Around 1530, it was considered very bad luck to walk around a church widdershins (see the Wikipedia article). I think it goes back earlier than that, to a time well before clocks.
If widdershins means counter-clockwise, how did they know which way clocks ran? The answer lies in northern hemisphere sundials. When clocks with faces were invented, they ran in the same direction as the shadow of the gnomon on a sundial. Widdershins also means anti-sunwise, which would be blasphemous to people that used to believe that the sun was a powerful god. There's lots of angles to this time stuff. Bill Hawkins _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
