Humans have the ability to observe their environment and transform natural processes into cultural ones.
Today is the winter solstice, a moment marked by the astronomical dance between the Earth and the Sun.
Today is the shortest day of the year, the longest night.
Today marks the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next.
Prehistoric societies depended on the solar cycle; they surely knew it well and relied on it for hunting, gathering, and their survival. They did the same with death, turning a natural and inevitable process into cultural rituals. In some places, they even combined these two aspects, constructing large megalithic structures oriented in such a way that, on a day like today, the sun would illuminate the funerary chamber. In this way, both processes converged.
Did Paleolithic societies also combine the ritual or funerary with the astronomical? Probably, but we don’t know for sure. In Deathrevol we will keep working to try to answer these questions.
