The Puzzle of Left-Handedness by Rik Smits Page B

clockwise. The demands of industrial production soon established an unswerving standardization that was more enduring than could ever have been created by superstition.
    Racetracks, finally, differ from all other circuits in the position of their reference point, which lies outside them. The crowd in a stadium or at a racetrack does not usually sit in the centre of the arena; in fact, the centre tends to be virtually empty. Instead people look on from outside. In contrast to players of board and card games, they are not participants but literally outsiders. The action they watch most closely takes place on the nearer side of the track. If the movement observed by the crowd were to circle clockwise, then the competitors would be seen to move from right to left, passing the spectators in the opposite direction to the sun. By using the track the other way round, the usual effect is preserved; the participants pass, like the sun, from left to right.
    So all circular movements conform to the same principle, following the sun. The reference point is all that differs from case to case. With processions and games it lies in the thing the circuit revolves around, with windmills it lies inside the mill, with engines in the position of the driver, and at racetracks in the eye of the beholder, outside the circuit.
    * The church engagement ceremony we know today, an extension of the marriage ceremony with the rings on the right hand, is a later innovation.

7
    The True Nature of left and Right
    Inversion, the path of the sun and healing magic: these are the three contexts in which the left side and the left hand occur in modern-day symbolism. Only the last of the three is interesting in its own right. With inversion, the choice of the left hand is simply derived from the fact that right-handedness is the norm, and rituals inspired by the path of the sun across the sky are dictated by the fact that the sun happens to travel from left to right as seen from the dominant northern hemisphere. The left is of essential importance only in magic. The symbolic link between the left side of the body, the left hand in particular, and health and sickness, life and death, is not derived from anything else, at least not directly. It has to do purely with the opposition between left and right. This is a puzzle, since although left and right are opposites, it’s less clear what the opposite of health and sickness could be, or of life and death.
    Of course with matters of this sort it’s impossible to prove anything beyond doubt. We are dealing with soft values – irrational feelings, intuitive judgements, things that lend themselves poorly to analysis – and we cannot ask our ancestors to tell us about their motives. We can’t even directly observe the foundations on which we construct our everyday, subconscious view of the world, but we can formulate a reasonable conclusion about what we suspect is going on with all that health magic and its link to the left side of the body. First we need to return to classical antiquity.
    More than 2,000 years ago, in the Hellenic period, a goddess with Egyptian origins called Isis developed into a divinity that was popular all the way from England to Mesopotamia. Isis was a manifestly female figure who symbolized the elongated land called Egypt as it waited to be fertilized by the flooding of the Nile, a river represented by her husband Osiris. Together the couple symbolized the cycle of living and dying, the idea that life returns after death, just as new life sprouts from the parched earth every spring. In that flourishing period the Isis cult grew into a mystical religion that was in some ways similar to the later Christian faith. It had initiation rites that included baptism, and people who underwent them were literally expected to see the light. Those who had been initiated would live on in the Elysian Fields after their deaths, under the protection of Isis, on condition that they had fulfilled the duties