Tag: pagan

Mabon: It’s All Downhill from Here

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The least known of the eight seasonal Celtic festivals is Mabon, this earth holiday celebrated at the autumnal equinox.  If Lammas (August first) is first Harvest, Mabon is second harvest, at least where the Celts lived in the British Isles and the northern part  the giant peninsula that is Western Europe. Apples. Pumpkins (not in Europe!). Root vegetables. The days grow short, the temperatures fall.

The equinoxes are what mathematicians call inflection points, as compared to Litha (the summer solstice) and Yul, which are peak and trough, mountain and valley. We climb the mountain after Yu, head back toward the valley of delight at midsummer.. Unlike many mountains, the length of days is on an accelerated path at the beginning, slowing down at the inflection point and climb more slowly toward the midsummer peak.  The reverse comes with the decline into winter.

We notice peaks and valleys in the wheel of the year, but often neglect the turning points in our own lives until long after the fact.  Mabon and Ostara (the vernal equinox) remind us to be more attuned to the changes in the seasons that mirror the changes in our lives.

The interval from Litha or Lammas to Mabon is the beginning of aging in the seasons, including the Corn God or the Sun God.  It is a time of anticipation of both death and birth.  The children are grown, perhaps we are retired or planning to retire. It is a good time to take stock of our own aging process, to notice the changes in our bodies, our interests, our daily activities.  We can try to slow the aging process so that these later days of autumn leaves and fires in the fireplace can be enjoyed in different and more leisurely ways. 

My aging friends and I can assure you that travel is fun and inspiring but also is not a full- time occupation. If you haven’t taken care of your health until now, that can too easily become a full- time activity!  But if your health and memory are good, and your income is adequate to your needs, it is a good time to give back to the earth and human communities that have nurtured us. Volunteering, mentoring, teaching, coaching, helping rescue animals, organic gardening, are among the many options. So is part-time work in something completely different. Many of my friends have turned to writing fiction.  Always a nonfiction writer, in retirement I have written nine more books to join the nine I wrote when I was working. Currently I am writing my autobiography,  not in hopes of publication, just for family and friends.

There are two poets with contrasting views of the aging stage of life.  Dylan Thomas        : Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage, Rage against the dying of the light.”  Or Robert Browning, “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.  With Browning, I vote for the goodness of aging.  My role model for engage aging is Jimmy Carter, peanut farmer, humanitarian, disease eradicator, Habitat for Humanity worker, Sunday School teacher, and fiction writer until his death at age 100. Who is yours?

First Harvest, Celtic Style

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Got some Irish, Scottish, Welsh in your ancestry? Or maybe some of the original Brits (Celtic) in your English ancestry, or Gallic that came to he islands with the Norman conquest? Celttc culture once covered a huge part of the European continent only to be run off to Britain those annoying Romans. Some of these holidays were baptized and melded into Christianity, especially . Easter with Ostara (the spring equinox, with bonfires at dawn), as well as Sammain/Hallowe’en (All Saints’ Day), Yul and Christmas(and midnight mass).. Others live on in other customs, like Groundhog Day (Imbolc) and the fertility festival of Beltain (May Day, the maypole as a mating ritual).. Lithia, the summer solstice was celebrated with midday bonfires, a midsummer holiday that is most closely kin to July 4th in this country.

But one lonesome little Celtic holiday seems to have disappeared from memory. This sweet little holiday on the first day of August is Lammas or Lughnasad, the celebration of first Harvest. I sit at the table with my friends eating fresh corn and tomatoes from the farmers’ market just two days before the holiday. As the Druids disappeared and the Celts turned to Christianity, Lammas was celebrated by bringing the first fruits of the harvest to church for a blessing, a custom carried on in this country into colonial times. I myself have led a blessing of the vegetables service, which is must less disaster-prone than a blessing of the animals and also provided fresh vegetables to our local food bank.

So add an upbeat holiday to your calendar the first of August and celebrate the abundance of harvest and the rich taste of fresh fruits and vegetables!

Celebrating the Solstice

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Friday June 20th marks the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.  In Australia, New Zealand, and most of South America, it is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.  There they huddle before a warm fire at this solstice and celebrate the December solstice at the beach. Here in the Northwest quadrant of the globe, we have picnics and celebrate Fathers’ Day. Why Fathers’ Day? Perhaps because, inn Celtic mythology, the sun God is at the peak of his powers, even as the mother Goddess is pregnant with his child who will be born at the winter solstice. After the solstice, he begins a long descent into aging and death before being reborn in December.

The four sky holidays (equinoxes and solstices) are celebrated with bonfires—spring at dawn, summer at midday, autumn at dusk, winter at midnight.  Do these times of day remind you of Easter, (sunrise service), Fourth of July picnics (two weeks past the summer solstice), Trick or treat (five weeks past the fall equinox), and midnight mass (winter solstice)? If so, you have penetrated the Celtic roots of some of our non-biblical religious and secular customs of honoring the rhythm of the earth.

The ancient Celts, from whom many Americans trace their descent, observed eight evenly spaced holidays.  Solstices and equinoxes were dictated by the rotation of the earth around the sun, while the four cross-quarter holidays were earth-centered. Males were associated with sun and sky, women with moon and earth.

We modern humans are largely disconnected from these rhythms of earth and sky, with air-conditioned harvests and food from the grocery store that can be frozen or refrigerated.  We can eat blueberries and watermelon year-round even if it means shipping them long distance from Chile or other points far south. Change of clothing is one of the few acknowledgements we make of changing seasons as we swap coats and sweaters for t-shirts and bathing suits.

And yet the pull of the rhythm of the seasons is still strong. The urge to plant is evident in the spring, even if we are more often planting for beauty than for sustenance. Recreation moves outdoors in the warm summer months, while long winter nights are a time to huddle in front of the fireplace, alternating with snow sports in the short daytimes in more northern parts of the hemisphere.  We can try to insulate ourselves from nature, but we are in fact a part of nature and our bodies and hearts pulsate to its changes. We are also dependent on nature for all the resources that sustain us—food, and water, and electricity, and fossil fuels, metals and minerals,  plants and animals.

Each season brings us different gifts of both beauty and sustenance, challenge and opportunity.  If a single word unites these eight ancient holidays into a common thread, it should probably be gratitude.  Gratitude for rain and sun, soil and water, food and fuel, beauty and wonder. Eight chances to count your blessings and honor Mother Earth and Father Sky.  A joyous summer solstice to all my readers!

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Saint Patrick Meets Ostara: The Living of the Green

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It is no accident that Saint Patrick’s Day falls in the same week as the vernal equinox, the holiday called Ostara by the ancient Celts. Ireland is the Emerald Isle with, as Johnny Cash reminded us, its 40 shades of green. Ostara had other names, Oestre, Astarte, and, of course, Easter, yet another celebration of revival, renewal, and resurrection. (I once was asked by a seminary professor why Unitarian Universalists celebrate Easter. I replied with my own question. Why do Christians name their most important holiday after the goddess of the dawn?

Some of the customs of the equinox holiday have migrated to the moveable feast of Easter, celebrated in the Western world on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring Equinox. They are supplemented by ancient Roman and Scandinavian equinox customs involving eggs and rabbits, agents of fertility.

What comes to mind about Saint Patrick, besides green beer and shamrocks? You probably know that he was born around 400 CE in Britain to a Romanized Christian family. Captured by Celtic pirates, he was hauled off to Ireland and worked as a shepherd. He escaped, returned to Britain, studied for priesthood, and was ordained. He chose to return to return to Ireland as a Christian missionary..

Like many such missionaries, Patrick adapted the Christian story to the local environment—a rural, earth-centered culture, He used the shamrock or three -leafed clover to explain the concept of the trinity. He planted churches and monasteries all over Ireland. It is appropriate that his day is celebrated during the season of preparing for spring planting. Like so many other holidays including Yule), the celebration of Ireland’s patron saint was part of the bridge from the old Celtic nature-based religion to what the Irish called the New Faith.

Initially the New Faith was welcomed to Ireland as an addition, rather than a competitor, but eventually it became its own wayward version of Roman Christianity. Today there is a revival of the Celtic version of Christianity not only in the two strongholds of Celtic culture, Ireland and Scotland, but also in North America. That culture and that way of being Christian was earth-centered, non-exclusive, and egalitarian, with a particularly strong affirmation of women as full participants in the larger community. Women in early Ireland had the right to choose their spouses, divorce if they wished, get an education, own property, and enter many of the professions. Many of those rights were not available to women in this country until the late 19th century. (A nod to another annual observance in March, Women’s History Month.)

Even after Roman Christianity forced the Irish to end their practice of co-houses of nuns and monks who were free to marry, have children, and raise them in the faith, there was still always a Celtic underground that survives today in some of the ancient holy places, especially the Scottish island of Iona. There is much wisdom in dedicating this pair of holidays to the re-planting of that vision in our own hearts and mind, As as we begin the season of fertilizing and planting, we can celebrate our oneness with the natural world that nurtures and sustains us.

Note: I am indebted to historian Peter Tremayne’s fascinating set of historicall novels about Sister Fidelma for background on the customs of the Irish in the 5th and 6th centuries CE.

It’s Groundhog Day Again!

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This is my annual updated version a holiday variously known as the feast of Saitn Bridget, Imbolc, Oimelc (both Celtic words related to lambing), and Groundhog Day. I mentioned that the first of February was the only holiday devoted to housecleaning in an email to my daughter. Aha, she said that explains the backstory for the movie Groundhog Day. It’s like house cleaning. You clean, it gets dirty, you clean it again, it gets dirty again… A good story line for a movie! At least my repetition, unlike the movie, is only once a year.
Imbolc, Oimelc, or Groundhog Day, they all anticipate spring. It is one of the lesser-known cross-quarter holidays on the Wheel of the Year. In addition to Groundhog Day it survived as the feast of the purification of the virgin (Mary) after the birth of her son 40 days earlier. It is also the day devoted to Saint Bridget or Brigid. Bridget is the Triune Goddess in her maiden phase, converted to a Christian saint. The corn maiden from the previous harvest is brought out in her honor as a virgin once again, ready to encounter the Sun King reborn at Yul in a mating ritual of spring.
The purification part of this holiday was known in pre-feminist times as spring house cleaning. In ancient time among the Celts, Imbolc cleaning consisted of removing the Yule greenery from the home and burning it, cleaning up fields and home, and in Ireland, burning old Bridget wheels and making new ones. By Imbolc, most of us have taken down the tree and put away the decorations from Christmas, but if you haven’t, you can use Imbolc as the excuse for delaying it till now. After Imbolc, you are at risk of being labeled a lazy pagan if you don’t deal of the winter holiday residue.
Imbolc is approaching the end of an indoor time. It’s cold and still pretty dark, but it is the waxing period of light and warmth following the winter solstice. It represents a final stage of wintry inwardness before the crocuses and daffodils invite us to look outward again. Housebound, we must find our spiritual practice within that space. It is the late stage of the hibernating season as we prepare for the cycle of life to begin again.
Spiritual practice has enjoyed something of a resurgence in recent decades. A spiritual practice is anything that is centering, mindful, focusing, and connects you to the sacred in a very inclusive sense. Practicing patience with difficult people is a spiritual practice. Listening attentively is a spiritual practice. Eating mindfully is a spiritual practice. Meditation and prayer are traditional spiritual practices in many religions. But there is also a form of spiritual practice that invests the ordinary activities of daily life with significance in the way carry them out.
The essence of spring housecleaning as spiritual practice blends several Christian and Buddhist ideas. One is humility; no task is too menial that we are above it, as in Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. The second is mindfulness, to be engaged in the moment, to calm the monkey mind, to focus all our attention on the window being washed or the floor being swept. The third is letting go of attachment to possessions as an encumbrance on our spiritual life, passing them on to another use or another user. The spiritual practice of spring housecleaning can incorporate all three.
Housecleaning means two different things. One is the emphasis on clean, as in wash windows, polish furniture, remove cobwebs, paint, scrub floors, clean woodwork, dust the books. That’s both the humble and the mindful part. In the words of one contemporary Buddhist writer, “after enlightenment, the laundry.” The other kind of housecleaning is to declutter, simplify, recycle, let go of possessions no longer needed, like the greens from Yul in the Celtic tradition. That’s the letting go part.
For many years my Lenten practice, for the forty days that begin sometime after Imbolc and stretch to the floating holiday of Easter, was to wash a window every day. Then I moved to a smaller house, which taxed my ingenuity to find forty windows. I included car windows, TV and computer screens, mirrors. Friends helpfully offered their windows, but I did not wish to discourage their own spiritual practice. There is something very satisfying, very symbolic in letting the light of the returning spring shine through a clean window, but it means more when it’s my window.
A friend described a similar cleaning ritual, only she does it all on New Year’s Day. She takes each of her many books down one at a time off the shelf, dusts it (and the shelf), and decides whether it stays or goes. If books are a rich and meaningful part of your life, revisiting these old friends and deciding what role they still may play in your life and which ones should be shared with others is definitely a spiritual practice. This particular ritual embodies both humility (dusting). mindfulness (concentrated attention on the books and the memories and teachings they hold) and letting go (books to be passed on). This year I used my cocooning season, December 26th to February 1st, to declutter bookshelves, which led to one empty bookcase and about 80 book donations, plus a major cleansing of my Kindle.
So, as the daffodils and crocuses pop their leaves through the ground, as the groundhog in Punxatawny ponders his forecast, we can prepare to emerge from the hibernating season by renewing the spaces we inhabit. Like the bluebirds, whose house I have to clean very soon because they refuse to return to a used nest, let us be about the humble tasks of maintaining our habitats. Spring housecleaning only comes once a year!

Welcome Yule

~ purplesage41 ~ 1 Comment

A popular expression among some Christians is “Jesus is the reason for the season.” Yes, there is a connection, but The season is the reason why the choice was made to celebrate the unknown date of his birth at this particular time of year. Before Jesus, there was Saturnalia, and Diwali, and Hanukkah. The common thread is the holiday that falls this Saturday, December 21st, the winter solstice, known since ancient times as the festival of Yul or Yule. It celebrates the shortest day and the longest night of the year as the northern hemisphere turns away from the sun..
In Celtic and other traditions, the story goes something like this. The Sun God is born at Yul and grows to manhood. His companion through this travel in the Triune Goddess, maiden Bridgid, Mother Danu, and the crone, who has various names. He courts the maiden in spring, and she becomes pregnant with the sun god. At summer solstice the sun is a the peak of his powers and the goddess she is radiant with a child in her womb. The Sun God begins to decline and dies at the winter solstice even as a new sun god is born. The crone is renewed as the maiden, and the cycle begins again. Or at least, that’s ‘the mythical story that underlies the holidays that enable us to reconnect with he rhythms of the turning year.


Here is a solstice poem:
This ancient holiday
Marks ending and beginning


The seed is still beneath the earth
Preparing to emerge from its cocoon
At Imbolc or beyond.
Yule calls us to take rest in darkness
To hibernate, reflect, and be prepared
To bloom once more.
Let us not hasten through
These cold short days
Spring will come soon enough.
There is no spring without winter
To prepare us or rebirth.

Saint Patrick and the Vernal Equinox

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In ancient times, especially among the Celts, there were eight holidays—four sky holidays (the equinoxes and solstices) and four earth holidays. These holidays were occasions of singing and dancing and music and feasting and bonfires. They helped to signal humans to align their body rhythms of sleeping and waking, working and resting, to longer or shorter days and warmer or cooler weather.

One of those holidays we celebrate this week.  It was known to the Celts as Ostara, named for the goddess of the dawn. In the more inhabited parts of the Northern hemisphere, it marked the official start of the season of spring. Equinox means that the sun is at the equator, headed north in spring, south in fall, and our days and nights are of equal length.  Actually, right here in upstate South Carolina, that happened on the 14th of March, with sunrise at 7:40 am and sunset at 7:40 pm. The official equinox falls on the 19th.

As the Christian faith spread out to lands largely populated by pagans of various kinds, church leaders soon found that people might be open to the New Faith but still were attached to their eight holiday celebrations.  The easiest response was to ‘baptize” some of the traditional holidays by giving them a Christian interpretation.  This accommodation was most obvious in celebrating the birth of Jesus (since there is no known official date of birth) at the time of Yul or the winter solstice.  Birth of the Sun, birth of the Son. A new beginning.  The customs were easily combined, although there are still some very pagan hymns in many Christian hymnals, notably The Holly and the Ivy and Deck the Halls. Another holiday, an earth holiday that for Celtic pagans marked the anticipation of winter, was Samhain, which became Halloween or All Hallows Eve.  For Christians, as the vegetation was dying and many of the farm animals were headed for slaughter, it was also a time to honor our dead.

A third holiday that attracted the attention of Christian missionaries was Ostara, the spring equinox.  A new beginning and rebirth offered an ideal time to celebrate the risen savior.   Many of the customs of Easter, which is a movable feast based on the full moon in relation to the equinox, are borrowed from the Celts and the Norse pagans, including eggs and rabbits and new clothes.  But Ostara remained, even though Easter acquired the pagan name for its own festival.

Ostara was a popular holiday as flowers began to bloom and the days grew noticeably longer.  The answer to the missionary’s prayer la in Saint Patrick, the young Welsh priest who brought Christianity to Ireland. Patrick was not overly concerned about their celebrating earth festivals with dancing and singing.  Many Celts were open to the New Faith but unwilling to divest themselves of their ancestral customs and celebrations.  The unique compromise? In choosing feast days to celebrate the major Catholic saints, there was rarely any defined birthday or death date to designate the celebration of the saint on a particular day.  What better choice of day for the Emerald Isle to celebrate Saint Patrick than the vernal equinox? The wearin’ of the green, the shamrock that he used to teach the Trinity, the green beer and singing and dancing and Irish blessings mark this very Irish holiday everywhere as a charming marriage of Catholic faith and its uniquely Irish interpretation.

Patrick, in the fifth and sixth centuries, was flexible.  He could marry Catholic doctrine to Irish/Celtic customs with no difficulty.  So you don’t have to be Catholic or pagan or even  Irish to seize the occasion and celebrate the arrival of spring. As the Irish say, may the wind always be at your back, and the road rise to meet you on your travels.

A Joyful Yule!

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Given my name (Mother Holle of the Celtic pagan tradition, midway between the maiden and the crone among the three Goddesses, and to whom the holly is sacred) I cannot fail to honor this holiday.  Two famous Christmas carols celebrate this holiday, Deck the Halls, with no mention of Jesus) and The Holly and the Ivy, which added some nativity language as an afterthought. It is one of many New Years at this time (although the official Celtic New Year was Samhain, November 1st).  It joins the ancient Roman holiday of Saturnalia and the 12 days of Christmas from Christmas Day to Three Kings on January 6th for a prolonged celebration of the lengthening of days, with warmer days eventually tagging in after. T be human, or even Mallal, is to be attuned to the seasons, to be both geocentric, and with an eye on the source of warmth and light that sustain us and all life, to be heliocentric as well.

Yule and Christmas alike have celebrations of feasting and dancing, music and greenery, family gatherings and community events. It is a time to express gratitude for the returning sun with generosity, offerings of food and other gifts to those in need. But there are two shadows that deserve to be acknowledged and honored.  One is the shadow, the darkness, in which roots and bulbs lie under the frosty ground gestating in preparation for the coming season or awakening and rebirth.  In the meantime, we humans tend to our own roots as we hunker down and try to stay warm.  Think of all the carols that celebrate that inwardness.  Let It Snow! White Christmas.  Blue Christmas. Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.  I’ll Be Home for Christmas….

The other shadow is the sun, as earth absorbs more of its raise and the temperature rises, threatening agriculture, coastal areas, and other changes that make life on earth less sustainable for future generations and for all life, not just androcentric (also known as humans!). Christmas has become, over the years, a celebration of conspicuous consumption, in ways that are not good for sustainability.  A few years ago, my oldest daughter pressured me to make more of my gifts “consumables and experiences” as a way of not cluttering our lives and our space with more things to be used, discarded, or just clutter up our lives.  It has been a challenge.  Fewer gifts by drawing names among my three daughters, three sons-in-law, and four granddaughters. (And as of this year, one grandson-in-law.) I consider books consumable—once read, most of them can be passed on.  Edibles. Subscriptions.  Activities in lieu of gifts—movies, dining out, mini golf (it is, after all, South Carolina). Cookie baking for the girls, the gift of minor home repairs from sons-in-law.  

However you choose to make this holiday meaningful for yourself, your loved ones, your communities and the earth, may you have a Blessed Yule/Christmas/Saturnalia (if there are any ancient Romans life!), using this time of dormancy for reflection and renewal as we prepare for the longer days that lie ahead.