Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth
In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.
Sun Wheel
It's one of our people's oldest and most sacred symbols.
If anything could lay claim to the status of "universal pagan symbol," this might well be it.
Yet in Pagandom at large, they're few and far between.
The Sun Wheel. The Sun Cross. The Wheel Cross.
The equal-armed cross in a circle. It's the Sun. It's the Wheel. It's the coincidence of harmonious opposites. Male and female. Rounded and straight. Rectilinear and curvilinear. Up and down. Horizontal and vertical. Movement and stillness. Technology and Nature. Heaven and Earth.
In the Sun Wheel, Time and Space meet and embrace: the world with its four quarters, the year with its four seasons.
Such a deep and ancient symbol. Wherever has it gone?
(Time was, in the pagan marketplace, you couldn't find one for love nor money. These days, you might be able to turn one up if you ask for a “Medicine Wheel” instead. Sigh.)
Has recent religious history made us shy of crosses in any form? (In the span of human history, after all, anything non-pagan is, by definition, recent.)
If so, we underestimate the depth and power of the ancestors' wisdom.
If so, I don't doubt that eventually we'll be wise enough to outgrow the aversion.
The Sun Wheel has already rolled its way through human religious history since (at very least) the Bronze Age.
I don't for a moment doubt that its journey is far, far from done.
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