‘Embracing the Darkness, Welcoming the Light’ - Lindsay River

The winter solstice is my favourite festival. Why do I love it so much?  

I love the deep reflective depths of the longest night, to me it is the stillness at the heart of the year. I love staying with pagan friends and watching the dawn with them. 

It seems to have been regarded, as special for thousands of years, though part of its observance became integrated with Christmas. Yet way back in about 3100 before the common era, the very grand passage tomb of New Grange in Ireland was built. On the shortest day, winter solstice, and a few days either side, but on no others, the rising sun is at the exact position to shine through the lightbox, a tunnel that runs above the long human entrance passage into the tomb chamber. This was precise engineering and must have involved labour by a whole agrarian community over years. 

We don’t know why such a great effort was made, but we could hazard a guess. As well as calendar keeping, it might have been believed that the sunlight at this magical, liminal time would bless or perhaps awaken the souls of the dead buried there. 

Many other neolithic sites are aligned in some way to the winter or summer solstice – the most famous of which is Stonehenge but tbere are others too which seem to have this orientation such as the Dorset Cursus.  

What then is the winter solstice exactly? It is the longest night and the shortest day. Today is the shortest day and tonight the longest night, though last night was long too, only one second shorter. The length of days and nights changes very slowly at this time of year, which is why it is called Solstice or sun stand still. Of course the sun doesn’t appear to stand still in the sky. As on other days it appears to move through a smooth arc between sunrise and sunset. 

The so called standstill is because the sun’s position at sunrise, plotted against trees, buildings or hills, appears to linger in the same place morning after morning, something it does not do except around the two solstices. Only at the equinox does the sun rise due east. In the summer it rises further and further north east til summer solstice, in the winter further south east until the winter solstice. For a person in the northern hemisphere watching the position of sunrise on the horizon day by day, at the winter solstice it rises as far to the south east as it can ever get at their location. Perhaps you have seen this if you have a good view of the sunrise. I am lucky to see this daily from my 3rd floor flat - at the moment I see the sun rising over the London plane trees of Stoke Newington Common, south east of my building.  

These were the very changes that neolithic people charted with the position of earthworks, stones and monuments

Many other cultures have marked the solstices – particularly indigenous peoples of North America – for instance the Hopi and Zuni festival of Soyal welcomes the sun back on the 21stof December. In Europe too there are winter solstice rituals In Latvia a huge yule log was rolled through the villages. As it went it gathered all the failures, misfortunes and sorrows of the year which were then burned with it. 

The Scandinavian cultures, celebrated Jul - spelled J U L - with feasting and drinking and we inherit the word Yule from the Anglo-Saxons. 

In many countries this is a time for disguise, dressing up, wearing masks - often of animals or wild spirits. Saturnalia for the Romans had some of that flavour, and in England Twelfth Night though not on the solstice was related to it and involved reversals of status and gender.   

In my own magical group, which is small but perfectly formed, we celebrate the Winter Solstice as the end and beginning of our year. This is not widely done by British pagans for whom Samhain may be the New Year, but it is in our tradition. 

In the first, dark half of the festival we let go of all we want to lose. These things and what we imagine symbolically as the whole world, even the whole universe, are gathered and put into a large cauldron. The cauldron, which may otherwise be a fruitful fertile space, here symbolises destruction. Astronomically I see the cauldron as a symbol of a black hole.  

Then comes the turning point as light is reborn and we enact the recreation of the universe, moving and dancing with symbolic masks as the different realms of plants and creatures of earth are created. It is a wonderful thing to do together and provokes deep smiles of joy.  

Other people who celebrate the winter solstice have quite varied rituals. You may have your own and I would love to hear about them.  

The Anglesey Druid Order go to Bryn Celli Ddu, a passage grave on Anglesey somewhat similar to New Grange but on a much smaller scale. There they enact, singing, a part of the Welsh classic the Mabinogi. In this sequence the god of light itself, Lleu, has been murderously attacked. He has not quite died but is transformed into a huge wounded eagle perched on top of a tree. He is dying. Together they sing a Welsh healing spell that will bring him down the tree and initiate his complete recovery. 

In my own practice I celebrate Winter Solstice as the central, most important part of the winter festivities. But not only on solstice itself. I celebrate it within the whole Christmas season. For there are many solstice-like features within Christmas – the decoration with evergreens, the carols which celebrate the Holly and other evergreens, the baubles which can represent the returning sun, the candles in the darkness – they are all part of solstice season to me.  

Christmas, as a Christian festival, has its own beauties of mysticism and folk myth (such as the animals being able to speak on Christmas night as the child was born). I love these too. 

For me within the Christmas season is a very ancient kernel of solstice, of a time when the huge energy of a community was roused up to create miracles of engineering, or where feasting and dancing celebrates both community in the darkness and the return of the light. We cannot know what it has meant exactly to people of the past but clearly it has been deeply important. 

Many of us still feel that urge to make light and fire in the darkest time, and others perhaps are more attuned to the stillness and introspection of the long night, to the value of darkness, or to rituals where the negative energies of the past year can be discarded. Perhaps we can discover or find again a personal meaning of the solstice by meditation on this shortest day and the longest nights that surround it, in the sweet still heart of the year.  

We are going to have three minutes of meditation here to help us centre with our own alignment to the shortest day and to the turning of the sun.