visara

At the Winter Solstice, the two God-themes of the years cycle coincide even more dramatically than 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; for 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-fertilise her and bring back light and warmth to her kingdom.

The Christmas Nativity story is the Christian version of the theme of the Suns 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 depended on your viewpoint, because basically both were celebrating the same thing the turning of the years tide from darkness towards light. St Augustine acknowledged the festivals solar meaning when he urged Christians to celebrate it for him who made the Sun, rather than for the Sun itself.

Mary at Bethlehem is again the Goddess as Life-in-Death. Jerome, the greatest scholar o 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. Now 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, it is significant that the name Bethlehem means the House of the 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 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 its charred remains to bind the last sheaf of the following harvest. (Here again we meet with the magical properties of everything about the Sabbat fire, including the ashes; for the Yule Log is, in essence, the Sabbat bonfire driven indoors by the cold of winter.)

But to return to Mary. It is 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 (sometimes even conflicting with) the Biblical data on Mary. She had to be given the 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 emphasised that the Churchs male chauvinism was not inaugurated by Jesus, who treated woman as fully human beings, but by pathologically misogynist and sex-hating St Paul.)

Marys virtual deification came with startling suddenness, initiated by the Council of Ephesus in 431 amid great popular rejoicing, due, doubtless, to the hold which the cult of the virgin Artemis still had on the city. Significantly, it coincided closely with the determined suppression of Isis-worship, which had spread throughout the known world. From then on, he theologians strove to discipline Mary, allowing her hyperdulia (super-veneration, a stepped-up version, unique to her, of the dulia, veneration, accorded to the saints) but not latria (the adoration which was the monopoly of the male God). They managed to create, over centuries, an official synthesis of the Queen of Heaven, by which they achieved the remarkable double feat of desexualising the Goddess and dehumanising 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.

Pedestrians 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 form, retained; for the Goddess cannot be banished.

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 versions of this play, but the action is substantially the same throughout. Yuletide mumming still survives locally for exaple 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 and excellent film of it as their entry for the 1978 Golden Harp Festival.

All too 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 Devils Knell or the Old Lads 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 ot 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. Nik was a name for Woden, who is very much a Holly King figure as is Santa Clause, 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 Christianised in two forms; as Satan and as the jolliest of saints. The Abbots 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.

Incidentally, in Italy Santa Clauses place is taken by a witch, ad a lady witch at that. She is called Befana (Ephiphany), and she flies around on Twelfth Night on her broomstick, bringing gifts for children down the chimneys.

An extraordinary 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 as far apart in time and space as ancient Greece and Tome and todays 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. The robins 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 Stephens Day, 26th December. In some places the Wren Boys are groups of adult musicians, singers and dancers in colourful 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 knock on our doors and recite their jingle to us:

The wren, the wren, the king of the birds,
On Stephens 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.

The apparent absence of a corresponding Midsummer tradition, where one might expect a hunting of the robin, is puzzling. But there may be a trace of it in the curious Irish belief about Kinkisha, a child born at Pentecost, that such a person is doomed either to kill or to be killed unless the cure is applied. This cure is to catch a bird and squeeze it to death inside the childs hand (while reciting three Hail Marys). In some places at least, the bird has to be a robin, and we feel this is probably the original tradition, for Pentecost is a moveable feast, falling anywhere from 10th May to 13th June i.e. towards the end of the Oak Kings reign. It may be that long ago a baby born at this season was in danger of becoming substitute sacrifice for the Oak King, and what better escape than to find a replacement in the shape of his own bird-substitute, the robin redbreast? And the kill or be killed danger may be a memory of the Oak Kings destiny of killing at Midwinter and being killed at Midsummer.

The Waxing Year robin brings us to Robin Hood, cropping up in yet another seasonal festival. In Cornwall, Robert Graves tells us Robin mans phallus. Robin Hood is a country name for red campion (campion means champion) perhaps because its cloven petal suggests a rams hoof, and because Red Campion was a title of the Witch-god Hood (or Hod or Hud) meant log the log put at the back of the fire and it was in this log, cut away from the sacred oak, that Robin had once been believed to reside hence Robin Hoods steed, the wood-louse which ran out when the Yule log was burned. In the popular superstition Robin himself escaped up the chimney in the form of a robin and, when Yule ended, went out as Belin against his rival Bran, or Saturn who had been Lord of Misrule at the Yule-tide revels. Bran hid from pursuit in the ivy-bush disguised as a Gold Crest Wren; but Robin always caught and hanged him.

In the Book of Shadows Yule ritual, only the rebirth of the Sun-God is featured, with the High Priest calling upon the Goddess to bring to us the Child of Promise. The Holly King / Oak King theme is ignored a strange omission in view of its persistence in the folklore of the season.

We have combined the two themes in our ritual, choosing the Oak King and Holly King by lot, as at Midsummer, immediately after the opening ritual but postponing the slaying of the Holly King until after the death and rebirth of the Sun.

If, as is more than likely, you have a Christmas tree in the room, any lights on it should be switched off before the circle is cast. The High Priest can then switch them on immediately after he lights the cauldron candle. If there is a fireplace in the room, a Yule Log should be burned during the Sabbat. It should, of course, be of oak.