The Puzzle of Left-Handedness by Rik Smits Page A

But if we look at their direction of movement, everything is reversed and suddenly whatever comes from the right is bad.
    With circular motion too, the various beliefs look chaotic at first, but appearances can be deceptive. Here a third theme lies waiting to be discovered.
    A wide range of ritual movements are performed clockwise. The processions held by Catholics always move around a church clockwise, just as a priest performing Mass moves clockwise around the altar. When new houses are blessed in today’s Europe, people process around them clockwise. In party games we take turns in clockwise rotation and cards are always dealt out that way round.
    Clockwise motion can be seen as rightward in direction, so it might seem as if the connection between the right and favourableness is responsible here once again, but in the early twentieth century French sociologist Robert Hertz came up with a different explanation. He claimed that circular rituals were intended to reinforce a common bond, a sense of ‘them and us’. People turn their right shoulders towards the safe centre of the group and their left shoulders towards the hostile outside world. As a result, they automatically circle clockwise. Neither explanation can be right. Hertz does not make clear, for example, why we would choose to turn our right shoulders inwards. Surely a right-handed majority would want to use their right hands to defend themselves against a hostile outside world. Furthermore, neither Hertz’s hypothesis of cosiness nor the connection between clockwise rotation and goodness and good fortune explains why a number of traditional rituals involve anticlockwise motion.
    The sports world offers one highly visible example. Almost all racetracks, whether for dogs, horses, people or cars, are used anticlockwise. The propellers of planes and helicopters turn anticlockwise too, as do windmills.
    The best explanation for these phenomena presented so far lies in the path described by the sun. In the northern hemisphere the sun moves clockwise across the sky. Although they may be completely unaware of it, priests and believers who circle churches, altars or houses are following ancient heathen sun rites. They are reflecting the course of the sun as it passes around the place at the centre of the ritual: the church, the altar or the house to be blessed. Precisely the same rituals exist in the southern hemisphere, but this can be explained by the fact that all today’s dominant cultures arose in the northern hemisphere. It would be wonderful to know whether the Incas of South America or the long-lost Bantu cultures of the Congo and southern Africa had circular rituals long before the first European explorers set sail, but they all disappeared long ago, leaving no evidence as to their directional sensitivities.
    The traditions of board and card games adhere to exactly the same principle. The players represent the path of the sun, the ‘turn’ is the sun itself and the point around which the sun revolves is the centre of the board or the gaming table. Each player watches the course of the game pass on the other side of the table in the direction of the sun, from sunrise on his left to sunset on his right.
    So what about windmills? They may appear to turn anticlockwise, but that’s because we tend to look at them from the wrong side. The reference point for a windmill is not the chance passer-by, looking at the mill from the front, but the miller himself. He is generally inside, behind the turning sails; from his point of view they turn in the same direction as the clock and the sun.
    The crankshaft and therefore the drive shaft of an internal combustion engine, as well as aeroplane propellers, simply follow the tradition that arose centuries ago when the first windmills were built. The engine in the earliest motor vehicles quickly came to occupy the place formerly taken by the horse, in front of the driver. Seen from his perspective, engines and propellers turn