Gift Of The Sun: Pagans And Solar Energy

As an Earth centered Pagan, mine is an embodied faith. I celebrate and worship five elements on a real planet in a biological body. In the body, the locus of Air or East is the breath and the gases dissolved in the blood. In the body, the locus of Earth or North is the skeletal bones and the supportive structure network of connective fascia and sinew. In the body, the locus of Water or West is the blood and lymph. In the body, the locus of Center or Spirit is the subtle body or the coordination of all elements. In the body, the locus of Fire or energy or South are the mitochondria in every cell. This is the place of fire where our bodies burn sugars and carbohydrates for all the energy we ever use. Every cell comes equipped with its own tiny hearth.

Mitochondria are matrilineal, passed in the cytoplasm of the egg, inherited only from our mother and her mother, etc. They are so ancient as to be presexual, and their genetic material is uninvolved in the fusion of nuclei between the egg and sperm, standing free from the 46 resulting chromosomes. Mitochondrial DNA is from the mother’s cell, changing much more slowly, and does not even divide on the same schedule as the chromosomes. Symbiogenesis as creation of new life forms early in evolution out of the collision or incomplete digestion or teaming up of life forms.

This is how mitochondria ended up in ‘our’ cells. Cooperation more than competition, joining more than diverging, creativity more than random. Biological life is not ruthless so much as it is mutually supportive: why? Biologist Lewis Thomas mentioned in his immensely popular Lives of a Cell the cross cultural persistence of merged or hybrid creatures in mythology. Perhaps this is a reflection of the early events of symbiogenesis, when creatures actually did merge to form cells with nuclei and mitochondria and chloroplasts.

Bacteria have the ability to trade useful bits of DNA quickly (called recombination), and do it separately from reproduction, so adaptive changes spread rapidly. As Fritjof Capra mentions in The Web of Life, “Thus microbiology teaches us the sobering lesson that technologies like genetic engineering and a global communication network, which we consider to be advanced achievements of our modern civilization, have been used by the planetary web of bacteria for billions of years to regulate life on Earth.”

Species coevolve, shaping each other by our interaction. “The environment” is not a static and dead unchanging thing, but also coevolves with the life on it. Life adapts itself, but it also adapts the globe for itself, and without governmental or economic coercion, without organizations. For example, our atmosphere is wildly chemically unstable; it is the continual action of living creatures upon it that keeps it at its current gas composition, precisely right to maintain life. The recent CO2 rise causing global warming could have devastating consequences for the current balance, but Gaia has handled more severe atmospheric changes before, from the early hydrogen shortage that triggered the use of water in photosynthesis to the oxygen poisoning that triggered the first animal respiration (in bacteria, of course).

The coevolved context is holy while decontexted opportunism is hubris. Outside the body, the loci of Fire or energy or South are all the energy we ever use for heating, cooling, cooking, transportation, lighting, communication, the Arts, maintenance, entertainment, etc. Did your mother teach you that it is rude to reject gifts? Every day our Mother showers us with gifts of sunshine, wind, flowing water, and hot magma. There are gifts of renewable energy in all these beribboned packages. All we need to do is open them; She renews them every day. Not for us the ungrateful squandering of pollutive energy stored in fossil fuels and the atom, we choose to accept Her fresh gifts.

Life is renewable energy. In a beautiful web of interconnected eating, we life forms take energy from one another and give energy to one another. Energy cycles around the physical globe and is renewed. Our spirit energy is renewed and recycled in reincarnation. This is deep teaching, not in some tome but embodied in the very flesh of the world, divine law expressed as the laws of physics and biology and ecology. We can take this teaching as our template for our energy use, and shift to renewable energy. We call it renewable because the sun shines again and again, the tides and waves flow in and out, the wind blows again and again, the rainfall renews the streams that spin our tiny turbines.

Please don’t call it “alternative energy”, which implies that it is a minority choice, something to happen only in the future but never in the now. Now, already, we have the technology to use this energy safely and effectively. These technologies are not experimental anymore, they have been tested over decades, and qualified experts await your call. To find someone in your area of the US, check into the HomePower InBiz database at http://www.homepower.com/inbiz.htm. If you are not in the US, ask at Solar Energy International: http://www.solarenergy.org/.

All electrical systems must be grounded for safety. Grounding in electrical systems means the same thing we do when we ground in or before a ritual: connecting to the Earth in a way that transfers and shares energy. It brings harmony and safety by transferring energetic charges until a balance is achieved, until the energies of the unit and the great Earth are one and the same. This works if the unit is your spirit energy, a backwoods windmill generator, or a giant power plant. In British usage, the term “earthing” is still sometimes used for grounding. Gaia is a most embracing Goddess. As She says in the Charge of the Goddess, “Nor do I demand aught of sacrifice, for behold, I am the Mother of all things, and My love is poured out upon the earth.…Come unto me …From Me all things proceed and unto Me they must return…”

This is true of electrical charges just as much as it is true of the renewable life energies of every living being. She embraces and accepts and welcomes all charges into Her earthly body, rock and soil and interlaced groundwater. She offers and bestows and pours out all charges from Her body to any body that touches Hers. “She changes everything She touches, and everything She touches changes”.

Waves of charge pass randomly and harmlessly across Her surface constantly. We have never generated enough electrical power to cause more than a tiny ripple in Her vast stores or sinks of electrical charge.

Although we wouldn’t dare say that there are only two genders, gender is a spectrum and one could postulate that there are two ends, male and female. Or you could say butch/femme, or yin/yang. Or you could say proton/electron, or positive/negative. Each side dances in a playful complementarity. Opposites really do attract, especially when we are talking about magnets and electrical charges. Charges always seek their opposite. Fascinatingly, the Earth is always the opposite of any charge; it’s part of Hir magic. S/he is both masculine and feminine, yin and yang, positive and negative, holding them both within Hir.

The word electricity comes from elektron, the Greek word for the ancient tree sap amber, which sheds a charge when rubbed. Y’all and your kids can play with some fur and a piece of amber, charging small objects up to see them attract and repel. It helps to hang lightweight things by threads to make the attraction and repulsion more visible. Push the objects together and note the attraction ends after they touch. What happens after things charged to attract or repel touch wet ground?

A Direct Current (DC) system is one that separates charges to store and use them. In a DC system, there are two poles of opposite charge, and they maintain their charge status in a steady way. If a connection is made between the poles, charge will flow in only one direction from one pole to the other, hopefully doing useful work along the way. Flowing charge is called current. Usually one pole is grounded, but DC can function if neither pole is grounded, like a flashlight. DC will function if either pole is grounded, be it the pole we call negative (most DC systems are grounded this way; in these cases the positive charges flow to Earth) or the pole we call positive (telephone systems are grounded this way; in these cases the negative charges flow to Earth).

An Alternating Current (AC) system is one that uses charges that change polarity. Unlike DC, AC is not storable. AC in average homes is single phase 240v60Hz, which means the charge flows in one direction, then back in the opposite direction in a 240v circuit loop, sixty times a second. When one part of this loop is wired properly to flow back and forth through useful work into a neutral wire connected to the ground, it becomes the 120v AC we are all familiar with from ordinary receptacles, and this is done for all but a few large home appliances. In this case Gaia accepts charges of both polarities in turn. Excellent inverters in many sizes are available to convert from stored DC produced in a Renewable Energy system. Also unlike DC, AC can be shipped rather easily, usually in a 3 phase system, in which case charges flow in a rotation between the three phases. Ultimately, Gaia accepts these charges too.

It’s not necessary to become photosynthetic in our own bodies; we can instead eat plants, letting them do the energy conversion for us. We can also make artificial leaves out of refined sand to do our energy conversion to electricity, for our energy use outside our bodies. These “leaves” are photovoltaic modules, made of the same refined silicon that makes computer chips, mounted to the backs of panes of glass framed in aluminum. They produce the cleanest electricity available, mesh well with wind, wave, and microhydro power, and last decades (perhaps centuries if protected from breakage). They are so reliable that we use them to power all our satellites. We imitate life; we're better off when we follow the cosmic design and use energy that respects its context.