Darkish shepherdess of many a golden star,
Dost see me, Mom Night time?
From The Electra by Euripides
As I’ve completed for a few years, I’m encoring my annual observance of Winter Solstice Eve. Could this holy evening of deep, velvety darkish thriller be a quiet blessing for you. Deep peace to all.
– Beth
This is the day earlier than Winter Solstice, and the standard celebration of Mom Night time.
So far as we all know, our ancestors didn’t have atomic clocks or satellites to assist them dissect Time to the nanosecond. As an alternative, they needed to determine by their eager commentary, by lifeless reckoning, by the vegetation and animals, by the celebs, Moon, and planets.
And that’s the reason they named this time “Solstice,” as a result of it comes from the Latin “solstitium,” from sol, which implies “Solar” and –stitium, which is “a stoppage.”
For a short time, it seems that the Solar’s arc from dawn to sundown is unchanged. The lengthy, regular darkening we now have felt and seen, ever since mid-June, now stops… after which…. in the future, our personal pricey Goddess of the Solar, the supply of all life, will rise a little bit extra to the north east, and the daylight will start to elongate, a couple of minutes every day.
However not simply but.
First, as She is now doing, tonight we enter the pause that’s on the coronary heart of this trip of time. That is the time to present honor to the huge, deep darkish that cradles us.
Of their lovely ebook, The Winter Solstice, John and Caitlín Matthews write:
“There’s a second of silence that happens yearly… a second we now have all skilled not less than as soon as in our lives, perhaps greater than as soon as. It may possibly silence an ideal metropolis like London or New York, and it may possibly carry stillness to our hearts, whoever and wherever we could also be.
“That second is like no different.
“It gives the promise of latest beginnings, of the clear slate of latest yr, and it incorporates the breathless expectancy of Christmas evening itself, when a well-recognized determine enters our lives and adjustments them briefly.”
Do you recall such moments? Occasions whenever you stepped out of the push, and had been flooded as a substitute with quiet marvel? Have you ever ever gazed off into the Winter’s evening sky, seeking a Star?
This pause between Darkish and the return of the Mild is an ephemeral second, filled with magic. Tonight, give your self time to permit the scrumptious darkish to fill your consciousness.
Be with it, with out concern, with out the necessity to distract your self. Discover how calm, how tender, how quiet it may be.
If you’ll permit it, this evening is usually a balm for the typically too hard-shiny-bright depth that shuns this time of yr’s truest present: its reminder of our personal mortality, and the deep give up of all issues, even the Earth Herself, to occasions of darkness.
Who Calls from This Darkish?
Mom Night time is noticed in honor of the Darkish Goddess, who holds us at our beginnings and our endings. She will be the Black Madonna, Frigga, Freya, Holle, Hecate, the Cailleach, the Crone, or anonymous. Also called Mōdraniht, this evening is Her doorway, after which the times of Yuletide can start.
Tonight we give honor to the Dísir, the holy ancestral moms of our households. We pay homage to all female guardians of the house and household.
As historian Carolyn Emerick has defined in her fascinating two-part article, The Lost Female Figures of Christmas, our Americanized patriarchal, secularized tradition has obscured the significance of girls’s tales and roles in our Yuletide legends.
Within the previous nations, this was not the case. The Germanic holidays honored feminine ancestors at Yuletide and the pre-Christian Northern European cultures positioned huge significance on girls’s items of magic and knowledge. There are nonetheless traces of feminine Christmas figures with historical Pagan roots to be discovered throughout Europe.
Sadly, with the aggressive conquest of Christianity over the previous people religions, many of those Goddesses of Winter had been twisted into demonic monsters, equally to how different misogynist attitudes of the Church took maintain.
However we know higher.
And, as I’ve said many occasions, our civilization is out of stability in direct proportion to the distortions, fears, and rejection of the Female Divine, particularly in Her much less snug side as Darkish Crone.
Historical Days, Holy Methods
With out query, that is probably the most intense week within the Western European religious traditions. Its roots go deep into the Mesopotamian New Yr’s celebrations of historical Persia and Babylon.
From Greece’s rites to honor Kronos, recognized later by Romans as Saturn; merging, as 
Rome conquered northern Europe, into the Celtic and Norse Solstice observances, this highly effective time of the rebirth of the Solar echoes via the blood reminiscence of all of the Western tribes.
That is additionally an evening for honoring the Sidhe, toasting, and giving thanks with tune and choices:
Hail the holy Elves, Shining of the harrow,
Entire Ye maintain the Fireplace,
Mighty elders of previous. Flip our minds towards you!
So highly effective and in style is that this time, so deeply ingrained the welcoming of the returning Solar, that the brand new faith was obliged in 350 C.E. to vary the observance of their Solar God’s delivery (which their students are properly conscious was within the Springtime) to December.
They discovered it completely inconceivable to place a halt to the revelries of the Saturnalia, so that they tried to Christianize them as a substitute.
However solemnity and piousness are feeble playmates, and there’s no place at this groaning desk of pleasure for the guilt-ridden. For we’re the youngsters of the Earth, and our our bodies and our spirits bear in mind this.
It’s unnatural for our fashionable tradition to have a lot concern and denial of the darkish. The evening is our trainer, our healer, and it’s completely obligatory if we’re to know peace. It brings the stillness during which the seed could gestate. It’s the womb from which the Baby of Promise will emerge.
So flip off the electrical lights, and by candlelight, really feel the presence of the Shining Ones drawing close to. Pay attention and listen to the whispers of the Ancestors who could supply council or loving greetings within the darkness.
In each cell of our bodily being and within the soul’s historical consciousness, we all know and bear in mind the darkness that now gathers deeper round us. We all know and do not forget that the Wheel is popping, and we wait.
Enter now the darkish quiet Thriller of this Mom Night time.
Could She train and bless you properly.
