The Wheel of the Year E-Book

Rebecca Beattie

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 286

Beschreibung

___ Live a life in step with the seasons. In this enchanting book, Rebecca Beattie – a Wiccan priestess who has practised witchcraft for over twenty years – takes us on a magical journey around the Wheel of the Year. Every six weeks, from the Spring Equinox to the Summer Solstice, from the Autumn Equinox to Imbolc, these restorative moments in nature's cycle offer a moment to pause and reflect, to reconnect with the seasons and ourselves. The Wheel of the Year is alive with the ebb and flow of the natural world, full of nurturing rituals, rejuvenating wisdom and journal prompts to help you sow seeds of change and thrive. 'Warm, friendly… Encourages us to pause, rather than rush headlong through life. It's a way to make time and space to really experience the world around us.' Resurgence & Ecologist 'An enchanting celebration of eight restorative moments in nature's cycle' Caught by the River

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Introduction

ONE             Midwinter or Yule

TWO            Imbolc or Candlemas

THREE        Spring Equinox

FOUR          May Eve or Beltane

FIVE            Midsummer or Summer Solstice

SIX              Lammas

SEVEN       Autumn Equinox

EIGHT        November Eve or Samhain

Desideratum, or the Manifesto of Perfectly Imperfect

Acknowledgements

References

Further Reading

INTRODUCTION

I wasn’t born a witch. Few people of my generation were, although I have encountered the odd one along the way. I am not the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. I had no moments of envisioning the goddess while driving down the motorway. In fact, I was brought up in a rural community that was largely Anglican, although, looking back, the signs were there. My favourite time of year was harvest festival. We would decorate the church with autumn flowers – red poppies and orange chrysanthemums, interwoven with ears of wheat – and bring food to donate to those who needed it most. In those services, the readings were all focused on nature, and the season of creation. That service made me feel more at home than any other. Despite the long years of involvement in the local routine of the church, I always felt out of place and alienated by the lack of a feminine divine presence. I studied comparative religions at school and was fascinated by other people’s traditions, not realising at the time I was seeking something, though it took me a bit longer to realise that I wasn’t quite the agnostic I believed I was. At eighteen, I left home and village life behind me and set off in search of adventure and an acting career, which is what I was certain I was born to do.

Funny how life changes the map and leaves us wondering if we somehow missed a turn. Fast forward about a decade: I was in my late twenties and based in London when the penny dropped. I had an active social life, I was involved in a bountiful creative venture running a film collective with my two best friends, I was touring the country performing in Macbeth, my favourite of Shakespeare’s plays – but I was feeling dissatisfied and out of sorts. I had just broken up from a significant relationship and I was frustrated that I hadn’t been earning my income through acting, but it was more than that. I was experiencing a phenomenon that modern witches or pagans refer to as their ‘Saturn Returns’. In astrological terms, it means that the planet Saturn – the sphere that governs stability and foundations – has come back into your chart at the position it was in when you were born. In simpler terms, my world as I knew it was ending.

Everything started to look shaky when I put it under the magnifying glass, and I started rethinking all my life decisions. On tour, we were staying in farmhouses, surrounded by nature at every turn. I was getting up with the sunrise, walking in the rural landscape and spending contemplative time in solitude surrounded by trees and fields. I had time to breathe the air and inspiration flowed in. This was what had been lacking in my life. In all the urban streets I walked down to auditions, in all the dusty rehearsal rooms, and the admin jobs I took to pay the rent, I had been missing my connection to nature and, more importantly, I had been looking in the wrong place for fulfilment – I had been seeking outside myself. My journey to self-discovery had begun.

When I returned to London from that tour of Macbeth, I knew I had found my spiritual peace in nature and that there must be more to life than the misery of hard-nosed rejections I was experiencing in my acting career. I set off in search of meaning, intending to return to acting once I had found my way back to a more fulfilled and fulfilling life. This path led to my training in Wicca.

Don’t be alarmed if you’ve not heard that term ‘Wicca’ before, or if it makes you wonder if I am a little peculiar. (I really am – but then, aren’t we all?) I will tell you more about it as we go on. For now, all you need to know is that it is a spiritual way of life that centres on our sacred connection to nature.

It was on this path that I learned all about the Wheel of the Year, a concept that helped me to understand my place in the world, to deepen that connection to nature I had felt when touring the countryside and to appreciate fully the wonders of its cycle, no matter the season – or location.

There are various ways of carving up the year into smaller, more manageable time periods. Our Graeco-Roman months of the year are one way, but other faiths also have their own methods of measuring time. For pagans, since the 1940s or 1950s, the year has been defined and delineated by the Wheel of the Year. Yet this seasonal calendar is now spreading outwards and connecting with nature lovers more widely. If you have spent any time on social media over the last few years, you will probably have encountered it. #witchesofinstagram is one of the most followed tags around, WitchTok is a thing, and people have become very curious about modern paganisms, including druidry, heathenism, witchcraft and the many other spiritual faiths that sit beneath the pagan umbrella and follow the Wheel of the Year. However, you certainly don’t have to identify as pagan to find meaning in the Wheel: as long as you are a lover of nature and want to spend more time there, reflecting, observing, dreaming, creating, healing, then the Wheel of the Year can help you to do just that.

The Wheel is best thought of as being represented by an old-fashioned wagon wheel (not the biscuit). The year is divided into eight festivals – known as sabbats – that are observed by pagan groups across the world marking a particular moment in the cycle of the natural world with a day of contemplation and celebration. Each sabbat occurs every six weeks or so, and our celebratory practices are always a reflection of what is happening in nature at that time. So following the Wheel enables us to stay connected to the earth as we move through the seasons. The purpose of this book is to help you to do the same, to guide you through each sabbat and find your own connection to nature and yourself.

Some of these eight festivals have their origins in the Celtic cultures of Europe, but the history of the others requires a little more discernment. The Wheel as a cohesive whole is not as ancient as one might believe . . . Well, it is and it isn’t. Let me explain.

The Wheel of the Year was brought together by two men – Ross Nichols (the father of Modern Pagan Druidry) and Gerald Gardner (the father of Modern Pagan Witchcraft) in the 1950s and 1960s. They were inspired by theories of an ancient witch cult and the idea of a more shamanic, nature-based, indigenous faith, one that had existed before Christianity came to the British Isles. The trouble was that while archaeological studies have certainly proved that such faiths existed before the arrival of the Romans, they relied largely on an oral tradition and much of the meaning behind the practices had since been lost. Undeterred, Nichols and Gardner began to build new traditions of paganism using nature as their principal inspiration for developing a relationship with the divine. It was a logical consequence that those practices, rooted in the cycles of Mother Earth, would come to form this Wheel of the Year.

Nichols’ Druids began celebrating quarter days: the solstices and equinoxes, which mark the beginning of each quarter of the year (traditionally when rents and other payments were due). Meanwhile Gardner’s witches were celebrating the Celtic equivalents, which had become known as cross-quarter days as they fell in between the others. In the late 1950s the two practices merged, and the Wheel of the Year was born. Since that time, modern pagans have organised their practices around it, with the following sabbats:

Yule or Midwinter – 21 December

Imbolc – 1 February

Spring equinox – 21 March

Beltane or May Eve – 30 April

Midsummer – 21 June

Lammas – 1 August

Autumn equinox – 21 September

Samhain or November Eve – 31 October

(The exact dates can vary due to Earth taking slightly more than 365 days to travel around the sun, hence the need for leap years.)

I have been teaching people about the pagan Wheel of the Year for several years now at a bookshop in Bloomsbury called Treadwell’s. Treadwell’s has an important place in the lives of many people, and seekers come from all over the world to visit. In the UK we live in a climate that allows us to experience four distinct seasons and the Wheel reflects that cycle, so at a crucial point in the class I always invite people to share what they are currently witnessing in nature. Sometimes I am met by blank looks if my students are firmly entrenched in urban life, but they soon get into the swing of looking around them with a little more curiosity. Many of the answers relate to what is visible in the city parks or gardens.

Yet as the Covid pandemic took hold and the classes went online, I noticed a change. My students were now coming from all over the world, so when I asked that same question, the answers began to fan out into something far more expansive. We began to hear how the forest-fire season began at Lammas, how Greenland got only four hours of daylight at midwinter, how the Spanish harvest oranges at autumn equinox, not just apples, and how the seasons were opposed in the southern hemisphere. As we celebrated midwinter, our southern hemisphere cousins were celebrating midsummer, and while we were celebrating spring equinox, they were at autumn equinox, and so on.

What is glorious about a modern-created, ancient-inspired practice is that it can adapt and expand to encompass whatever you are experiencing. There is no dogma that says in autumn you must celebrate the apple harvest if your local region doesn’t produce apples, or if what you are seeing around you is the blooming of spring flowers. It makes little sense to celebrate the emerging hawthorn blossom at Beltane in May if it doesn’t grow in your region. It’s useful to understand where the practices come from, and what the symbolism is, but you can look for inspiration in nature wherever you happen to be in order to mark the festivals. The sabbats on the Wheel are therefore a blueprint, a guide, a map, but remember: the map is not the same as the land.

Likewise, the human experience has much in common wherever you are, so you will often find similar themes appearing in the seasonal practices of different cultures across the world. While pagans and Celts honour their ancestors at Samhain, in Mexico people mark Día de los Muertos; in Upper Egypt they visit their family graves; Christian faiths have All Hallows’ or All Saints’ Day; and others celebrate Halloween. Most of these festivals have existed in some form for centuries – across the world, there is a line of concordance that joins them all together, whether through the collective unconscious or some other means, in reverence of our ancestors and a remembrance of our dead.

One of the beauties of the Wheel of the Year is that it is cyclical, so you can begin marking it at any point. You don’t have to wait for an appropriate ‘beginning’ to start celebrating the sabbats; you can do it right now. You just need a desire to align your own life more closely with the cycles of nature. Whether you’re in a rural or more urban spot doesn’t matter either. A quarter of a century in a major metropolis taught me that looking for the hidden paths and gardens, the window boxes and the tree-lined streets, paying closer attention to parks and waterways, can be more than enough.

Because of its cyclical nature, the Wheel of the Year also gives us a ‘glass-half-full’ perspective on human life. We are offered a chance to pause and reflect on our lives every six weeks – almost like being given a fresh start, a blank piece of paper. Not happy with the way your life has been going in the last segment? Great – you can start to make decisions that help bring about change and the next sabbat is the perfect moment to begin. Over time, I have also found a deepening of meaning that I hope you will begin to experience too. The Wheel is not just a circle, it’s also a constantly moving spiral through life. Each turn of the solar year brings deeper nuances, and new insights.

As time has moved on since the emergence of Modern Paganism, the practice has grown and developed, and embellishments have been added by later practitioners. The Wheel has taken on other mythologies that are not always followed by the pagans who adhere to the original practices of Gardner and Nichols. This means you might encounter some differences between what you find on the internet and what I am sharing here. For example, you might have come across the story of the Oak King and the Holly King who do battle for dominion over the year – the Oak King takes the throne in the summer months, while come winter it is the turn of the Holly King. It is a nice story, but it was a much later addition to the Wheel in the 1970s when it travelled over to the United States. So too are the ‘Celtic’ names Ostara, Litha, Lughnasadh and Mabon, which were added in the 1980s to replace spring equinox, summer solstice, Lammas and autumn equinox. You will notice I don’t use those terms here. This is not just because they came later, but because the thinking behind them is problematic in many ways. In the Wiccan community in the UK, many dislike those names with a passion, as they were added arbitrarily, some say for the sole reason of trying to make the Wheel sound more authentic. It is a personal choice, and you can choose to call the festivals whatever you like, but in this space I will guide you around the Wheel as it was taught to me, which is how Gerald Gardner and Ross Nichols originally conceived it.

As we are on the topic of language, there are a few terms I’ll be using on our journey that might take you by surprise. The first of our knotty problems: Wicca. Wicca is a mystery tradition – it’s not quite recognised as a religion in the UK – but nonetheless I identify as a Wiccan priestess, the title I was given when I was initiated into my coven. My training has been over twenty years long so far, but then, as my teacher is fond of telling me, ‘In this life we all die beginners.’

It’s not a life for everyone. There is a sense of vocation that comes with the title, and with that a calling. It also comes with a strong sense of the divine, and adherents recognise both the sacred feminine, the sacred masculine and every gender identity in between. Whether you are a monotheist or a pantheist, or an agnostic or an atheist, my world view may not be your world view, but what is important is that we all find our own way to connect to nature, the divine, and our own inner spiritual selves.

As this isn’t a book about religion, but a book about connecting to nature and all that you find there, I invite you to substitute my terminology for yours. I have spent many years studying comparative religions and find fascination in all faiths. I am not here to convert you to paganism (it is a non-proselytising faith) and I respect all paths that help us to lead more fulfilling and happier lives, if we don’t harm others in the process.

What this book is about is connecting to nature’s cycles through these important pause points in the year. You’ll find out about the festivals themselves – the myths, traditions, the spiritual and practical elements – and I’m also going to encourage you to think about what is going on in the natural world, to engage with the changing of the seasons at those times by going on walks or jotting down your observations in a journal. We have learned to separate ourselves from the divine and from nature and the rest of the animal kingdom, to see ourselves either as first in the food chain or last on the list of priorities to attend to, and that means that some of us also disrespect the natural world and our own divinity. By failing to see what’s holy in the everyday, and what is all around us, we have lost all sense of the sacred.

I shall also encourage you to try your hand at several different practical activities throughout the book where we make things, as opposed to buying them. I practise lots of different crafts myself – making soap, bath salts, candles and dabbling in needlecraft, though I am spectacularly awful at sewing. Making your own items allows you to pour some of yourself into these objects, giving them special meaning, but also by engaging in particular activities or using particular ingredients that are associated with that time of the year, you further connect with the Wheel.

Different times of year, for example, are ‘ruled’ by a particular planet. This is based on an ancient system of planetary philosophy, when it was thought that two luminaries (the sun and moon) and five other planets revolved around the earth (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). Each had their own set of characteristics and healing qualities and the natural world was divided into things that fall under the dominion of each one of the seven.

We still use this system of correspondences today. When we create and make recipes – bath salts, balms, incenses, oils and brews – we work with the list of correspondences for the planet we want to call upon to help us in our endeavours. If I want to bring love, I will work with Venus and I may choose to work with roses too. If I want to encourage health and vitality, I work with the sun, and perhaps orange or frankincense.

For each sabbat, I will give you the planetary ruler, the tarot card and the astrological sign, as these inform the quality of that sabbat. Also, each sabbat is given a cardinal compass point, which relates to the direction with which the festival is associated. This is because, magically, we work in a circle and the Wheel is superimposed onto that magical space. As the Wheel moves onwards, we too turn to face the new orientation and place our altar in that position. And as we go, I will give you pointers about what all of these things represent, and it may be an area you want to explore a little further. If that’s the case, check out my ‘Further Reading’ section at the back.

Throughout the book, and in each of the sabbats, I will also offer you a short ritual to follow to help give you a moment to pause, to connect to nature and reflect on your inner thoughts. This is really the point of the Wheel. Ritual helps all of us to mark transition points and to give them meaning. Ritual should not feel rehearsed. Try to let yourself go a little, allowing for spontaneity: that is where you will encounter the divine – and find a little magic.

Don’t worry, I won’t be teaching you to raise dark forces or practise maleficium – harmful magic. Despite centuries of accusations of Satanism, pagan witches don’t worship the devil. You’ll discover that I take a very down-to-earth view on magic, one that is about positive exchange with the universe and not about taking what you can get. Before you attempt to change the world, let’s focus on changing your inner beliefs about what you can achieve – like an active form of prayer. Scott Cunningham, an American author who published many books on magical practice in the 1980s, once wrote:

Magic is natural. It is a harmonious movement of energies to create needed change. If you wish to practise magic, all thoughts of it being paranormal or supernatural must be forgotten.

So you won’t find the secret to magically disappearing and reappearing at will; what you will find are some seasonal spells to help you communicate with your unconscious self.

Connecting with and nurturing your inner self is to me one of the most important aspects of all of this. In our fast-paced modern lives, your sense of self-worth can plummet and self-care easily go out of the window. My twenty-plus years of working in the health and charity sector – my corner of which has been underpaid and underfunded for decades – has taught me how important it is to cherish yourself before you are able to support anyone else. The old cliché about putting on your own oxygen mask before you can help anyone else put on theirs rings true. Therefore, throughout the book I lean more into reconnecting us with our own sacred nature, rather than striving for the attainment of an external goal. I will also be encouraging you to be a little kinder to your inner self than you may be used to.

Each of the sabbats is presented with its themes or qualities, and the practical exercises are curated to help you bring more of that quality into your life. For example, at Yule we work towards finding hope, while at Beltane the theme is joy. At spring equinox we connect to your inspiration, and at midsummer we encounter the concept of sovereignty. I would encourage you to use this book partly as a resource that suggests how to live life in step with the seasons, but also as one that can help guide you on that spiritual journey inwards. While taking the time to work on yourself can feel a little like self-indulgence when you begin, it really isn’t. It’s a worthwhile investment that will yield riches for years to come.

So, then, back to the reason we are here – to nature’s enchantment, and your nurturing guide to rediscovering and celebrating the Wheel of the Year. As I mentioned, you can start anywhere. I am going to start with Yule or midwinter, as this marks the ‘birth of the sun’, which seems as good a place as any to begin.

CHAPTER ONE

MIDWINTER OR YULE

21 DECEMBER (NORTHERN HEMISPHERE)

21 JUNE (SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE)

The most ethereal forms belong to winter; hers is the beauty the leaf has when substance and sap are gone and only the frail white outline belongs. This is the best time to learn the proportions of things.

Mary Webb

THEMES: The shining light in the darkness, resting, birth

PLANET: Sun or Sol

DIRECTION: North

TAROT CARD: The Star

ASTROLOGY: Capricorn

If I were to ask you, ‘What’s happening in nature at midwinter?’ you might be forgiven for thinking the answer to this question is ‘Nothing much.’ The trees are mostly bare, although some still hold on to crisp, dead leaves. Those trees have given into the impulse to just let go, whether gradually – like the planes that seem to drop one leaf at a time – or all at once, like the ash, in a seeming display of temper. They stand outlined against the winter skies, their naked branches on full display, their stretched silhouettes cast onto the brown earth by a low sun. Without the camouflage of the green canopy, we can see the true nature of these trees’ central form, something that has been hidden since spring equinox, when the first smattering of new foliage began.

The earth is tilting on its axis, pointing those of us in the northern hemisphere away from the great solar orb, while at the other end of the planet our cousins are enjoying summer once more. The pavements and trails are imprinted with discarded and dead leaves that seem to melt into the stone. Leaves are also littering the gutters and the edges, and the process of turning all that matter into mulch is under way with each downpour and each set of footsteps through them – human or animal. This year’s dead leaves will become the soil of a future year, enabling new growth and new life to emerge.

In winter, the physical path of the nature lover becomes dominated by form and by texture. The grass underfoot crunches with its coat of frosting; tree branches stretch out across the void. Even your breath takes on texture as it becomes visible in the cold air. The pathways become waterlogged with rain, and thick with mud. The pigs on the city farm frequently wear mud stockings – as do I! Scents are loamy and earthy. Colours are muted – browns and greens, clear blues and white, and black. The gnarly surface of the tree bark invites us to touch it, to trace the lines and shapes, sometimes coated in fine green moss, and embraced by boughs of ivy. Hedgerows now have only the jewels of their berries left on their bare branches, with little greenery remaining.

With so little that’s new going on in the natural world (though that can be deceptive), it might surprise you that I am starting our journey through the Wheel of the Year with Yule, or midwinter. You might have heard too that it is Samhain on 31 October that is the Celtic new year. People therefore assume it must be the witches’ new year too, but not all pagans identify as Celtic in their outlook. Marking a new-year point also assumes a linear measurement of time – the start and end of something – but the point of a wheel is that it keeps turning, spiralling through the seasons.

I have never been a fan of new year – all that pressure on us to go out and have a good time, to make new year’s resolutions we shall all have broken by 3 January and replaced with a heady layer of self-loathing. If we shift the new-year point to October and Samhain, it’s just moving the pressure. Instead, the Wheel gives us the opportunity to start afresh whenever we feel the need, to nurture ourselves whatever the time of year. To my mind, it really doesn’t matter when new year is – every day can mark a beginning.

We start, therefore, with the darkest part of the year, and with the birth of the infant sun. Interesting thought that, don’t you think? We have stumbled into the first of our worldwide archetypes – the birth of the sun/son god. Sound familiar? This has been a human preoccupation for millennia.

At this time of year, there are hundreds of memes online about who celebrated Christmas first – the pagans or the Christians. To me, this isn’t the important question. The truth is a combination of considerations, depending on which aspect of Christmas you are talking about – the birth of Christ belongs to Christianity, but the birth of the sun/son, the midwifing of hope and the need to light up the darkest part of the year is global, and older. While Christmas as we know it is a much later reinvention that developed in the last two centuries, humans have been celebrating the midwinter point for thousands of years.

OUR ANCIENT ANCESTORS AT MIDWINTER

Many of the midwinter practices of our ancestors are shrouded in mystery, as they were based on oral traditions that were not written down. Nevertheless, while they didn’t have access to the scientific knowledge we have today, they were able to observe the movement of the sun and to understand that something significant was happening, with the days becoming increasingly short between midsummer (summer solstice) and midwinter (winter solstice). The lengthening nights must have been just as poignant for our ancestors as they are today, if not more so, and one theory is that midwinter celebrations were held to encourage the sun to return before it disappeared completely. The word ‘solstice’ comes from the Latin and translates as ‘the sun stands still’, with this apparent stillness happening twice a year, though we don’t know exactly what rituals were performed by the pre-Christian peoples of Britain and beyond to mark these moments.

What we do have is archaeological evidence of the significance of this time of year in the form of monuments – some of which date back to around 3000 BCE – sites such as Stonehenge in England, Newgrange and Knowth in Ireland, and Maeshowe in Orkney, Scotland. Each of these sites was built with an alignment to the solstice sun in some way. At Newgrange, Maeshowe and Knowth the midwinter sunrise illuminates the passageway leading into the main chamber of the mounds there, while at Stonehenge the stones are aligned to frame the sunrise at midsummer and the sunset at midwinter. English Heritage, which now looks after the site at Stonehenge, suggests that winter solstice might have been most important to the people who built and worshipped at Stonehenge, as recent excavations reveal that huge feasts were held during those periods.

Even more remarkable is that this is not only a Celtic phenomenon. Several years ago, I was lucky enough to visit the Abu Simbel in Nubian Egypt, near the border with Sudan. This temple complex was built in the thirteenth century BCE by Rameses the Great and is accessible only by travelling a long distance into the desert. Rameses had it built at this far corner of his empire to make a bold statement about his conquest of the Nubian people at the battle of Kadesh, but also as a monument to his wife, Nefertari, who herself was Nubian.

There are two temples at Abu Simbel, the smaller of which is dedicated to the goddess Hathor, the patron deity of mothers, and to Nefertari and her children with Rameses. The larger of the two temples is dedicated to the sun god, Ra-Horakhty – a conflation of Ra and Horus – and to the pharaoh, Rameses.

The morning I visited, we had to set out from the Nubian city of Aswan before dawn had opened its eye to ensure we got to the temple complex before it got too hot and busy. Driving for hours through the desert in convoy for safety was a surreal experience (it’s not only in movies that empty desert spaces become a haven for outlaws). The landscape rarely changes – just flat dusty ground to the horizon – until you reach the colossal temples themselves, which seem to rise out of the desert sand. What’s so special about them, and the reason for me mentioning them here, is that the temple to Ra-Horakhty also has a small entranceway at the front, just like Maeshowe and Newgrange, sitting between the feet of four immense statues of Rameses. At sunrise on the winter solstice, the sun shines through this doorway, down a corridor lined with more statues, and lights up the holy shrine at the centre of the temple.

Elsewhere in time and space, our ancestors had other ways of celebrating the midwinter point. In ancient Rome, Sol Invictus (‘Unconquered Sun’) was marked on 25 December to celebrate the victory of the sun god Sol. This was followed by Saturnalia, another of the Roman midwinter festivals. Celebrated between 17 and 23 December, Saturnalia – despite being in praise of the god Saturn, who was not known for his cheery aspects – was famed for its light-hearted atmosphere, with all of the social norms of Roman society overturned. Public banquets were held, gifts were given, gambling was permitted, and it was a time of liberty for free people and slaves alike. One of the traditions was for masters to provide table service for their household staff, with a King of Saturnalia elected to organise the general games and jokes. Some of these customs were thought to have influenced the later development of Christmas traditions in western Europe, with the King of Saturnalia echoed in a ‘Lord of Misrule’ chosen to watch over the Christmas celebrations, which started to die away in Europe only with the rise of puritanism in the seventeenth century.

Other earlier traditions also made their way into the celebrations we still know and love today. In the pre-Christian eras, the Celtic Druids would sacrifice a white bull and decorate their spaces with mistletoe, until the early Church put a stop to this. While the bull might have faded into history, mistletoe did not. In the UK it is still traditional to kiss under the mistletoe, and in Sicily, ‘Mistletoe is given as a gift to family and friends,’ my Sicilian friend Angela tells me. ‘It is hung behind the door to the house to ward off evil spirits and bring good luck in the new year. The old one is usually burned between Christmas and New Year.’

TRY THIS: DECORATING FOR MIDWINTER

In the pagan faiths, we do not have temples or religious houses in the way of most religions. We instead create our own sacred space in our everyday lives and in our homes. We begin by cleaning – sweeping away all the dust (metaphorical and literal) – and then cleansing the space, either by sprinkling a mixture of consecrated salt and water, or by burning incense. We also take a salt bath or shower prior to any ritual. According to the grimoires, or old books of magic, salt is an energy cleanser.