Cycles, Change and Stability
At this time of year, with Mabon approaching, I have been thinking about cycles and change.Mabon is a the point when we see the other side of the yearly cycle from the spring equinox The cycle if the year is turning and we are at a point of equality and transition. This concept of cycles through which we move, both annual and some believe cycles of lives, is often expressed in the Wheel of the year. The idea of the soul undergoing the process of life, death and rebirth is also common, not only in many Pagan traditions but in other religious faiths.
While the wheel of the year seems to be a modern expression of this interest in the cyclical nature of nature and life, there is significant evidence that the ancient peoples of these islands also had a sense of this cyclical nature of life. For example many standing stone rings, such as Stonehenge, mark celestial events such as mid winter and mid summer. Many tombs, particularly in Ireland, are also aligned in such a way as to mark these annual events.
It is thought that the tri-spiral seen in Celtic tombs is also a symbol expressing the cyclical nature of existence – that of life, death and rebirth.
I think that we can assume that these people also felt the draw of the cyclical nature of life and death and wished to mark it in some way.
If this apparent cyclical nature of things is an accurate reflection of nature, does that mean that we are all doomed to continuously repeat events? Will each life be no different from the last, or the next? Well no, nature teaches us that while the cycle repeats, each cycle is slightly different, we never pass through the same event in exactly the same way twice. Each Samhain is slightly different from the last. We are older and some of us even wiser J. Equally we believe that each life cycle will be slightly different. Each cycle we learn something new or consolidate something learned in a previous cycle.
A comment made by a friend at lamas described this in a very clear manner, She said that while this was a celebration to celebrate Lamas, just as we did last year, the event was however different. We had moved on, the fruit we brought to the ritual the previous year was now the wine we drunk at this lamas celebration. The festival was the same but it clearly demonstrated both the nature of change and the link to previous cycles.
This concept of cycles, returning again to our starting point but every time moving through a slightly different path, is a very powerful concept in the human imagination.
One interesting point though, is that this isn’t simply a human perception. It is more than us seeing patterns in nature where
they might not be any. Recently the science of Chaos has shown that seemingly simple systems can, and do, exhibit exactly these sorts of patterns.
One part of chaos theory is the study of what are called dynamic systems. Here we see that small changes in starting position leads to a large change in outcome.
For example this is a phenomenon that is also seen in systems such as the weather where a small change in input will give large changes in result; this is the infamous butterfly effect.
However the general weather pattern remains remarkably stable – hotter and drier in summer and colder and wetter in winter and the cycle repeats each year with small changes in the day to day weather.
This idea of cycles / systems being bound to some cyclical state is known as attraction, for example a satellite remains in orbit because it is attracted to the earth. The Earth is, not unexpectedly, known as an attractor. In the case of the earth and the satellite, the orbit is highly predictable and the satellite retraces its steps every cycle. For this reason the Earth is known as a simple attractor.
The weather on the other hand does not retrace its steps each cycle, every year is slightly different. In this case the attractor that the weather ‘orbits’ is known as a Strange Attractor.
One nice example of the ‘orbit’ created by a strange attractor is known as the ‘Lorenz Attractor’.
We can see that the path never retraces its steps but is always following the same general path.
Interestingly enough, this shares many similarities with the Tri-spiral, well that’s what I thinkJ?It is often referred to as a Celtic design, but it was carved at least 2500 years before the Celts reached Ireland.
I don’t think that we can necessarily take these similarities as more than that, but the existence of these ideas in nature as well as our philosophies are certainly interesting.
So while we can’t really claim scientific evidence for the wheel of the year or our ancestors feeling those cycles were important, I do think that perhaps our thoughts and feelings are based on something more fundamental in the universe that both the science and our beliefs are reflecting.