In his chronicle of the Gothic peoples, the historian Jordanes (6th century CE) tells of a place called Scandza – today’s Scandinavia – where the sun does not shine for forty days in midwinter, to the grief (he says) of the people there. As this shows, even then people knew about Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), which doctors attribute to problems with either the neurotransmitter serotonin or the hormone melatonin, caused by too little exposure to daylight.
For SAD sufferers the time change in late October is bad news, for immediately it happens the approach of winter darkness quickens. Each day is suddenly shorter and gloomier, and the horizons of the world seem increasingly to crowd around one in murky confusion.
It was in opposition to the dying of the light that our ancestors devised feasts and jollifications, with fires and bright lights, gifts, games and parties to keep the dark at bay. We still celebrate versions of them, adding more recent traditions from the bonfires and fireworks of Guy Fawkes to Christmas lights and New Year partying. The descendants of Jordanes’ Scandza Goths created the festival of the yule log, a giant tree trunk that burned constantly for twelve days from the winter solstice onwards, by which time daylight was already perceptibly increasing again. The Druids decorated their temples and homes with holly and ivy, the Romans celebrated the Saturnalia between the 18th and 25th of December. That latecomer Christianity took over these traditions and bent them to its own purposes. Northern Europeans have a candles and gift-giving feast-day for Saint Nicholas (Santa Claus) on 6 December; he has mutated into Father Christmas and his coming is postponed until after the time of the longest nights.
All these were ways of alleviating the dark and cheering everyone up. And paradoxical as it might seem, winter darkness was traditionally a time of plenty – the harvest had long been gathered and stored, the pigs slaughtered and their flesh salted – and the austerities of spring, when supplies were used up and the year’s hard work had to begin, were far off. The dark part of the year was therefore a welcome season of holiday.
For such timid and defenceless creatures as mice, darkness is a friend. But for such timid and defenceless creatures as children, darkness can be a theatre of terrors, when the ordinary objects of day change shape and loom, and new and peculiar noises are heard. Both fear of the dark and SAD might be a hangover from our deep evolutionary past, in the form of a hibernating ancestor for whom the dark was a hostile terrain. Making light of the dark with fireworks and feast-days is a sensible response.
These words are written in New Delhi on the night of Diwali, Festival of Lights. The firecrackers have been going all evening, ever since the populace finished making puja (worship) to Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, and Ganesh, elephant-headed god of luck. A lot of people gamble on Diwali, hoping to make a fortune after propitiating these deities. Do they do better on Diwali than other nights?
I am here on a return journey from the lovely kingdom of Bhutan, which hides among the Himalayas between India and Tibet. Flying from Kathmandu to Paro in Bhutan one sees Everest and then, after a short while, K2 glittering in the sun, a mighty sight. Everest rises from behind the bastion of a long ridge. K2 is the centremost peak of several on a giant stone and snow massif. Both are unquestionably pillars of the sky, saving the world from being crushed by the frozen weight of blue crystals above.
You can see on YouTube what it is like to fly into Paro. The plane skims some peaks, then banks sharply to the left round one of them, then sharply right around another, sharply left again around a third, and sharp right round yet a fourth, to swoop suddenly onto a short runway beside a river, braking hard. All the passengers clap with relief and genuine admiration. Our pilot was a relaxed Australian, which prompted confidence.
It is a few decades only since the country opened its borders. Traditionally known as ‘Land of the Thunder Dragon’ it maintained the reputation of its name against all comers for centuries. But it is in fact a peaceful and welcoming place, Buddhist in inspiration and practice. The men wear comfortable robes that look like dressing gowns, and the few roads are bumpily narrow. Between Paro and the capital Thimphu the highway winds dizzily along river valleys, littered by regular and substantial rockfalls. Every mountain has another and higher mountain behind it, so that as one gasps for breath in that altitude, reflecting that one is only a third of the way up, one wonders what it would be like to go higher. Still, if one ran out of breath altogether in that clarity of air and distance, it would be a nice way to end.