Fifteen Hours of Darkness: The Solstice

Yesterday, the 21st of December, marked the solstice in the Western hemisphere: the longest night and the shortest day before the hours of daylight begin slowly to lengthen.

It’s also a time, in the western world, of cold, ice and snow:

When icicles hang from the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall
And milk comes home in frozen pail
When blood is nipped, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
To-whoo:
To-whit, to-whoo, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.”

From Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor Lost, with the energy of cold weather and the cooperation required for us to survive. The play also has the line, “When coughing drowns the parson’s saw,” which when I was a child I thought meant that the parson, sawing wood, was coughing; later I learned that “saw” is a sixteenth-century word for “sermon” and so it’s the congregation’s coughing that drowns out the learned man’s droning.

For me this solstice has special meaning, perhaps because last night at sundown I was hoping to see the close conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, so close they are being called “The Christmas Star.” 1226 was the last time they were so close, and the astrological meaning, as we move, finally, into the Age of Aquarius (my birth sign) is intense.

But beyond and before all that, the solstice is an important pagan tradition, celebrating the birth of the sun from the Mother’s womb, celebrated at Stonehenge—the only time of the year when visitors are allowed to walk between the great columns (not this year, due to Covid) and observe the sun rising. All over the world, there are prehistoric monuments celebrating elements of the old goddess religion, including New Grange, in Ireland, called, in Welsh, Alban Arthan, or New Light. The Druid tradition turns on the cyclic repetition of darkness and light, darkness not as threat or evil but as an essential part of nature, when seeds are planted in the dark earth and babies are nourished in dark wombs.

Long ago I used to celebrate solstice with my now-adult granddaughters, and in memory of that happy time, I baked a cake for Mother Winter, called a Wish Cake in Starhawk’s excellent Circle Round: Raising Children in Goddess Tradition. Starhawk has made a great contribution to our growing understanding of the essential link between feminism, neopaganism and Wicca with her teaching, workshops, and many books including The Spiral Dance. Our obsession with trying to explain life through reason leaves us bereft, especially as women whose special understanding of darkness and light finds little support today.

But it was not always so. Years ago, driving up to Los Alamos, the infamous nuclear laboratory that manufactured the first atomic bomb and continues to produce death-dealing devices and to poison the surrounding land, I was gratified to see, posted by the highway, a small sign announcing a weekly Wiccan meeting. Surely we need all our sources of mystery, magic, and potency to deal with the darkness around us, I mean the man-made darkness of despair and distrust that will soon give way to the newborn light.

In Women, Writing