The Turning of the Seasons

In today’s modern world, we tend to look at time as linear. A year’s time for us is comprised of 12 sequential months beginning with January and ending with December. The months follow each other in the same order, year after year.

The years themselves also follow each other in lineal sequence: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010. Holidays within this linear system are assigned specific dates that usually do not vary from year to year. For example, Christmas always comes on December 25th, Independence Day (in the U.S.) on July 4th, Halloween on October 31rst, and so forth and so on.

But it wasn’t always this way.

Take Easter for example. The specific date on which Easter is celebrated is based on something called the Gregorian Calendar, a liturgical calendar created by the Roman Catholic Church during the time of Pope Gregory XIII (16th Century). According to the Gregorian calendar, Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox.

Huh?

Well, that last sentence provides just a taste of how different the modern concept of time is from the ancient one, even in Christian systems.

Time for modern Westerners is secular and solar. Time for our ancestors was sacred and lunar. Time for us today is tied to the pages of a 12-month calendar. Time for our ancestors was tied to the turning of the seasons, the waxing and waning of the moon, and the natural rhythms of planting and harvest, feasting and fasting, birthing and dying.

Time for us is a straight line that goes forward and backward eternally. Time for our ancestors was circular, a wheel that goes round and round forever and ever. Today we use the words “timeline” or “deadline” to connote boundaries within our modern concept of time. For us, time is all about lines and points on a line, cause and effect, and sequences of events.

The concept of time as an eternal wheel marked by returning cycles of celebration and grief, plenty and want, life and death, is very ancient and occurs across almost all cultures. You might wonder why it is then that we, in the modern era, no longer understand time in this deeper, cyclical way, and why until very recently almost everyone else in the world has had a richer, more symbolic understanding of the passing of time.

Though few modern Christians realize it, the Jews of the Old Testament Bible calculated time and festivals by the phases of the moon, not the sun. Likewise, the Roman Catholic Church still, to this very day, uses a lunar calendar to mark its liturgical year: Liturgical calendars are often pictured in circular form and look a bit like mandalas. 

Tibetan Buddhists depict eternity as a turning wheel. (Although in that system the goal is definitely to get off the wheel.) The ancient Aztec calendar was drawn as a wheel, as was the Mayan calendar. Modern day pagans also depict the year as a wheel tied the changing seasons, the changing length of the days and nights, and the festivals that accompany these changes. Native Americans viewed the world through a cycle of tales on a Medicine Wheel.

Looking at even a small selection of these beautiful and complex symbolic round calendars makes trotting off to Barnes and Noble for 12 months of cute puppies on a square pad of paper seem incredibly dull.

It also raises questions:

In moving to this modern concept of time, what, if anything, have we lost? What have we gained?

The Pagan Year

The pagan calendar wheel is divided by five major feasts tied to the seasons of the Earth: Yule, Imbolc, Beltane, Lammas, and Samhain, and also by four annual events tied to the length of days: Winter Solstice (which roughly overlaps with Yule), Summer Solstice, Fall Equinox, and Spring Equinox. Each of these demarcations on the wheel has symbolic and ritual associations which make certain times of the year more ideal than others for various activities.

Christmas on the pagan wheel is known as Yule and falls on the Winter Solstice. Winter Solstice usually occurs on December 21rst and marks the shortest day of the year, the time when darkness reaches its apex and light comes slowly back into the world. This is literally true, as each day after Winter Solstice brings a bit more light than the one before it, culminating in the longest day of the year on Summer Solstice, usually occuring on June 21st.

This cycle of light and dark is not only scientifically and practically factual—that is, December 21st reallly is the shortest day of the year—it is also filled with symbolic and ritual meaning. The early Catholic Church melded the pagan festival of Yule onto the birth date of Jesus (who, historically, was not actually born on December 25th) because the pagan symbolism overlapped with and echoed the Christian meaning. When the Church adopted Yule and altered it to include the birth of Christ, pagan peoples were more easily converted to Christianity.

While this tactic is often presented as proof that the Church was opportunistic and exploitive, it’s also true that some of the symbolism of the two holidays is really and truly shared: the birth of light and love at the point of deepest darkness, the myth of the birth of a magical child, the sacred nature of love and family, and the idea that inner light is a gift. A few purely pagan elements of Yule that we retain today include Christmas trees, holly and mistletoe, sweet cakes and treats, caroling, and the exchange of gifts. None of these traditions were originally Christian in nature.

The festival of Imbolc celebrates the first signs of Spring with the emergence of crocuses from the ground and hibernating animals from their dens. Imbolc (or Imbolg) is the ancient Celtic version of a festival that is celebrated in some form across many cultures on or around February 2nd. The word ‘imbolc’ in Old Irish literally means ‘in the belly’ and refers to the pregnancy of ewes and their impending lactation as birthing time draws near. Oimelc, another name for the festival, is Old Irish for ‘ewe’s milk’.

In the modern Irish calendar Imbolc becomes St. Brigid’s Day, or Candlemas (the Christianized version). St. Brigid, a fifth century monastic nun, is considered by the Catholic Church to be the patron saint of Ireland. Brigid or Brigit is coincidentally also the name of a very ancient Celtic hearth goddess, and many facts about the life of St. Brigid and the powers of the Celtic Goddess Brigid overlap.

Because of this, many scholars believe that there was no actual human being who became known as St. Brigid, but rather that the saint is an amalgam of pagan goddess stories, especially since St. Brigid’s feast day so coincidentally falls exactly at Imbolc. More likely, the Catholic Church invented her in order to adapt the pagan Imbolc into a Christian celebration of “the purification of the Virgin.”

On St. Brigid’s day, young girls make up poppets of corn husk and young men then visit them (and their corn husk poppets) in their family homes. Later, the poppets are paraded through the streets.

While it’s hard to see much in the way of churchiness or virgin purification in all of that earthy custom, the symbolism of the maiden and respect for her virginity are clearly invoked in these activities. In addition to Imbolc’s obvious fertility themes, this festival is also associated with weather spells and prognostication in general—For instance, if the groundhog sees his shadow on Groundhog’s Day, it is thought to predict another six weeks of winter.

The festival of Beltane marked the beginning of the summer season for the ancient Celts, a time when cattle were driven out to pasture to fatten. The word ‘beltane’ derives from the Gaelic word for the first of May (or that time thereabouts). May 1rst eventually was taken over by the Christian Church and became May Day, ostenisbly a celebration of the Virgin Mary.

Beltane celebrations included a bonfire to symbolically purify the cattle (although that part of the festival has become more important in modern pagan revivals than it likely was for the Celts), and also involved the decorating of May boughs or May bushes with ribbons and flowers. May boughs were placed above doorways and windows and were commonly made of hawthorn or whitethorn branches, which are in blossom at that time of year. The same May boughs were later thrown on the Beltane fire, and each household would then take home a cinder for their hearth at the end of the feast day.

Today Catholic children still erect May Poles with long ribbons attached and participate in processions to honor the Virgin Mary. The little girls adorn themselves in ribbons and flowers for the procession, most of them completely unaware of the ancient pagan nature of the ritual.

The festival of Lammas falls on August 1rst, and is also known as Mabon or Lughnasad. ‘Lammas’ literally means “loaf day” or “first wheat.” The festival originally marked the first grain harvest of the season. Lammas resembles Thanksgiving in the U.S. insofar as it is a harvest festival and involves food and drink and the kind of feasting we associate with Thanksgiving, but the symbolism associated with it runs much deeper.

At Lammastide, peasants baked bread out of the first cut wheat and presented the bread to their landowners (if they had any) or else ate it themselves. Lammas bread was (and is) often baked into the shape of a man. This reminds celebrants that the power of Lugh, the Celtic Sun King (and the pagan god at the root of the word ‘Lughnasad’) begins to wane and die after Summer Solstice. The death of the Sun King at harvest is followed by his rebirth at Yuletide. His symbolic death in the cutting of the wheat enables people to live through fall and winter on grain, bread, and ale.

Ritually cutting down the Sun King and baking him into bread in the form of a man is the pagan precursor to the Christian sacrament of communion. The ritual eating of bread to invoke remembrance of sacrifice (“Do this in memory of me…”) and to strengthen a sense of community dates back to pre-Christian times, and in fact has roots that are far more ancient than the historical days of Jesus. The religious theme of the Sun King who is ritually killed and later reborn, enabling others to live, recurs again and again across all cultures in myriad myfhic forms and incarnations. It predates Christianity by thousands of years, although Christians of course feel their Sun King is the only real one. I’m sure every earlier culture felt the same way about theirs.

The festival of Samhain (pronounced ‘sow-en’) evolved into what we currently call Halloween. Halloween is often presented as a contraction or mispronunciation of ‘Hallow’s Eve’ or ‘All Hallow’s Eve’, the Christianized version of the original pagan feast day.

On Samhain, pagan people set out small cakes or treats for the dead. It was believed that on Samhain the veil that separated the living from the dead was at its thinnest, and the spirits of the dead were able to walk about and converse with the living. The dead were frequently consulted on Samhain about what the coming year would hold and any other matters that might be on the diviner’s mind. At the end of the day on Samhain a huge communal bonfire was built, and again, celebrants took embers back to their home hearths.

The Catholic Church was especially uncomfortable with the feast of Samhain and had a tough time rehabbing it for Christian consumption. In fact, to this day many evangelicals refuse to celebrate Halloween, seeing it as intrinsically demonic and evil. The Church instead created the tradition of what we now call “Trick or Treat” to get people to stop leaving cakes out for the dead on Samhain and to persuade them to stop talking to folks who had passed on.

Renaming the feast “All Soul’s Day,” the Church instituted the tradition of begging door to door for a “soul cake” to help the poor souls consigned to purgatory move on to heaven. This shift in focus was more in line with Catholic belief and metaphysics, but the outlandish costumes, the fear factor, the bonfires, and the occult flavor are all very much pagan and were not so successfully squelched. Those elements survive to this day.

Samhain is one of the most misunderstood and wrongly maligned feast days in existence. Pagan peoples faced death on a daily basis. They believed in the spirit world and consulted it regularly. Death was a daily reality to pre-Christian peoples and it wasn’t easily erased by verbal reassurances that belief in Christ would conquer and eliminate it.

In the late fall, as the weather turned bitter and crops began to die, the last of the grain would be gathered in and any animals that were not to be wintered over would be publically slaughtered. Some would be roasted and eaten, others preserved for the winter to come. Blood and death were therefore integral to the feast day, not out of some ghoulish love of horror, but because the impending winter brought an awareness of possible starvation, illness, and death, and preparing for it naturally grew into a day of respect for the dead and respect for the power of Death.

It’s easy to see how the Christian emphasis on eternal life through a profession of belief in Jesus Christ led to the demonization of an ordinary feast day that had its roots in practical tradition and daily hardship. The fact that the misunderstanding continues is unfortunate. We do die, regardless of our beliefs. Everyone dies. Perhaps some live eternally and others do not—that point is a point of faith—but it does not stave off physical dealth in any way.

Modern societies keep death quarantined and make the topic taboo. In doing this, everyone feels a little better, we all feel more civilized and comfortable, and yet, Death still comes for us all.

What Has Been Lost?

I was born on the Vernal (Spring) Equinox in 1953, the year that the Catholic Church finally decided to let the Virgin Mary into heaven. (Hey, better late than never!) My paternal grandmother was Irish-Catholic. My maternal grandmother was a painter with a pagan view of the world and an utter contempt for organized religion. So I’ve always felt like a halfbreed when it comes to metaphysics and spirituality, and consequently, over the course of 55 years I’ve studied just about every religious tradition in existence.

I find something to admire in all of them, including Christianity.

I don’t hate religion.

Yet on personal level I do come back again and again to the natural rhythms of life and the beauty and mystery of the physical world. Before Christianity, and way before science, human beings had to band together and work with the earth to survive. Life was very hard. No one could afford to ignore this world and the way it works, nor could people afford to turn their backs on their neighbors and isolate themselves and their ideas unless they had great riches to tide them over when things got difficult. And things did (and do) have this tendency to get difficult.

That part hasn’t changed much.

Life is hard, and then you die. I find nothing in that sentence I can oppose—It’s just a fact of life, it’s what life is, it’s what we all have to face and accept and somehow learn to live with as best we can. I think that the ancient cyclical calendars, with their conception of time as a wheel with recurring dramas, feasts, hardships, and celebrations—these cyclic wheels helped people to understand the way the natural world works, and in doing so, brought people together and helped them to survive and enjoy life now and then.

Oddly, both Christianity and science shift the main focus of life from this original goal of survival to the abstract issue of authority. Christianity places all authority with God (as God is understood within that faith), science places all authority in rational procedure and the knowledge that results from applied reason. Today, Christianity and science frequently argue over which side possesses more authority or authentic authority.

In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t much matter who wins that battle. It’s a tiresome fight. The earth is what it is. You learn to live with her, or you die a lot faster. It’s just about that brutally simple. Both science and faith are helpful to different people in different ways, but when you need to eat a Bible and a textbook are equally useless.

When I look at the way we view time now—as a sequence of causal mathematic events that are virtually drained of all symbolic meaning—and the way time used to be viewed—as a great turning wheel of the seasons and the heavens—I see that what has been lost in the shift is the Earth. The Earth, the circle of sky above us, the great round Moon and its waxing and waning light—all of these have been sidelined and trivialized in terms of daily life, and I do believe that has been to our very great and tragic detriment.

What has been gained?

Well, Barnes & Noble still sells lots of calendars with puppies, kittens, Playboy centerfolds, and Dilbert on them. Nobody has to think about death unless they want to. And we can all buy bread at the supermarket in plastic bags.

I’ll leave you to judge the drawbacks and rewards.

Me, I’m going to bake some bread. It’s easy to do and it’s delicious. Here’s a basic recipe in case you don’t know how:

Bread

1 Cup warm water

1 packet yeast

1 dollop of honey

1/4 cup oil or melted butter

flour

Dissolve the honey and yeast in the warm water. Add the oil or butter. When the liquid bubbles, mix in enough flour to make a soft dough.

Sprinkle some flour on a counter or table and knead the dough until it feels smooth and elastic. Place in an oiled bowl and cover the dough with a soft cloth. Put the bowl in a warm (but not hot) place for several hours or until the dough doubles in size. (Inside a cold oven often works well.)

Punch down the dough and make it into a loaf shape. Place the loaf on a greased or oiled pan, cover, and let rise again until double.

Bake at 350 degrees until the loaf is lightly browned on top and tapping it produces a hollow sound.

Cool the bread slightly, slice, and eat buttered slices with honey and a glass of cold whole milk. (Throw that skim stuff away or feed it to the cat.)

Smile. Say thank you. Enjoy your life.