Three Things to Share This Holiday Season


I wrote these some years back, but they are worth posting again. 'Tis the season! And blessings of the season to you all!

http://margiemcarthur.blogspot.com/2010/12/it-all-comes-down-to-mother-and-her.html

http://margiemcarthur.blogspot.com/2010/12/midwinter-night-wheel-of-year-has.html



And here is a vision journey with which to tap in to this season wherein the Dark Mother births the Light.

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The Chapel in the Clearing and the Blessings of the Light

To begin: Place a candle in the center of your working space and light it in honor of the One Divine Source from which all life and being emanates.

Vision Journey —
Take a slow deep breath, then exhale, and relax. Be still for a moment, and feel your body as you sit upon the couch, chair or floor. Take another deep breath…and let it out. And another. And with each one, you feel yourself relaxing more and more.

As you gaze at the candle flame in the center of the room, you feel your own, inner flame, the spark of  divinity within you, awaken in response. Close your eyes now and see the candle flame with your inner vision, and watch as it grows in size, strength, and brightness. Take another slow deep breath, and as you exhale you watch the flame growing...and feel your inner flame growing stronger and brighter as well, and your awareness increasing along with it.

With your inner vision, you watch as the candle flame increases in size till it becomes a wall of flame, a curtain of flame.

You step through the curtain of flame and find yourself to be in a very different kind of place. You are standing at the edge of a woods, looking into a clearing, in the midst of which sits a small stone building. It is a cold wintery night, and overhead the stars shine brightly in the deep blue sky. The tiny crescent of the waning moon is setting in the west, but the stars are bright and provide illumination.

You walk towards the stone building, and as you get closer you can see it is a chapel of some sort, with three wooden stairs that lead up to a porch and a wooden door. You spend a few moments looking at the carvings on the wooden door (pause), then climb the stairs, push the door open, and enter the chapel.

To your surprise, the chapel is roofless and the starlight gleams down, giving a dim illumination to the interior. You see a cobbled stone floor, a few wall decorations, some wooden benches, and at the front of the chapel, a stone altar. On the altar is a beautiful golden cup.

You walk up to the altar and go around it to the other side, so that you are facing the body of the chapel and the door through which you just entered. You feel pulled to place your hands down upon the stone altar and do so, allowing your awareness sink within the stone......

Suddenly you become aware that the chapel, which had looked empty and deserted, is actually full. You hear the rustle of a great crowd of beings. You cannot see them, but you can sense them. You sense animal spirits, plant spirits, tree spirits. You sense humans, faeries, elves. There is a sense of expectancy and subdued excitement in the room, and yet a feeling of reverence as well.

Then your eyes are drawn upward to the sky above the chapel. The great cobalt dome of sky sparkles with stars. But your attention is pulled behind the stars, to the vast sea of space itself, and within that great sea of space you sense a vast presence, and a consciousness almost beyond human comprehension. You feel tiny by comparison. Yet despite the vastness of this consciousness and your relative tinyness, you feel it’s attention and caring... as it gazes at you with its thousands of eyes. 

You look now at the stars, and notice that two of them seem particularly bright...brighter than the rest, and that these two seem to be moving slowly and majestically across the sky to a place where their paths will intersect. You watch as this happens....and as they come into conjunction, their lights blend together, forming one huge bright light, one enormous star. Beams of light begin to pour forth from this huge star, streaming downward toward the earth, and as you watch this, you hear music — a kind of wordless singing of many voices, in beautiful harmony.......

On instinct you place your hands on the golden cup that is sitting in the center of the stone altar. As you sense all the unseen faces in the chapel turning skyward, you lift the golden cup to the sky. The beams of light pouring down from the large star flow into the cup, filling it with a light both silver and golden, a light that fills the cup to the brim, and then overflows. The beams of light from the sky flow onto your head and into your body, as well. They splash onto your shoulders, run down back and front, run down your arms and onto your hands. The light is infusing your body, and you know it is infusing all the other beings in the chapel, as well.

And everywhere on and in you this light reaches, you feel warmed, cleansed, blessed, and healed. You spend a few moments allowing yourself to fully experience and absorb this……

After a while, the outpouring of light from the huge star slows….and it’s brilliance returns to normal. You lower the cup down to the altar, and as you do so, you become aware of the presence of a great and powerful being just behind you. The being steps up and places its hands upon your shoulders, and as this happens you feel a great powerful blessing pour through you, and into the contents of the cup...... Lifting the cup, you take a sip, then extend your arms outward and offer the cup to the unseen beings in the chapel. You hear a great rustle of movement as they all come forward. And as each comes forward to drink from the cup, you find that you can see them as they take their sip. As they take their sip, each one looks at you, and you look upon them — faeries, elves, plant spirits, animal spirits, nature spirits, and even some human spirits — and you feel the bond of joyful kinship that unites you with these other creatures of the earth.

When this is done you place the cup down upon the altar. You stretch your arms out again, and feel the power of blessing flow forth from you, and out into the world….You sense that the spirits in the chapel, who have also partaken of the starry nectar, are doing likewise. You feel the power of blessing streaming out of you and out of the other beings, out of the chapel and into the world, to places and beings who are suffering — in pain of mind or body. The blessings — of peace, of comfort, of joy — stream forth for a long time…..... till finally, it feels complete, and you slowly lower your arms.... 

A moment of silence follows....and then you feel the great presence behind you slowly withdraw its energy from you...... After another moment, you again hear a rustle of movement, as the spirits arise and depart from the chapel.

Finally you are alone in the chapel....all is silent and still. You look at the cup, and see that, despite all who have drunk from its contents, it is still brimming and overflowing with silvery golden light. In fact, this light continues to spill over the top, flowing down onto the altar, and to the stone floor of the chapel. It soaks into the stones of both altar and floor, and it flows in tiny gleaming rivulets out the wooden door and down the wooden stairs, where it soaks into the earth. And you are aware that it is infusing with blessing, cleansing and healing all that it touches......

You feel now that it is time to leave this place. You walk around the altar, through the chapel, and step over the threshold, out into the night, closing the wooden door behind you. You walk down the wooden steps and out into the clearing. After a few more steps you pause, looking upward again at the sky, and feeling the vast consciousness there.... The bright star still gleams above you; the other stars twinkle brightly in the dark sky. As you gaze upon them, your vision shifts, and you see that the stars outline the form of a woman swaddled in a long hooded cloak. Her womb is glowing, and she holds a child in her arms..... As you perceive this image, you feel her presence and her motherly love......

Then your vision shifts again, and although you still feel her presence, you see only a starlit sky. You begin walking across the clearing, and just past tree line, you see a fire burning in the distance...You walk toward the fire, and find that each step you take brings you more and more into your normal waking awareness. You reach the fire, step through the flames, and find that you have come back to this time and this place, into a room where a candle flickers and glows, brightening the darkened room.....You are back….and when you feel ready you may open your eyes.

It all comes down to the Mother and her Child



The story is told over and over around the world in various ways, but it always comes back to the Mother and her Child. Even in Christian mythos the reference is to "round yon virgin, mother and child."

Who is this Christ Child born of the Virgin Mother—Mary—at the winter solstice, the time of the year’s longest night? It is Child of Promise: Light born from the Darkness, Manifestation born from the Unmanifest, Life born from the Void—the Void which is not empty, but rather, full of potentialities. This child is the light of renewed life, who is born into the death and darkness of winter.

And who is the Mother who gives birth to the child? She is the Mare (pronounced: mah-ray, or mah-ree), Mari, the dark and vast bitter sea of space—the Virgin Mother Void from which all things are born. The correlate on earth is the ancient sea (from the Latin mare) from which all life came forth—life-forms as numerous as the stars in the sky or the grains of salt in the that same primordial sea.

Solstice Eve—the night before the Solstice (this year December 20th)—is Mother Night, so called in the old Germanic Traditions where the Goddess Holda was honored. This is the night we celebrate HER—First Mother, the Great Mother of all manifest life. This is the time of her confinement; the time when she labors to give birth to the Light, the light which will enable life. From the watery womb of darkness is born the fiery spark of light.

On this night we reconnect with the eternal truth of beginnings—of light emerging from darkness, of spirit taking on substance, of life birthed into being. And on this Solstice Eve night we honor First Mother, as we remember how she gave birth to light, and thus to the universe, and all that is.

Sometime on December 21nd (depending on your local time) will come the moment of solstice—of the sun seeming to stand still—that three day pause before movement seemingly begins again on Christmas Day, when the Child of Light and Promise has fully emerged and the cycle of life starts anew. And so we celebrate the fact that now is Horus is born from Isis, Adonis from Myrrha, Mithras from Anahita the Immaculate One, and Christ Jesus from the Virgin Mary.

In a way, each of us is this Child of Light, the Child of Promise—Jesus, Adonis, Mithras, Horus. Each of us is light born from our precious Dark Mother. The spark of life and light of mind and intelligence are our heritage—within each of us to use as we will—because we are all sparks from that first Divine Flame and therefore, we, too, are Divinity as it manifests on this plane of matter/mother, our Mother Earth.

When the Christmas carol says, Veiled in flesh the godhead see, hail the incarnate deity, it is really speaking not just of Jesus, the Christ Child, but of us all—the divine concealed in a robe of substance; spirit contracted down from its expanded and rarified state into a more dense, material one. Every winter solstice brings us a fresh realization of this truth, and a fresh opportunity to reconnect with our own divine source and self.

It came upon a midnight clear...... This time of the year relates to midnight because it is truly the darkest hour of the year. Darkness precedes and gives birth to the light.

How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given…... The wondrous gift of life birthed from First Mother begins in the silent darkness.

We hear the Christmas Angels, the great glad tidings tell…... As light emerges so does sound. And so the voice of the Divine speaks in the form of Angels—the beings traditionally said to be messengers of the Divine—as they proclaim this sacred, auspicious beginning, this holy birth.

The Mother Mary is the ma-re, the matrix, the bitter sea (known in the Qabala as Binah) from which all creation (matter) arises. Mary births the light.... Maria (the dark and bitter sea), births the Christos (the anointed one), who is Light Incarnate—spirit in substance.

I realize that this might sound like it’s all “past tense.” As if it may have happened years ago and is now complete. But please realize that it is an ongoing process, because creation is an ongoing process that expresses itself continuously through the cycles of conception, gestation, birth, growth, decay, death, and rebirth. And the circling Cycle of the Seasons reminds us of this, expressing this eternal truth, over and over as the earth makes its yearly journey around the sun.

The solstice-born Child of Light is the reborn sun that will increase and grow throughout the waxing part of the year. But this Child, whose birth is commemorated in story and song, also represents the Light—born of the Galactic Mother—as shone through the lens of the current Astrological Age, which is the sign of the zodiac in which the sun rises on the morning of the spring equinox.

Thus, for the last 2000 years, the Holy Solstice Child has been the Piscean Avatar, who promised to make his disciples "Fishers of Men."

We have heard over and over that we are living in the time of the changing of the Age from the sign of Pisces to that of Aquarius. These Ages are like months of the Great Year - the 26,000 year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes, so we are going from the 'month' of Pisces into the 'month' of Aquarius. Each of these months has different energies and themes, and these are then played out and made manifest in the ongoing creation and evolution of our planetary lifestream.

The time of transition between Ages is traditionally one of confusion and chaos, as old beliefs, ways of being, patterns, and structures break down from their own dead weight to make way for the "new" that is coming through. And yet, hints and whispers of the new are often heard and felt too, although these are still in embryonic form. These transition times can be very schizophrenic, as we struggle through them, wondering which 'reality' is the real one!

And this is where we are right now, at this point in time. We are at a point very similar to that of Midwinter Solstice: already part way through the cycle of breakdown and dissolution. We are at a point where the darkness is deepest, the dissolution most severe, and the wintery, cold, watery Tide of Cleansing is sweeping things away, often in a quite terrifying way. And yet, we are also at the point where the new energies, and hints of the new patterns can be sensed, can be felt...just enough to give us the hope to hang on.

We are truly living through hard times; time when one age is dissolving and the next one is not yet fully formed. But we must live in faith that it will be formed, that we will survive, and we must contribute our good will and efforts to its formation and eventual healthy birth.

But getting through that dark time! We are helped in this task by the fact that each year as the winter solstice comes around it brings us increasing infusions of the energies of the age to come, if we can but feel their tantalizing hints in the surrounding darkness.

This coming Change of the Ages is also marked in the Mayan calendar, whose end date of December 21, 2012 is rapidly approaching. The Mayan lore says the world ends on that day, meaning that one world (or Age) ends and the next begins. But really, this 'end of the world' day is more than just one 24 hour day. This end date is affixed to a celestial event that takes several years to complete, so this energy of transition (so similar to that of the human birth process, as every mother knows) will be with us for several years to come.

The celestial event to which the Mayan legends refer is the fact that the winter solstice sunrise of Dec 21, 2012, will be exactly aligned with the dark rift of the Milky Way. This rift points directly into the galactic center, and is linked in many cosmologies with the Great Mother Goddess who births the cosmos. Poetically speaking, the visual imagery suggests the dark rift to be the birth canal of the Great Mother, from which energies from the galactic center (her womb) periodically emerge, bearing the embryonic energies and new patterns of the era which is to come.

This alignment also conjuncts the Mayan stellar configuration of the Sacred Tree, which is the spot where the ecliptic crosses the Milky Way, So one might say that the Sacred Tree of Life will be reborn or regenerated by the new energies birthed by the Great Mother. What responsibility, yet what joy, to be living during these intense times!

And with this we are brought back again to the darkness that is Mother Night, as we await with joy, this Winter Solstice Eve, the birth of the Divine Child of Light—within our planetary cycle, and within our own hearts, minds, and souls.

So, indeed, the wondrous gift is given: the Divine Light, reborn of the Dark Mother.

Yes, it really all does all come down to the Mother and her Child....

© Margie McArthur, 2004; All rights reserved.

Midwinter Night


The Wheel of the Year has turned once again and we find ourselves nearing the Midwinter Festival of Light, one which has been celebrated in many mythologies and under many names for eons.

At this time in the Northern Hemisphere, the light of the sun is reborn and the days begin to grow longer, waxing toward spring. Very frequently midwinter is celebrated as the birthday of the Sun God; always, it marks a time of renewal. It is a time of light in the midst of darkness, warmth of spirit and heart to counter the cold of the weather and a harsh world.

In actuality, the story of the birth of the Sun God, the Divine Child of Light, is illustrated in the stars of the winter sky. The hours of darkness have gradually increased since the Autumnal Equinox as the longest and darkest night of year, the Midwinter Solstice, approaches. The actual moment of Solstice marks the time when the Sun moves from the sign of Sagittarius into that of Capricorn. The Divine Child of Light is born in the dark cave of the vast sky’s darkest region at the darkest hour of the year.

At midnight on Midwinter Night, the constellation of Virgo, holding her sheaf of wheat, rises in the eastern sky. And so the Virgin gives birth to the Child of Light in the very depths of the darkness. His light, the newborn sun, will rise at dawn.

The newborn Light will bring growth and abundance—and therefore, life. So it’s not surprising to find that, in the Christian tradition, the Child is born from the House of Bread—Bethlehem’s literal meaning—who is the Virgin holding the grain. He is laid in a manger—the small glowing starry cloud of Praesaepe, or Manger/Crib, in the constellation of Cancer. He is surrounded by ox and ass—in the constellation of Taurus and the star group Aselli, the Asses, in the constellation of Cancer, one on each side of his Manger.

The three wise men—Magi, who were astrologers but are sometimes referred to as kings—come seeking him, this New Light whose birth they have seen in the stars. They have followed his star, they say, which rose in the east. The three stars that form the belt of Orion, which rises in the southeast on Midwinter Night, are called the Three Kings. Was it nearby Sirius, brightest of the stars and associated by the Egyptians with Isis, whose light they followed? Or perhaps the special planetary conjunction of bright Venus and giant Jupiter near Regulus in Leo (the planet of the King in the sign of the King) that lit up the night sky in the months just before midwinter?

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.” (Luke 2:8)

Angels sing to herald this birth, bending low to the earth from their homes in the high heavens. Angel means “messenger,” and stars were looked upon as messengers of the divine.

“And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:9-11)

The song of the starry angels streamed through the heavens, pouring forth to the shepherds the message of the new birth and its accompanying flow of spiritual energies that would usher in a new era of light, love, growth, and spiritual abundance, and “peace to men of goodwill.”

In Sagittarius, not far from the place of the birth, we find the constellation of Lyra the Lyre, or Harp; perhaps it was the “harp of gold” played by the angels as they sang. The constellation of Bootes, near Virgo, is known as the shepherd or herdsman; while the across the sky in the sign of Cancer, the constellation of Auriga the Charioteer, pictured as holding a goat over his shoulder, is sometimes known as the shepherd’s crook.

And so the sky tells the story of the birth of the Holy Child of Light. At Midwinter, this Light is born again, and will shine forth—bringing light, warmth, joy, and abundance to all the world.

This time of the year is a time of sharing, love, and good cheer. May you all experience these holiday delights of the spirit— gifts which far surpass any material ones you might receive.

© Margie McArthur, 2005-2010; All rights reserved.

It all comes down to the Mother and her Child



The story is told over and over around the world in various ways, but it always comes back to the Mother and her Child. Even in Christian mythos the reference is to "round yon virgin, mother and child."

Who is this Christ Child born of the Virgin Mother—Mary—at the winter solstice, the time of the year’s longest night? It is Child of Promise: Light born from the Darkness, Manifestation born from the Unmanifest, Life born from the Void—the Void which is not empty, but rather, full of potentialities. This child is the light of renewed life, who is born into the death and darkness of winter.

And who is the Mother who gives birth to the child? She is the Mare (pronounced: mah-ray, or mah-ree), Mari, the dark and vast bitter sea of space—the Virgin Mother Void from which all things are born. The correlate on earth is the ancient sea (from the Latin mare) from which all life came forth—life-forms as numerous as the stars in the sky or the grains of salt in the that same primordial sea.

Solstice Eve—the night before the Solstice (this year December 20th)—is Mother Night, so called in the old Germanic Traditions where the Goddess Holda was honored. This is the night we celebrate HER—First Mother, the Great Mother of all manifest life. This is the time of her confinement; the time when she labors to give birth to the Light, the light which will enable life. From the watery womb of darkness is born the fiery spark of light.

On this night we reconnect with the eternal truth of beginnings—of light emerging from darkness, of spirit taking on substance, of life birthed into being. And on this Solstice Eve night we honor First Mother, as we remember how she gave birth to light, and thus to the universe, and all that is.

Sometime on December 21nd (depending on your local time) will come the moment of solstice—of the sun seeming to stand still—that three day pause before movement seemingly begins again on Christmas Day, when the Child of Light and Promise has fully emerged and the cycle of life starts anew. And so we celebrate the fact that now is Horus is born from Isis, Adonis from Myrrha, Mithras from Anahita the Immaculate One, and Christ Jesus from the Virgin Mary.

In a way, each of us is this Child of Light, the Child of Promise—Jesus, Adonis, Mithras, Horus. Each of us is light born from our precious Dark Mother. The spark of life and light of mind and intelligence are our heritage—within each of us to use as we will—because we are all sparks from that first Divine Flame and therefore, we, too, are Divinity as it manifests on this plane of matter/mother, our Mother Earth.

When the Christmas carol says, Veiled in flesh the godhead see, hail the incarnate deity, it is really speaking not just of Jesus, the Christ Child, but of us all—the divine concealed in a robe of substance; spirit contracted down from its expanded and rarified state into a more dense, material one. Every winter solstice brings us a fresh realization of this truth, and a fresh opportunity to reconnect with our own divine source and self.

It came upon a midnight clear...... This time of the year relates to midnight because it is truly the darkest hour of the year. Darkness precedes and gives birth to the light.

How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given…... The wondrous gift of life birthed from First Mother begins in the silent darkness.

We hear the Christmas Angels, the great glad tidings tell…... As light emerges so does sound. And so the voice of the Divine speaks in the form of Angels—the beings traditionally said to be messengers of the Divine—as they proclaim this sacred, auspicious beginning, this holy birth.

The Mother Mary is the ma-re, the matrix, the bitter sea (known in the Qabala as Binah) from which all creation (matter) arises. Mary births the light.... Maria (the dark and bitter sea), births the Christos (the anointed one), who is Light Incarnate—spirit in substance.

I realize that this might sound like it’s all “past tense.” As if it may have happened years ago and is now complete. But please realize that it is an ongoing process, because creation is an ongoing process that expresses itself continuously through the cycles of conception, gestation, birth, growth, decay, death, and rebirth. And the circling Cycle of the Seasons reminds us of this, expressing this eternal truth, over and over as the earth makes its yearly journey around the sun.

The solstice-born Child of Light is the reborn sun that will increase and grow throughout the waxing part of the year. But this Child, whose birth is commemorated in story and song, also represents the Light—born of the Galactic Mother—as shone through the lens of the current Astrological Age, which is the sign of the zodiac in which the sun rises on the morning of the spring equinox.

Thus, for the last 2000 years, the Holy Solstice Child has been the Piscean Avatar, who promised to make his disciples "Fishers of Men."

We have heard over and over that we are living in the time of the changing of the Age from the sign of Pisces to that of Aquarius. These Ages are like months of the Great Year - the 26,000 year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes, so we are going from the 'month' of Pisces into the 'month' of Aquarius. Each of these months has different energies and themes, and these are then played out and made manifest in the ongoing creation and evolution of our planetary lifestream.

The time of transition between Ages is traditionally one of confusion and chaos, as old beliefs, ways of being, patterns, and structures break down from their own dead weight to make way for the "new" that is coming through. And yet, hints and whispers of the new are often heard and felt too, although these are still in embryonic form. These transition times can be very schizophrenic, as we struggle through them, wondering which 'reality' is the real one!

And this is where we are right now, at this point in time. We are at a point very similar to that of Midwinter Solstice: already part way through the cycle of breakdown and dissolution. We are at a point where the darkness is deepest, the dissolution most severe, and the wintery, cold, watery Tide of Cleansing is sweeping things away, often in a quite terrifying way. And yet, we are also at the point where the new energies, and hints of the new patterns can be sensed, can be felt...just enough to give us the hope to hang on.

We are truly living through hard times; time when one age is dissolving and the next one is not yet fully formed. But we must live in faith that it will be formed, that we will survive, and we must contribute our good will and efforts to its formation and eventual healthy birth.

But getting through that dark time! We are helped in this task by the fact that each year as the winter solstice comes around it brings us increasing infusions of the energies of the age to come, if we can but feel their tantalizing hints in the surrounding darkness.

This coming Change of the Ages is also marked in the Mayan calendar, whose end date of December 21, 2012 is rapidly approaching. The Mayan lore says the world ends on that day, meaning that one world (or Age) ends and the next begins. But really, this 'end of the world' day is more than just one 24 hour day. This end date is affixed to a celestial event that takes several years to complete, so this energy of transition (so similar to that of the human birth process, as every mother knows) will be with us for several years to come.

The celestial event to which the Mayan legends refer is the fact that the winter solstice sunrise of Dec 21, 2012, will be exactly aligned with the dark rift of the Milky Way. This rift points directly into the galactic center, and is linked in many cosmologies with the Great Mother Goddess who births the cosmos. Poetically speaking, the visual imagery suggests the dark rift to be the birth canal of the Great Mother, from which energies from the galactic center (her womb) periodically emerge, bearing the embryonic energies and new patterns of the era which is to come.

This alignment also conjuncts the Mayan stellar configuration of the Sacred Tree, which is the spot where the ecliptic crosses the Milky Way, So one might say that the Sacred Tree of Life will be reborn or regenerated by the new energies birthed by the Great Mother. What responsibility, yet what joy, to be living during these intense times!

And with this we are brought back again to the darkness that is Mother Night, as we await with joy, this Winter Solstice Eve, the birth of the Divine Child of Light—within our planetary cycle, and within our own hearts, minds, and souls.

So, indeed, the wondrous gift is given: the Divine Light, reborn of the Dark Mother.

Yes, it really all does all come down to the Mother and her Child....

© Margie McArthur, 2004; All rights reserved.

On the 12th Day of Christmas, I Have Some Things to Say....

Christmas Day is past, but this is something that’s been on my mind for a while, and I wanted to address it before the end of the holiday season.

I’m sure you all remember the big flap the last few years about Happy Holidays versus Merry Christmas. This was largely just more invented “persecution drama” from the Christian Right, and it’s a shame that many businesses seem to have cowtowed to it this year by ordering their employees to wish customers a Merry Christmas rather than Happy Holidays.

Last Christmas season I received an email espousing the “Say Merry Christmas!” thing from someone who, as an esoteric practitioner, should have known better. Of course I wrote back to her, educating on her on the pagan antecedents of Christmas and the lore of some of the sun gods (Dionysius, Mithras, and Horus, for starters) who’d preceded Jesus. Her response was to take me off her mailing list.

This Christmas season there was an article in our local newspaper that tried to assert that the dating of Christmas had nothing to do with the winter solstice. The article’s author, relying on the writings of a prolific Christian writer, offered up another theory. He said that Christmas had been assigned the date of December 25th by the early church because of an ancient Hebrew tradition (not found in the Bible) that held that a prophet always passed away on the anniversary of his conception date, so it would follow that his birth date would be nine months later.

Unstated, but implicit in this theory, is the assumption that the March 25th Catholic feast of the Annunciation actually marks the date of Jesus’s conception — a bit of self-serving circular logic, methinks.

It occurred to me that perhaps there was a need for more information on this topic, particularly at this time of year, so to that end, I offer the following—in the spirit of the season, of course!


The Reason for the Season
Our modern dating of Christmas to December 25th does indeed have a pagan origin. It is, of course, related to the winter solstice, and long before Christianity, the winter solstice was celebrated in various ways by various pagan cultures in the Old World.

Insofar as the December 25th nativity of Jesus being dated to a nine months previous conception date of March 25th, there is no date actually recorded in the Bible or in oral tradition for the visit of the Angel Gabriel which announced the conception of Jesus. But in ancient Rome the new year began in March, and the spring equinox time of March 22-21st was celebrated as the start of the new year by most of Europe until the calendar change of 1752.

It seems fitting that the beginning of the new year would be chosen by the church as the time of conception of the major (sun) god-form of the new era, especially since this time marks the beginning of an obvious increase in the sun’s powers of warmth and light, which result in obvious signs (i.e growth of vegetation, birth of baby animals) of a new cycle of life in progress.

Christian tradition records the Church became headquartered in Rome early in its history, perhaps beginning with St. Peter’s residence there in the middle of the first century. Rome celebrated the seven day pagan feast of Saturnalia approximately December 17th through the 23rd. One may assume that the early Roman Christians were not uninfluenced by the celebrations all around them, especially since they had previously been pagan themselves.

Saturnalia was held in honor of the Roman god Saturn—a god of agriculture—and his wife, Ops—a goddess of fertility and agriculture. Her very name means abundance, plenty, opulence. Saturnalia was a joyful celebration; a time to eat, drink, and be merry. Schools and courts were closed, and entertainment was paramount. Decorations were put up. Gifts were exchanged. It was a time when social roles were reversed, and the master served the slave. It was a time of offerings to Saturn and Ops, and great banquets were held to celebrate their gift of abundance. It was an observance of both the harvest and the winter solstice, and was considered a return to the mythic Golden Age, a time when humanity was thought to have lived in a utopian state.

Saturnalia began as a one day feast, but its popularity caused it to finally encompass seven days of celebration, although through the years various emperors made attempts to trim it back to size. In 46 AD the date for Saturnalia was officially set at December 25th. That year was most likely before St Peter even came to Rome, so when he did arrive, he would have found, already in place at the winter solstice, a joyful celebration of light and bounty.

Also influential on the dating of Christmas was the December 25th Persian feast of Sol Invictis—the unconquered sun—which marked the birthday of the god Mithras. This feast was brought to Rome by Roman soldiers who’d encountered it in Persia. Mithraism was an extremely popular religion in the Roman empire and very influential on the early shaping of emerging Christianity and its doctrines.

Actually, some of the significance and customs of Saturnalia may have derived from these earlier solstice observances in Persia, and also those from Egypt, where not only was the rebirth of the sun celebrated, but decorations of greenery were used to symbolize the return of light and life. In Egypt there was a 12 day celebration, in honor of the 12 divisions/months of the solar year. It was considered a time when the sun god Ra was recovering from illness–that the spirit of life was returning was shown by the increasing day length. Later, when Horus became known as the sun god, his birthday was observed on the winter solstice. Some stories say that Horus, like Mithras and Jesus, was born of a virgin, in this case Isis.

Christian revisionist histories notwithstanding, to say that the newly emerging Middle-East-birthed and Mediterranean-based religion of Christianity was unaffected by any of these previous beliefs and observances defies logic. Indeed, a much more sensible and realistic scenario would be that the church, when it finally decided—in the fourth century—to commemorate the birth of Jesus, chose the winter solstice in order to coincide with these pre-existing and popular feasts, casting Jesus in the old pagan role of the Sun God/Son of God in the hope that the worship offered to these old gods on that date would be transferred to him.
So! Let us immerse ourselves in the joyful celebration of the Light’s return at this time of year, whether we celebrate Mithras, son of Anahita; Horus, son of Isis; or that late-comer, Jesus, son of Mary!

Blessings of the Returning Light to You All!