The Winter Solstice Birthday by Isis Andersen

Bring to us the Child of Promise.
Bring to us the Lord of Light.
Bring to us the Sun reborn
To banish the powers of darkest night.
- Isis Andersen

Coming Forth by Day

The forepaw of a lion, the forearm of a man, the primal ray of sun.
I wake in the dark to the stirring of birds,
a murmur in the trees, a flutter of wings.
It is the morning of my birth, the first of many.
The past lies knotted in its sheets asleep.
Winds blow, flags above the temple ripple.
Out of the darkness the earth spins toward light.
I feel a change coming.
My thoughts flicker, glow a moment, and catch fire.
I come forth by day singing.

Blessed are the cattle asleep in the fields.
They shake their horns, tearing the dream.
Blessed are the bulls waking, their first thoughts of creation.
This day I make myself anew.
I create life; my flesh coils about me foot to head.
My breath rushes through and my blood.
The mind sparkles, dances, the world whirls beneath the sun.
I am given to know things I knew not yesterday....
- Awakening Osiris
(The Egyptian Book of the Dead)
translated by Normandi Ellis

'Whatever is born or done at this moment of time,
has the qualities of this moment of time.'
-Carl Jung

From an archetypal and astrological perspective we are like the moment of our birth. All born in a given moment share the qualities of that moment. The miraculous, magical moment of the Winter Solstice, the longest, darkest night of the year, is a profoundly serious and powerful turning point in the Wheel of the Year. It represents both the end and the origin, the root and beginning of all things. In the cycle of the solar year it is the time of the death of the old sun and the birth of the new.

For the ancient Egyptians it is one of the times that commemorates the time of emergence recalling that time which they called the 'first time', the time before time when the ageless age of the Gods began. This is when the sun God Atum-Ra first stirred in the primordial sea of Nun and existence was born from apparent non-existence.

For the ancient Pagan world and for the Christian West the time of the Winter Solstice was the time of the birth of Gods. It is now that the dark womb of the Great Mother gives birth to the sacred Sun/Son and the whole world is born again with the birth of this Child of Promise. The solar Child was hailed as a savior, a hero, a child of wonder. He was Horus of the Egyptians, Apollo of the Greeks, Mithras of the Persians and Romans, Mabon of the Celts and even Jesus of the Christians; his birth held forth the promise of life, light and hope that spring would come again.

Isis and her son Horus were the most the most widely worshipped Divine Mother and Son in the ancient world, until the world became Christian under the Emperor Constantine. After the murder of her beloved husband Osiris, the God-King, at the hands of his evil brother Set, Isis fled and took refuge in the papyrus swamps of the Delta in northern Egypt. It was here that she gave birth to her son Horus on the day of the Winter Solstice after enduring a long and difficult labor. Because of her own travails in childbirth and the banishment she endured, and also because of the difficulty of raising and protecting her son from the evil One, she became the patroness of women about to give birth and the protectress of children. Horus was the Egyptian Savior God who later defeated his evil Uncle Set in battle and in a successful legal action before the Gods regained the throne of Egypt. Because of this the curse that had followed Isis and Horus for so long was finally broken and as the rightful heir Horus was vindicated. Egypt was now free of the tyranny of Set and the divine order was restored by Horus. After this all the pharaohs of Egypt were considered to be manifestations of the 'living Horus' on the throne of Egypt.

Now in our time Druids, Wiccans and Neo-Pagans still celebrate the birth of the Child of promise. In the darkest depth of winter they do this as an affirmation of life. They call on the Child of Wonder by many names but all the traditions honor this sacred moment and recognize this time to be an awesome moment in the psychic life of humanity. This is a time of great psychic stress and the imprint of the seriousness of the season lingers and lives on in the deep mind of collective humanity. Anciently it was a time of life and death, for none knew who would live to see the coming spring. At this time of year the veil is thin and the gates between the worlds stand ajar. John Matthews says in his wonderful book 'The Winter Solstice' that: "At these times the coming and going of otherworldly beings, communications between the dead and the living, happen all the more easily...". He further states that: " Above all this was a time of celebration, of ritual acts designed to align the individual with the cosmos. Dances were devised to enact the movement of the seasons, the fertility of land and people. The masked dancers and shamans of the Bronze Age and the Neolithic people are still reflected in the masked "guisers," who tour the outlying villages of Britain and Ireland to this day; while the shamans, who descended a ladder or tent pole into the smoky fires of the ancestral world, recall a more familiar red-suited figure who descends our chimney every year at Midwinter."

Because of the psychic stress at the time of the Winter Solstice it is traditional at this time to divine the future and to look into the past. The method described here to see the past can also be adapted to "seeing" the future. In Pauline Campanelli's book: "Ancient Ways: Reclaiming Pagan Traditions" she states that the Winter Solstice "is a time to review the Wheel of the Year that has just completed itself; with an emphasis on the successes and goals achieved. It is time to look back through the many turnings of the Wheel, to look at the direction our life has gone in, and to bid a fond farewell to all the paths not taken-and to do so without regret. Finally, it is an appropriate time to look back over the years and even into previous lives." She then goes on to give a method of meditation that places one in a circle or sphere of light (white light) and places a mirror or black bowl of water in the west with indigo or purple candles on either side. She suggests holding in your left hand an amulet or object associated with the time period you are looking into. Before you do this she suggests praying to a higher spiritual source (according to your tradition) and also speaking with your own subconscious mind and saying that you want to see a previous life, but not experience the pain and fear associated with it. At this point one may begin to chant words like this as you gaze steadily into the reflection of your own eyes: 'This is not a mirror but the past I gaze into'. "Eventually the face in the mirror may not be your own; close your eyes and let the images from a previous time flood your mind....When the images fade sit quietly within the circle for a while, reviewing what you just experienced and commit it to memory before clearing the circle." She further states that the purpose of experiencing a past life is to know through personal experience that birth is not only a beginning and death not only an end, but that we are all a part of an eternal cycle of birth, death and rebirth.

Circles and cycles.. 'Great is the Mystery of the Circular Course'.. (from the Chair of the Sovereign) translated by John Matthews. "The early Celts understood the the cyclical spiraling nature of the Universe. Looking up into the skies, they watched the rhythmic rising and setting of the stars, sun and moon, and noticed their relationship to one another. They saw that as the sun rose, culminated and set, he traced an arc which expanded and then contracted throughout the year, appearing as a spiral tightly wound at Midwinter, rising higher in the sky as the heat of the sun increased and the days grew longer, until Midsummer, when the spiral once more began to rewind; like a flower opening its petals to rejoice in the day, then closing them as the hours of daylight decreased. The early peoples of Britain carved vivid representations of this spiral path over rocks and boulders, together with discs and crescents representing the sun and moon, and their interweaving paths. We know too that they built circles of stone to represent the circle of the stars, and aligned these and their passage graves, stones and dolmens with the rising and setting times of the sun and moon at particular times of the year. Many stone circles and carved stones acted as calendars, some predicted eclipses as well as the phases of the moon...". Standing stones and, other stones, are of great importance to the Celts. Oaths were made on stones called Troth stones...promises of all kinds...some would be binding for only a year and a day and others would create ties that would follow one from incarnation to incarnation. Troth stones are well known in England. These troth stones are often stones with holes in them. There is a troth stone at Weyland Smithy, on the northwestern side of the monument, according to a friend of mine.

At the Winter Solstice the Druids celebrate the festival of Alban Arthuan. The following is taken from the Festival of Alban Arthuan, of the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids. 'In every death is the seed of birth, and in the darkness of the longest night we await the dawn of the waxing year.' "At the Midwinter Solstice, around the 21st of December, the Sun enters the Cardinal Earth sign of Capricorn from the Mutable fire sign of Sagittarius, whose arrows point ever upward, aiming to the top of the Capricornian mountain, always seeking to move deeper into knowledge and wisdom and the understanding of all things. This is the festival of Alban Arthuan, Light of Arthur. Arthur the Sun King begins his return from Annwn, the child newborn as a weak flickering light that nevertheless holds all the promise of Midsummer in his grasp. Now the sun appears to stand still for a few days on his lowest arc over the horizon, as the spiral of his path is tightly wound. Capricorn is the sign of the mountain goat, whose dogged persistence achieves the slow, steady climb from mountain base, Midwinter, to pinnacle, Midsummer, and whose people born under this sign show the same steady perseverance towards their goals. At the celebration of Alban Arthuan we extinguish our lights and wait awhile in silence and darkness, in the stillness of time, before rekindling the light for a new sun, The Mabon. The phase of the moon is Complete Dark, but like the promise of Midsummer that is inherent within the dark, so here is the promise of the Full Moon, and of growth."

In Ireland at Brug Na Boine (also known as New Grange) there is a megalithic site, a sacred mound which is decorated with spirals and circles. These are symbols of the mysteries of eternal return, of death and rebirth. "Though thou goest thou comest again" as the Egyptian Book of the Dead says. Here since 3,000 B.C., the Winter Solstice sunrise has illuminated the Great Passage within the tomb bringing with it the promise of rebirth. Bones found at megalithic sites such as New Grange have been found to be painted with red ochre. This color symbolizes life, vitality and rebirth and is associated with the Great Mother Goddess Earth who is both the womb and the tomb. She is the Mother of the Wonder Child whose birth at this time is the promise of life and light and rebirth. It seems to me that the builders of this tomb were attempting to invoke their own rebirth by aligning the tomb so that the light of the rising sun would illuminate their graves, thereby calling them back to life. As John Matthews states in his book 'The Sacred Traditions of Christmas': "The Winter Solstice has always been a time of celebration, whether it is the return of the sun, the promise of the evergreen boughs, or the birthday of the Midwinter King. This wondrous child, celebrated in so many ways and throughout such an extended period of time, has had many names, though he (and it seems always to be a male child) shares characteristics despite the different cultures and periods in which he has come into being. A surprising number of the gods of the ancient classical world shared nativity stories that would later influence the development of the story of the birth of Jesus. Among those recorded are Tammuz (Mesopotamia), Attis (Asia Minor), Apollo and Dionysis (Greece), Mithras (Rome), and Baal (Palestine). All are Wonder Children, born under extraordinary circumstances and conditions, at or near to the time of the Winter Solstice.

It was a belief from classical times well into the Middle Ages that human souls entered and exited this life through the gates of the solstices. Quoting from the commentary on The Dream of Scipio, the medieval scholiast Macrobius says the following: "The Milky Way girdles the zodiac, its great circle meeting it obliquely so that it crosses it at the two tropical signs, Capricorn and Cancer. Natural philosophers named these "the portals of the sun" because the solstices lie athwart the sun's path on either side. Souls are believed to pass through these portals when going from the sky to the earth and returning from the earth to the sky. For this reason one is called the portal of men and one the portal of gods. Cancer the portal of men, because through it descent is made to the infernal regions; Capricorn the portal of gods, because through it souls return to their rightful abode of immortality, to be reckoned among the gods."

As John Matthews says: "Capricorn, then, the time of the Winter Solstice, admits the soul into life and then allows it to return to its former god-like state. This was also the time when the gods became incarnate as mortals, and they too are said to have journeyed through the solstitial gates."

We have come far since the days of old when our ancestors looked to the heavens for answers that would show them the way to move forward and yet we too must live in accord with the changing seasons, the waxing and waning of the solar cycle. We are not so far from them in time and our spiritual journey is ever the same. The old pathways and the old gates are with us now and the memories echo down the ages calling us to journey, to come close to the Gods again, and to feel the healing light of the reborn sun.

John Matthews notes: "At the solstice tide the gods were close, and the wheel of the year turned once more. Portents of new blessings were everywhere, and all around the word was whispered of the coming of new wonders. Somewhere on a dusty road, a group of wise travelers were in search of one such wonder - a child of light who held the future of the world in its hands."

Queen of the Moon, Queen of the Sun,
Queen of the Heavens, Queen of the Stars,
Queen of the Waters, Queen of the Earth,
Bring to us the Child of Promise!

It is the Great Mother who giveth birth to Him;
It is the Lord of Life who is born again;
Darkness and tears are set aside when the Sun shall come up early!
Golden Sun of hill and mountain,
Illumine the land, illumine the world,
Illumine the seas, illumine the rivers,
Sorrows be laid, joy to the world!
Blessed be the Great Goddess,
Without beginning, without ending,
Everlasting to eternity, Io Evo He! Blessed Be!"