local dish of elvers, olive oil, and garlic, baked at a very high heat in a
casuela
dish. Dickey left her mother at the hotel to recover from her sea going ordeal and the three of us stayed out late, something that is de rigueur in Spain if you want to have a good dinner. Rafe knew all the hot spots in town, such as they were, and after we had eaten, we went out
bodega
crawling, sampling the local beers and sherries and listening to touristic versions of
bulerías
and
soleares
. Dickey loved it, clapping her hands, clicking, and snapping her fingers, and the performers loved Dickey, with her mop of hennaed hair and her painted nails and her dark lipstick and high spirits.

By two in the morning I left on my bicycle to thread my way home through the labyrinth of streets the boys had followed earlier in the evening. Dickey and Rafe were still celebrating when I left.

All through the summer and autumn before I went south, during the whole winter in the Everglades, all the time that we were at sea, the great spinning earth had been speeding on its appointed course through the heavens. On my second night in Cádiz, on the twenty-first of March, in the pitch dark of the night sky beyond my ominous bedroom, the sun, as viewed from earth, entered the Ram and crossed an invisible halfway point on an imaginary line known as the celestial equator. At that moment, 3:22 in the morning to be exact, spring officially began.

This perception of four distinct seasons, and the ability of early human beings to track and predict or even control the celestial events, seems to have been one of the constants of the human condition. Artifacts designed to measure time and track the courses of the sun and moon date back more than 24,000 years. There is an ancient mammoth-ivory baton marked with designs that was found on the Mal'ta Peninsula in Siberia that appears to be some sort of calendar designed to track celestial events, for example. But the awareness of the seasons, of the importance of seasonal changes, and of the effects on herd migrations is far more ancient.

The perception of a singular, blazing entity in the sky that appears on one side of a given landscape, crosses the sky, and then disappears on the other side, alternately spreading light and then darkness over the land, must reach back even to the dull consciousness of
Australopithecus
and the other protohumans who roamed the savannas of Africa over one million years ago. Whether these apelike beings in any way associated this blazing light in the sky with life on the earth, we cannot know. Nor can we know whether, at some point in the slow evolution of the bicameral brain and human consciousness, upon seeing this blaze of light appear each day, these apelike beings stretched their lips back over their snouts and hooted with a specific call to indicate its coming and going. We do know that many species, such as birds and monkeys, begin singing and calling at first light. And we know too that certain species of our distant ancestors, the lemurs of Madagascar, collect together at dawn and sit upon their haunches with their arms lowered, palms outward, facing the rising sun as if in prayer. But as far as early humanoids are concerned nothing is recorded.

We do know, however, that burial sites indicate that even the supposedly dull-witted Neanderthals buried their dead with an east-west orientation, implying a consciousness of sunrise and sunset and—perhaps—an association of light and day with life, and nighttime with death and an underworld, a dark continent that this life-giving sun visits at the end of each day.

Not far from the olive grove where I was resting outside of Puerto de Santa María, there is a megalithic site that is believed to be a part of an ancient protoreligion. And just to the south at Tarifa the southernmost prehistoric cave paintings were recently discovered in an area already known for dolmens, caves, and shelters decorated with art of the Upper Paleolithic period. One of the most important of these Spanish sites consists of a multitude of caves that have been purposefully dug into the rock and megalithic constructions that form a closed gallery around ancient graves containing pieces of ivory, bronze and gold, stone tools, jewelry, and perforated discs made from shells of mollusks. Whatever is known about ancient solar practices has to be surmised from artifacts of this sort—cave paintings, burial sites, and megalithic temples.

Archeologists have found what they believe are solar images in the form of spirals that may be 40,000 to 50,000 years old, scratched on cave walls. The pattern shows not only the circular image of the sun itself, but also the seasonal course of the sun in relation to earth, as it migrates along the horizon during the various seasons of the year. There are also innumerable figurines, technically known as “small art,” from the same general period inscribed with geometric designs such as the cross or spirals, and also many examples of one of the most important ancient solar symbols—the swastika. Although sadly eclipsed by the dark star of National Socialism after 1934, this design was a direct representation of the sun's rays and also a reference to the notion of revolving wheels or clusters of the circumpolar stars.

There is also a 37,000-year-old Mousterian artifact from Pech de l'Aze in the Dordogne Valley in France that suggests the people of that period had what we now understand to be a religion, that is to say they were capable of experiencing themselves as separate entities from nature and that in the occasional idle moment when they were not busy surviving they found the time to reflect on their existence.

Although I didn't recognize the image at the time, I had seen one of the scratched solar spirals on a cave wall in Portugal a few years before my pilgrimage. Near the town of Moura, on the Alentejo Plain, there is a small cave entrance with an iron gate across it. If you can find the local shepherd who is the keeper of this cave, for a few coins he will open the iron gate and lead you down deeper and deeper into the narrow passageways. Here, lining the crevices of a wall, is a row of human skulls. A little farther along, on the right wall, are the scratched images of animals now extinct in Spain and Portugal—reindeer, woolly mammoths, wild horses, and bison—created some 30,000 years ago by the ancestors of the people who now live on the Iberian Peninsula. Amid these various scratches, straight lines, squares, and stick figures, I remember seeing an engraved spiral.

Not far from that cave there is later evidence of solar worship, a circle of standing stones about thirty yards in diameter. Twenty yards or so beyond this circle are four larger upright stones about five feet high. They stand apart, at the four quarters of the compass, as if guarding the inner circle from some imaginary invader. This oddly formal company of stones, placed here in this empty quarter of the Alentejo Plain, standing alone among the cork oaks and sheep pastures, was the work of a Neolithic tribe of people who descended from the cave artists. The stone circle, the four outlying uprights, and the whole alignment of the structure are arranged in such a way that the sun, on the summer solstice, will appear just over the northeasternmost marker. On this day, at this singular point, it will halt in its daily march to the north and begin south again. Fifteen thousand years ago, this day marked a major event in the lives of the people who lived on the Alentejo Plain. Now no one seems to notice.

I came upon these early solar artifacts some years ago while I was following the story of another solar-related event, a distant cousin of these ancient rituals, the Christian festival known as Carnival, which takes place the world around at the beginning of spring and is, as are so many Christian holidays, essentially a pagan festival. During Carnival, as any revelers will tell you, anything can happen; the world is turned upside down. It is a holiday that actually dates back to the Babylonian period, and probably evolved out of even earlier Neolithic rites. In Europe it is no accident that this event is celebrated at the end of February, when the world itself is changing, when the spring flowers begin to bloom out of the brown winter fields and the migratory birds return to Rome, where Carnival as we know it originated. Carnival evolved out of the pagan rites associated with earlier cults of the vegetative god Attis and bears some resemblance to the solar-based festival known as Saturnalia, both of which were subsumed by the Christian church in the first century
A.D.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

To begin at the beginning, it is currently believed that some five billion years ago in a smoky region of the universe presently referred to by various cultures of earth as the Milky Way, a vast, incandescent cloud of gas began to coalesce and collapse on itself until it formed just one more of the one hundred billion stars found in the Milky Way.

According to one theory, as it coalesced the cloud began to spin, and the more it shrank the faster it whirled and the rotary forces of this mad turning caused it to flatten into the shape of a spinning top. The force of this rotation was so great that a thin disclike section broke off from its widest girth and separated itself from the central star. This disk continued to spin and eventually clotted and broke apart and whirled off into space to form the nine planets, which, as if in memory of their ancient connection to the mother star, continue circling to this day. Another, more current theory holds that the cloud broke apart earlier and the nine planets formed at the same time as the sun.

In either case, after a cooling period of some two billion years, on one of those planets, the third one out from the sun, a series of chemical reactions began brewing in its warming seas. Three billion years later, more or less, a complex recombination of these same chemicals developed the ability to label objects and subsequently named the planet upon which they—the now recombined complex chemicals—lived.

I'm simplifying, of course, but that is one of the scientific theories concerning the creation of the sun and its family. That is only one version, however.

The ancient Egyptians believed that Ra, the god of the sun, was the creator of our planet. In the beginning of time, they say, an egg rose from the primeval waters and from this primal egg, Ra hatched. Ra had two children, Shu and Tefnut, who became the atmosphere and clouds. They had more children, Geb and Nut, who became the earth and the sky. One day Ra wept, and from his tears human beings were created.

The Fon people of West Africa hold that the sun god Liza created the world with the help of his partner Mawa, the goddess of the night, fertility, rest, and motherhood. Whenever there is an eclipse, it is said that Liza and Mawa are making love. Long ago, after one eclipse, their son, Gu, was born. Gu shaped the world with an iron sword and then taught the people the art of ironworking so they could make their own tools and shelter. (Unfortunately, Gu did not know humans would use their knowledge to make weapons.)

The Sumerians said the work of creation was carried out by Shamash, their god of the sun. Every morning, the scorpion-men of the East Mountain opened a gate and Shamash would emerge, cross the sky in his chariot, and at the end of the day enter the West Mountain gate and begin his travel through the Underworld, only to reemerge the next day and begin again.

The Aztecs believed the universe was composed of several cosmic eras with four different suns in four previous ages, each of which died at the end of its era. The fifth sun was named Tonatiuh, “He Who Goes Forth Shining.” This was the first sun that had the ability to travel across the sky and it is his era in which we now live. Tonatiuh is, or was, responsible for the smooth functioning of the universe, and it was well known that if he weakened the world could come to an end, so he had to be fed, and the food that best sustained him turned out to be human flesh.

In yet another creation story, an obscure, wandering tribe of pastoralists in the deserts of the Middle East says simply that in the beginning an unnamable, abstracted entity created heaven and the earth. All was without form until this entity spoke aloud and said: “Let there be light …”

But before any of this, before the written word, at the very dawn of consciousness, the sun must already have been comprehended as the creator. Its image was scratched on cave walls, elongated stones were arranged upright in circular patterns to mark the annual circuit of this powerful entity. Fires were lit in early winter at the end of his apparent annual decline to assure his return, and finally he, or in some cultures she, was given a means of traveling across the sky, a boat, a chariot, a golden wagon pulled by fiery mules, and in some versions he was even supplied with an armed guard to help assure safe passage through the known dangers of the Underworld from west to east so that he could rise again the next morning.