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This sits really well with the elongated celebration of the many and diverse ‘Holidays’ that have become conjoined starting with the lead up to Thanksgiving. Possibly because this was always the situation: Christian trying to live with Pre-Christian… the emotional circuit of the year (the reasons for ‘Yule’) trying to live with with the solar division of the year (the equinox festivals and the solstices – as far as we can tell, important to the druids, but not to people who till the fields…)… let alone the lunar division of the year….of which we have two, between now and the winding up of New Year’s… let alone the various Lunar New Years… It’s all redolent of the need to create an intellectual world that distracts from the monotony of Winter weather…

So…

The contest between the Holly King and the Ivy Queen’s champion: they fight with staves or with swords…

Dancing sun-wise – deosil – holding hands to welcome with the warmth of friendship the gradually longer days that are coming. 

Deck the halls with boughs of holly…  and ivy and mistletoe and pine or fir… and a little tinsel… and a ball of mistletoe – or candles, ribbons and apples – overhead at center – probably where there’s normally a light-shade…

The holly and ivy wreath, with red and white candles…

The wren on a golden crown with holly, ivy and mistletoe… the wren in a glass case lined with ivy…

Mulled wine, hot punch and frumenty… …a man wearing the skin of a stag, its antlers on his head… …and other animal masks and costumes…

And when it is windy, one voice calling from the mid-distance, personating the words of Herne the Hunter…

A piper and a drummer… …and a singing bowl… …the weaving dance… 

Mead and fruit-cake… brought round by the priestesses of Fire and of Barley. A kiss as the mead and cake are offered. Pass the parcel. Musical chairs. Sitting by the fire, telling ghost stories…

The Yule log of ash or oak, decorated with greenery and sprinkled with cider…

A decorated tree, small gifts in the branches, and all the greenery and tinsel are there as a setting for the animals of the forest, and their personation…

Watching the stars through the boughs of the fir trees…

Geese and standing stones and mist
 Baying hounds and hooting owl
 Sparkling stars and snow that's crisp...

The essential is that such well-endowed graves, in Kent and in the Isle of Wight, imply that the women who lie there were regarded as totally on a par with the men who were similarly buried, but with sword and other weaponry. Instead of the sword, the women had an iron weaving batten, and instead of the weaponry, the women had means of divination, and amuletic items.

1)

This is telling us about the culture PRIOR to Christianization, and what happeded AFTER Christianization, when these women became the abbesses of prominent abbeys and minsters: at that time the geographical organization of early English Christianity.

Back to pagan times: in Chessell Down grave 45, the great Lady also had a bucket for dispensing magical drink prominently preserved between her feet. It was an exotic item, from the eastern Mediterranean, and secretively beruned. This is an archetypal ‘Lady with a mead cup’. Written sources tell us how highly she was respected…

Along with other ladies in Kent, the Isle of Wight, and Wessex 2), this Lady is buried so as to oversee whole swathes of important landscape. And at this point we may remember that the Angles were noted by Tacitus as belonging to that one in three of all Germans who worshipped the Earth Mother – which usually also implies matriarchy. So the culture of the first Angles in England looks ever more interesting. As does the complexity of the Jutish enclaves in Kent and the Isle of Wight, won first under the leadership of a couple of Angles: Hengest and Horsa.

1. Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain, Howard Williams, p.7
2. Burial, Landscape and Identity in Early Medieval Wessex, Kate Mees pp.67-73

– – – by Kimbal Anderson Sensei

Well…  

…imagine you’re all in your cocoon, and you’re having a little rough time, but it’s time… you smell of ripeness, the moon is right… and someone comes and makes a little opening in your cocoon, so now light streams in: you can go out or you can not go out… it’s up to you: “I’m not ready, I’m not ready, I’m not ready…” or “phew! It was claustro-fucking-phobic in here.”

And then you’re out. You can’t fly or do s*** and you’re very vulnerable at first, you’re delicious, too, because you’re all covered with that sweet goo, but that’ll eventually dry out.  Now, some people harvest you, at that sweet goo stage.

It would not be me.

I’m not interested in that, I do not require your life-energy for me to live. We share the big source. 

Then your wings dry and you look around and think, ‘I don’t know what to do…’  But your wings do: form and function.  That’s why I sent you that video of the baby: there’s this little infant who’s emanating every single thing through kotodama to integrate what it’s receiving. You know what? They don’t know the word ‘Mummy’ until you say it to them:  ‘Mummy’… ‘Daddy’… And then they understand that. And they use the ‘ah’ sound – usually, not always ‘ah’ – with the consonant “m”. ‘Ma’, ‘mo’…  “Ma, mo, mu, mi…” And it gives them access with communication with all kinds of forces…

Please do kata!

From whatever place you brought with you…

Because when you’re done you won’t be the same person.

Around Glastonbury is a Zodiac embedded in the landscape. Many have been discovered in the British Isles and Paul Screeton collates the one around Glastonbury and two more of them 1), rediscovered in the middle quarters of the twentieth century, and dating from the beginnings of the Neolithic in England and Wales. This is the same time as many monuments that mark the leys… and it is just the same time as Thuban (in the constellation Draco) is becoming the North Star, following seven or eight thousand years of no good pole star, and increasingly complex and sophisticated arithmetic and astronomy developing around navigation in its absence of a pole star.

So the complicated arithmetic and astronomy of navigation was absolutely central to any travelling culture; which was every culture in Europe north of the Pyrenees and the Alps, as we came out of the Ice Age. The stars, then, and what we thought about them, were absolutely central to every European culture, whatever it might be.

One has to wonder if a culture’s choice of North Star was, for that culture, a prominent cultural marker and perceived as utterly emblematic, along with all the thinking that accrued to it. In that respect we notice that the name of ‘Arthur Pendragon’ is an enigmatic combination of both available North Stars, at a time when Polaris, the tail of one bear (Ursa Minor) pointed at by the head of another bear (Ursa Major) is coming closer to North, and Thuban, in the tail of Draco, the dragon, is moving away from true North. Remember all those engravings of Cernunnos holding a snake (Draco, dragon) in either hand? Did the Celts in Britain still respect Thuban as their North Star, while the Anglo-Saxons were looking to Polaris??? (The original Arthur lived and fought in Northern England – at that time Wales – in the early fourth century.)

And the elements of a people’s Zodiac can be super-revealing: for example, Virgo, in each of Paul Screeton’s three zodiacs, has a sheaf of barley or wheat, and and looks like an Earth Mother, which is quite appropriate for farmers at the beginnings of the Neolithic.

Similarly instead of our familiar Gemini, the – in the night-sky much more prominent – Orion is featured. And Argo Navis, the boat, which is south of Orion and not even visible from the British Isles today. This is definitely emblematic: there are stick figures in northern Bronze Age rock carvings in the shape of Orion…. And then with the revolution of the northern Iron Age, Orion, the aristocratic warrior with his ‘sword’, suddenly is gone, replaced by the much less noticeable Gemini.

So in ages before writing, the zodiac of choice, and the North Star, and the many things they imply, are central to a culture and the way it thinks its understanding of the world.

1. Quicksilver Heritage, pp.139-141