Mood:
brightYule 21-22 of December
At the Winter Solstice, the two God-themes of the year’s cycle coincide---even more dramatically then they do at the Summer Solstice. Yule (which, according to the Venerable Bede, comes from the Norse Iul meaning ‘wheel’) marks the death and rebirth of the Sun-God; it also marks the vanquishing of the Holly King, God of the Waning Year, by the Oak King, God of the Waxing Year. The Goddess, who was Death-in-Life at Midsummer, now shows her Life-in- death aspect; foe although at this season she is the “leprous-white lady”, Queen of the cold darkness, yet this is her moment for giving birth to the Child of Promise, the Son-Lover who will re-fertilize her and bring back light and warmth to her kingdom.
The Christmas Nativity story is the Christian version of the theme of the Sun’s rebirth, for Christ is the Sun-God of the Piscean Age. The birthday of Jesus is undated in the Gospels, and it was not till AD 273 that the Church took the symbolically sensible step of fixing it officially at midwinter, to bring him in line with the other Sun-Gods ( such as the Persian Mithras, also born at the Winter Solstice). As St Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople a century later, explained with commendable frankness, the Nativity of “the sun of Righteousness” had been so fixed in order that “while the heathen were busied with their profane rites, the Christians might perform their holy ones without disturbance”.
“Profane” or “holy” depending on your viewpoint, because basically both were celebrating the same thing—the turning of the year’s tide from darkness towards light. St Augustine acknowledged the festival’s solar meaning when he urged Christians to celebrate it for him who made the Sun, rather for the Sun itself.
Mary at Bethlehem is again the Goddess as Life-in Death. Jerome, the greatest scholar of the Christian Fathers, who lived in Bethlehem from 386 till his death in 420, tells us that there was also a grove of Adonis (Tammuz) there. New Tammuz, beloved of the Goddess Ishtar, was the supreme model in that part of the world of the Dying and Resurrected God. He was (like most of his type) a vegetation or corn-god; and Christ absorbed this aspect of the type as well as the solar one, as the Sacrament of the Bread suggests. So as Frazer points out (The Golden Bough, pg. 455), it is significant that the name Bethlehem means ‘the House of Bread’.
The resonance between the corn-cycle and the Sun-cycle is reflected in many customs: for example, the Scottish tradition of keeping the Corn Maiden (the last handful reaped at the harvest) till the Yule and then distributing it among the cattle to make them thrive all year; or, in the other direction, the German tradition of scattering the ashes of the Yule Log over the fields, or of keeping of its charred remains to bind in the last sheaf of the following harvest.[1] (Here again we meet with the magical properties of everything about the Sabbat fire, including its ashes; for the Yule Log is, in essence , the Sabbat bonfire driven indoors by cold weather.)
But to return to Mary. It was hardly surprising that, for Christianity to remain a viable religion, the Queen of Heaven had to be re-admitted to something like her true status, with a mythology and a popular devotion far outstripping something even conflicting with) the Biblical data on Mary. She had to be given that status, because she answered what Geoffrey Ashe calls “a Goddess-shaped yearning”—a yearning which four centuries of utterly male-chauvinist Christianity, on both the divine and the human level, had made unbearable. (It should be emphasized that the Church’s male-chauvinism was not inaugurated by Jesus, who treated women as fully human beings, but by the pathologically misogynist and sex-hating St Paul.)
Mary’s virtual deification came with startling suddenness, initiated by the Council of Ephesus in 431 “amid great popular rejoicing, due, doubtless, to hold which the cult of the virgin Artemis still had on the city” (Encyclopedia Britannica, ‘Ephesus’ entry). Significantly, it coincided closely with the determined suppression of Isis-worship, which had spread throughout the known world. From then on, the theologians strove to discipline Mary, allowing her hyperdulia (‘super-veneration’, a stepped-up version, unique to her, of the dulia, veneration, according to the saints) but not latria (the adoration which was the monopoly of the male God). They managed to create, over the centuries, an official synthesis of the Queen of Heaven, by which they achieved the remarkable double feat of desexualizing the Goddess and dehumanizing Mary. But they could not muffle her power; it is to her that the ordinary worshipper (knowing and caring nothing about the distinction between hyperdulia and latria) turns, now and at the hour of our death”.
Protestantism went to the other extreme and in varying degrees tried once again to banish the Goddess altogether. All it achieved was the loss of magic, which Catholicism, in however distorted and crippling a form, retained; for the Goddess can not be banished.
(For a fuller understanding of the Marian phenomenon, see Ashe’s The Virgin and Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex.)
The Goddess at Yule also presides over the other God-theme—that of the Oak King and Holly King, which survived, too, in popular Christmas tradition, however much official theology ignored it. In the Yuletide mumming plays, shining St George slew the dark ‘Turkish knight’ and then immediately cried out that he had slain his brother. “Darkness and light, winter and summer, are complementary to each other. So on comes the mysterious ‘Doctor’, with his magical bottle, who revives the slain man, and all ends with music and rejoicing. There are many local variations of this play, but the action is substantially the same throughout.” (Doreen Valiente, An ABC of Witchcraft, pg. 358-60.) Yuletide mumming still survives locally—for example in Drumquin, County Tyrone, where exotically masked and costumed young farmers go from house to house enacting the age-old theme with words and actions handed down from their ancestors; Radio Telefis Eireann made an excellent film of it as their entry for the 1978 Golden Harp Festival.
All to often, of course, the harmonious balance of the dark and light twins, of necessary waxing and waning, has been distorted into a concept of Good-versus-Evil. At Dewsbury in Yorkshire, for nearly seven centuries, church bells have tolled ‘the Devil’s Knell’ or ‘the Old Lad’s Passing’ for the last hour of Christmas Eve, warning the Prince of Evil that the Prince of Peace is coming to destroy him. Then, from midnight on, they peal out a welcome to the Birth. A worthy custom, on the face of it—but in fact it enshrines a sad degradation of the Holly King.
Oddly enough, the popular name ‘Old Nick’ for the Devil reflects the same demotion. Nik was a name for Woden, who is very much a Holly King figure—as is Santa Claus, otherwise St Nicholas ( who in early folklore rode not reindeer but a white horse through the sky—like Woden). So Nik, God of the Waning Year, has been Christianized in two forms: as Satan and as the jolliest of the saints. The Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance (now a September, but once a Yule rite) is based on the parish church of St Nicholas, which suggests a direct continuity from the days when the patron of the locality was not Nicholas but Nik. (On Nik and St Nicholas, see Doreen Valiente’s ABC’s of Witchcraft, pg. 258-9.)
Incidentally, in Italy Santa Claus’s place is taken by a witch, and a lady witchat that. She is called Befana (Epiphany), and she flies around on Twelfth Night on her broomstick, bringing gifts for children down the chimneys.
An extraordinarily persistent version of the Holly King\Oak King theme at the Winter Solstice is the ritual hunting and killing of the wren—a folklore tradition found as far apart in time and space as ancient Greece and Rome and today’s British Isles. The wren, ‘little king’ of the Waning Year, is killed by his Waxing Year counterpart, the robin redbreast, who finds him hiding in an ivy bush (or sometimes in Ireland in a holly bush, as befits the Holly King). The robin’s tree is the birch, which follows the Winter Solstice in the Celtic tree-calendar. In the acted-out ritual, men hunted and killed the wren with birchrods.
In Ireland, the ‘Wren Boys’ day is St Stephen’s Day, 26th December. In some places (the fishing village of Kilbaha in County Clare on the Shannon estuary, for example), the Wren Boys are groups of adult musicians, singers and dancers in colorful costumes, who go from house to house bearing the tiny effigy of a wren on a bunch of holly. In County Mayo the Wren Boys (and girls) are parties of children, also bearing holly bunches, who know on our doors and recite their jingle to us:
“The wren, the wren, the king of the birds,
On Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze;
Up with the kettle and down with the pan,
And give us some money to bury the wren.”
It used to be “a penny”, but inflation has outstripped tradition. All holly decorations in Ireland must be cleared out of the house after Christmas; it is considered unlucky to let these Waning Year symbols linger.
A witches’ Bible: The Complete Witches’ Handbook
Authors: Janet and Stewart Farrar
[1] Magical transference of fertility from one season to another by a charged physical object—particularly by grain or its products, or by the by-products of fire—is a universal custom. Speaking of the temple of Aphrodite and Eros on the northern slop of the Akropolis, where ‘Aphrodite of the Gardens’ dwelt, Geoffrey Grigson tells us: It was to this temple that two girls, two children, paid a ritual visit every spring, bringing with them, from Athene’s temple on the summit, loaves shaped like phalluses and snakes. In Aphrodite’s temple the loaves acquired the power of fecundity. In autumn they were taken back to the Akropolis, and crumbled into the seed grain, to ensure a good yield after the next sowing.” (The Goddess of Love, pg. 162.)
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