Summer solstice

The summer solstice appears as midsummer in a professor’s explanation of how the sun’s annual path and the Earth’s daily rotation can be represented through intersecting cycles. The discussion makes the solstice part of a larger astronomical pattern that the professor then uses to introduce the sun cross and theories about the origins of religion.

Place in the Astronomical Cycle

The professor describes the sun as moving through the zodiac in a great ring over the course of a year, while the Earth turns on its axis once a day. He identifies four points in the daily cycle—sunrise, zenith, sunset, and nadir—and connects them to the solstices and equinoxes in an astronomical account. Midsummer and midwinter are the two solstices; spring and fall are the equinoxes. Carl Mørck responds dryly that he would call the daily points morning, noon, evening, and midnight, bringing the abstract explanation back to ordinary terms.

Connection to the Sun Cross

The professor’s next step is to draw axes between zenith and nadir, and between ascent and descent, understood astronomically as the solstices and equinoxes. Their intersection produces a cross across the circles traced by the sun, which he calls the sun cross. He says that some call it the crucified sun and points to carvings of the cross in rocks dating back to prehistoric times. The summer solstice therefore figures not as an isolated calendar date, but as one of the seasonal points in the professor’s diagram and in his proposed account of religious ideas rooted in the sun and zodiac.