Summer is Coming!
AUTHOR’S NOTE: My antipodal readers will be excused for taking a pass on this post, although the day of solar turnaround (despite what AI thinks, it has nothing to do with the time required to install solar panels) is still a significant moment in their annual cycle.
As a non-religious person and more specifically a non-Christian one, I remain unmoved by the theistic and societal trappings of the holiday season (except as an annoyance in trying to get around town and being bombarded with that music). The curmudgeon in me always gripes “Christmas, get thee behind me!” On that score, it’s just another “Hallmark-card” event. For me it is a time for family cheer, and we celebrate with a gathering on the Winter Solstice since I’m much more in tune with the seasonal transit of the Sun than with the hieratical calendar.
As a spiritual but unaffiliated type I consider myself a nominal pagan, although I don’t submit to any kind of ceremonial rituals such as those of Wicca or Druidry; natural phenomena have always seemed more compelling than made-up concepts of deity with their attendant “holy blarney” dispensed by clergy. I once took the title of “hedge mystic” though I no longer reside in the remote countryside. I’m now a quasi-suburbanite but I used to say that I entered my private cathedral every time I walked out my back door.
So, although it will necessarily be brief, this is not a “Christmas greeting” sort of message but a meditation on the “sacrificed god” paradigm that the Sun’s retreat into the extreme South and its impact on the weather instilled in the superstitious Northern mind. Solar worship is ancient, and if the solar god seemed to be expiring in displeasure due to the morally perfidious behavior of its adherents, leaving cold, snow and withered crops in its wake, the remorseful people wanted to do whatever they could to resurrect its life-giving glory. And — wonder of wonders — it was a miracle that always produced the desired result!
At one time this anxious allurement amounted to shamanistic sacrifices, succeeded by less-brutal symbolic gestures of sympathetic magic using evergreen boughs and candles, segueing into prayerful religious supplication, and finally into the formation of an anthropomorphic “cult of personality” that carefully masked with sanctimonious fervor all traces of insidious paganism. (As Aleister Crowley observed, faith in Christ is a vestige of the Piscean Age and the Piscean personality can be notably self-sacrificing.)
Anyway, a belated “Happy Solstice!” to all and a sincere wish for another 12-months of staying “on the right side of the grass.”
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on December 25, 2024.
