This 2016 Sampler moved up a few days from its proper place in the chronological order because today is the the Winter Solstice - the longest day of the year.
Special treat alert: At the end of today’s posting is another essay with more information about the ancient roots of celebrating the Winter Solstice, taken from the 2016 liner notes.
Songlist
The Christians and the Pagans Darryl Purpose 3:07
Turning Towards the Morning The Short Sisters 4:31
Penny for the Plowboys Nowell Sing We Clear 4:51
The Spirit of the Word Brian Bedford with Artisan 3:00
Music notes
The Christians and the Pagans Modern paganism, or neo-paganism, is a relatively new religious movement, or perhaps more accurately, it is an umbrella term for many different spiritual beliefs. Adherents rely to varying degrees on historic, folkloric and ethnographic sources. The most well-known branch that aims to be seen as an organized religion is Wicca, which was developed in England in the first half of the 20th century.
Wicca's core beliefs, principles and practices are drawn from the teachings of founders Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente based upon their understanding of ancient beliefs and rites. But Wicca has no central guiding authority and therefore self-professed wiccans vary greatly in their practices.
Modern Druidry is another sect of organized paganism, focused on reenactment of ceremonies in Britain before its occupation by the Romans. There are other organized and semi-organized neo-pagan sects, but the majority of neopagans are people who are unaffiliated with any of them: They just choose to identify to varying degrees with world-views that are are rooted in ancient pantheism, duoism (two complementing or conflicting principles or deities), or animism (belief that God is manifested in all of Nature).
I suppose that I fit into that last category. I recognize that I have been shaped by my upbringing as a Catholic and by living in a Christian majority society, and I celebrate Christmas in that context, but I also consider observing the Winter Solstice as being the true core of the holiday season.
This song is by Connecticut singer-songwriter Dar Williams. I especially like the line in the song where Jane explains paganism to Timmy:
“We love trees; we love the snow;
The friends we have, the world we share.We find magic in your God:
We find magic everywhere.”
This recording is by Darryl Purpose and is from his 2002 album The Gift of the Magi.
Turning Towards the Morning The appropriateness this 1975 Gordon Bok song (lyrics here) for a Solstice music sampler is easiest to understand when you realize that a day is being in used as a metaphor for a year, and morning as a metaphor for the hope of better times in the coming Springtime. Bok wrote:
One of the things that provoked this song was a letter last November from a friend who had had a very difficult year and was looking for the courage to keep on plowing into it. Those times, you lift your eyes unto the hills, as they say, but the hills of Northern New England in November can be about as much comfort as a cold crowbar. You have to look ahead a bit, then, and realize that all the hills and trees and flowers will still be there come Spring, usually more permanent than your troubles. And if your courage occasionally fails, that's okay, too: nobody expects you to be as strong (or as old) as the land.
This rendition of the song comes from The Short Sisters’ 1991 album A Planet Dancing Slow. The Short Sisters aren't really sisters, and they say that they aren't particularly short. The trio was comprised of Kim Wallach, Kate Seeger (yes, from THAT family of Seegers) and Fay Baird. They met and began singing together in college and performed from 1979 to 2016.
Penny for the Plowboys This song is sung by the longstanding annual pre-Christmas performance group Nowell Sing We Clear founded in 1977. They continued with their anual pre-Christmas tours until the Covid pandemic (and have had a few reunion concerts since then.)
Three of the original members are still with the group – John Roberts, Tony Berrrand and Fred Breunig. The “new guy” is Andy Davis who began singing with them in 1986. At other times of the year the members are accompanying musicians for Morris dancing and they have their own solo professional recording and touring careers. They have many very fine albums and an essential book of traditional Christmas and midwinter carols and songs. This is from their 2013 album Bidding You Joy.
It was written by the long-time Essex-based folksinger Colin Cater in remembrance of the annual luck-visit performances by ploughboys and Molly dancers on Plough Monday. That is the Monday after the Epiphany (Jan 6) which had long been considered to mark the end of the twelve day Christmas/Yuletide holiday.
Actual plough-boys faded in England through the 19th century with the introduction of mechanized agriculture, and the ancient plough-boy customs described in this song disappeared by the 1930s along with many other luck-visit customs. The old community rituals began to be re-enacted by Morris dancers in the 1970s.
While we now associate such Morris performances as being joyful celebrations it may be useful to remember that “plough boys” were mainly itinerant workers and this was in the middle of their extended time of annual unemployment. They and many of the other luck visitors were not performing to get enough money to buy a pint at the pub, but to get enough food and sustenance to stave off starvation until their services would be needed again in the Spring, when the fields would be dry enough to plough.
The Spirit of the Word Our most ancient ancestors were animists – they believed that all things in the world have a spirit or consciousness that is capable of feeling and acting independently from their physical forms. Animism is also the world-view, or aspirational world-view, of many neo-pagans.
I think of this song as being an animist prayer. From 1990 to 2004 the Yorkshire-based acapella trio Artisan toured an ever-changing annual Christmas concert, which always included a mini-panto. I was fortunate to see one of their last tours of their show in 2005 when they brought it here to Victoria and performed it in Camosun College’s lovely old theatre.
The group was comprised of Brian Bedford as their singer-songwriter and arranger, his wife Jacey on soprano harmonies and as their business manager, and with the powerful alto voice of Hilary Spencer as their lead singer. They retired as a group in 2005. I’m not sure when Brian wrote this song but they performed it in a series of non-seasonal reunion concerts that Artisan held in 2010, including one at the Lunnenberg Folk Harbour Festival. It is on an album that they recorded that same year called Random Play.
Sampler-making recollections
The compilation process and structure for this 2016 sampler was nearly the same as for my 2010 one. So instead of reminiscing about this sampler itself I will tell you an anecdote about getting my liner notes printed after I retired and no longer had access to the office’s printer.
After my retirement from the government in 2014 I began getting my liner notes printed at Monk Office Supply’s print shop. When I first went to their downtown office and explained what I needed the printer technician recognized that it was a rather complicated and recommended that I go to one of their other shops further away from downtown. He said that their most experienced printing technician was the print manager there.
I can’t remember her name now but she was indeed very good at her job and every year I brought my annual printing to her. She was quite distinctive looking – I would estimate that she was early middle-age with a goth style about her; dressed all in black, with jet black hair that had white streaks. When I brought in this year’s Solstice print job her eyes lit up. She told me that she loves winter solstice carols. I am always on the lookout for more solstice music so we got into a chat about that and I told her that when I came in to pick up my print-run I would bring her this year’s Sampler as well as my previous solstice ones.
From her demeanor I had expected that she might be a Wiccan but she told me that her interest in the solstice and other pre-Christian holidays was because she was a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft. I told her that the name sounded familiar but I didn’t know anything about him. She tried to explain but most of what she said went right over my head. I asked her for recommendations about the kind of winter solstice songs that H.P. Lovecraft followers liked. She gave me a few names to look up on YouTube. Here is a playlist of their kind of Winter Solstice music.
More perspectives about the Winter Solstice
Celebrating the Winter Solstice in the northern latitudes seems to be as old as time itself. Christianity swept into Northern Europe about 1500 years ago, superseding the indigenous pagan religions of the people who had long lived there.
An important key to Christianity’s success was its ability to adapt and incorporate elements from local religions and cultures, and endowing their sacred ancient places, stories and symbols with new Christian meaning. For example, Brigid, the Celtic goddess of poetry, healing and smith-craft survived the transition in Ireland by becoming St. Bridget, complete with a new mythic backstory. Other times the church tolerated the beliefs and customs that it could not eliminate or Christianize as long as they were not too overt about the paganism of their origins.
Less well known is that the form of pagan culture that it absorbed had done exactly the same thing millennia earlier beginning around 1700 BCE, when agriculture and the Bronze Age from the Fertile Crescent in Middle East expanded out from there and brought along with it its own form of paganism. A new pantheon and mythology came to Europe with the expanding agricultural way of life, to absorb and supersede the hunter-gatherer’s animism. Because this form of paganism was a religion for agriculturalists it is not surprising that it too emphasized how the deities of nature shaped the cycle of the year and people's prospects for a good harvest.
But it also absorbed residual beliefs and myths from the hunter-gatherers who had settled in the far northern lands with the retreating of the Ice Age glaciers. One element that all of the pagan religions shared was that the midwinter solstice was seen as a very special time of year, and that it marked the birth (or perhaps more accurately, the conception) of the coming seasons of returning light, warmth and life for the land. It is reasonable to suspect that this was especially core to the beliefs of people the further north they lived.
Ancient hunters and farmers watched the skies constantly and possessed an intimate and detailed knowledge of the passage of the sun, the moon, and the stars. Their lives depended upon this knowledge, and since long before agriculture had come our northern European ancestors tried to interpret the relationship between what they saw in the sky and the cycles of the day, the tides, and the seasons.
In the summer the sun rises high in the sky; the crops grow tall and animals thrive. However, in winter the sun never rises far above the horizon in the northern latitudes: It gives its light and scant warmth for only a few hours at most each day, and life itself becomes precarious. The shortest daytime of the year, and hence, the longest night, is when the sun rises and sets at their southernmost places on the horizon and it rises to its lowest elevation of the year.
Our ancient ancestors did not take this annual cycle for granted. Since they didn’t know why this happened, each year the shaman-astrologers had to confirm that the sun was indeed following the proper pattern of rising and setting slightly further north and rising slightly higher into the sky after the time of solstice. Only after they could do so did they confidently proclaim that a new yearly cycle had indeed begun, and summer was going to come again, and only then could the people begin to celebrate rebirth of the sun and the coming year.
Based on different cultures' varying astronomical technologies (and the local weather) this confirmation was anywhere from a few days to a few weeks after the actual day of the solstice. That is why we still celebrate Christmas four days later, and New Year's Day a full ten days after the actual solstice occurs, usually on December 21 (but it can be as early as Dec 20 or as late as Dec 23.)
What they saw in the night sky influenced our ancestors' spiritual values and world-views, just as these cultural factors shaped their interpretation of what they saw in the heavens. During the Bronze Age night-sky objects and patterns came to be identified with gods and spirits: Celestial events were not just co-incident with earthly matters – people believed that celestial events shaped life on earth.
Unlike the constellations in the northern sky, which circle around the north star Polaris all year long, the constellations in the south change throughout the year only arising above the horizon during their season. The twelve zodiac constellations are all in the south, but in winter it is the beautiful large and bright constellation of Orion that dominates the southern night-sky. Its backstory is not really important for understanding the winter solstice, but it is an interesting story and an insight into what for our ancestors was their reality.
The giant hunter Orion had been a demi-god; the son of Poseidon. He was blinded by the treacherous King Oenopion, but Orion stumbled to the forge of the crippled smith-god Hephaestus (known as Vulcan to the Romans) by following the sound of his ringing hammer. Hephaestus took pity on Orion and loaned him a servant to guide him east to the land of the sun god Apollo.
When they got there Orion stood facing the rising sun and when he felt its warm rays on his eyes he began to see again, first through a fog and then as clearly as ever before. His transformation into a constellation is another story, but when he appears in the autumn evening sky he foreshadows the loss of light, and its return that will surely come. It is not a coincidence that Orion's opposition date (the day when it is highest in the sky) coincides with the winter solstice.
At this time of year our ancestors suffered the effects of the cold, damp and darkness, and all of the hardships of body and soul that derive from these. Even with our modern conveniences of electric lighting and central heating the health and moods of those of us who live in the North are still influenced by this annual cycle. Deep winter is a time when we all need to have our spirits lifted: Fire and heat, light, hope, renewal, companionship and celebration are natural themes to counteract this season of hardship.
Wassailing and other luck visit customs might well descend from pagan practices of hunter-gatherer times. I can readily imagine that the opportunity to socialize with others may well have outweighed the challenges of travel for our cave-dwelling ancestors during this time of year.
On the mainland the luck visiting customs were later endowed with Christian meaning (often being said to commemorate the visit of the three kings.) But in Britain scant attempt was made to disguise the pagan origins of wassailing, and even the word “Christmas” is rarely heard in the wassail songs that were collected from traditional sources.
Luck visits took place on different other occasions during the year, but they are especially common during Yuletide. Basically, visitors (often costumed) come to folks' homes bringing blessings for the coming year and they present entertainment in the form of songs or traditional magical plays in the hope that their hosts will reply with food, drink or hospitality.
We know that by the Iron Age our pre-Christian ancestors had turned midwinter into an extended time of joyful seasonal festivities, with many holidays for all. The Romans, for example, celebrated about two weeks of holidays at this time of year, including days when even the household slaves and freedmen employees had days off work. They were treated as equals (for a one day) and sometimes their masters and mistresses even served a feast to them.
The early Christian church did not even try to suppress the already-ancient solstice festivals: It decided to commemorate the roman holiday of Sol Invictus as the day to celebrate Christ's birth (since no actual birth date is stated in the Bible.) In 567 the Council of Tours declared the twelve days from Christmas to Epiphany (Jan 6) to be the holy and festive season of Christmastide. (At the same time it also established the duty of four weeks of Advent fasting in preparation for that feasting.)
In England, the extent of celebration was later curtailed partly by the Reformation's rejection of Christmas’ pagan roots. Their logic was that if God wanted Jesus’ birthday to be celebrated he would have put the date in the bible. But more importantly, later during the Industrial Revolution factory owners were not prepared to accept closure of their businesses for such an extended period. Our current three statutory holidays (only two in the US!) is a pale reflection of the earlier midwinter festivals.
Going back to pagan times, fire was the most holy of sacraments in the various solstice rites, whether in the form of candles, torches, ceremonial yule-log hearth fires, or giant bonfires. Even the ashes from the Yule Log fires were considered to have magical properties.
When fire is sacred, the household hearth is a holy place. In winter, there was a time when besides its role for cooking, domestic fire was the sole source of light and warmth and it was essential to maintaining life. Goddesses brought productivity to nature in summer, and if for no other reason, this made them at least as important as their male counterparts. (Our impressions that such deities as Zeus and Odin were the most important deities of their pantheons may largely be a construct of a paternalistic Judeo-Christian worldview.)
In northern climes, fires were life's most important sustenance, and the keepers of the fire were manifesting the realm of the goddesses. Even today, in most cultures, women are the traditional keepers of the hearth. This raises the possibility that in world -view of pre-agricultural times women’s role was not considered to be subordinate to that of men. For many neo-pagans, if the deity is personified as a single individual it is as the Goddess.
Modern paganism, or neo-paganism, is a relatively new religious movement, or perhaps more accurately, it is an umbrella term for many different spiritual beliefs that are based on interpretations of pre-Christian and aboriginal world views. Adherents rely on historic, folkloric and ethnographic sources to varying degrees. The most well-known branch that aims to be seen as an organized religion is Wicca, which was developed in England in the first half of the 20th century.
Wicca's core beliefs, principles and practices are drawn from the teachings of founders Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente based upon their understanding of ancient beliefs and rites. But Wicca has no central guiding authority and therefore even self-professed wiccans vary greatly in their theology and practices. Modern Druidry is another sect of organized paganism, focused on their understanding of the not-well-documented religion of pre-Roman Celtic Britain.
However, most neo-pagans do not identify with any specific organized leadership. Their world-view is rooted in ancient pantheism, duoism (two complementing or conflicting principles or deities), or animism (belief that God is manifested in all of Nature), but these modern pagans do not necessarily reflect or seek any unifying theology.
As far as I can tell, almost every current Christmas and New Year’s Day custom can be traced to pre-Christian roots, so nearly everyone can be said to be participating in pagan practices at Christmastime. Indeed, that is why Oliver Cromwell's Puritan government tried to ban the celebration of Christmas in England, and some fervent Christians still do not mark the holiday at all.
Just as there is considerable variety as well as similarity in how people celebrate Christmas today, there is considerable variety and similarity in how pagans keep the Yuletide. Some celebrate Christmas the same as everyone else but think of that holiday as being another name for the ancient ever-evolving celebration of the Winter Solstice. They may put up a solstice tree and only careful review of its ornaments would reveal that it is different from its Christmas counterpart. Others have special solstice rituals: the ceremonies vary, but common elements of a solstice celebration are fire, singing, dancing and feasting.
Folklorist Martin Carthy argues that people often perform old ceremonies more because it is the time to do so rather than because of any intrinsic meaning, and that this does not make the rituals or customs less important.
These can be seen to be quite private moments for a community which, although there is a line which the outsider may not cross, the wider world is allowed to view and perhaps to share. The community may struggle to provide a meaning for a particular ceremony or make any sense at all of the routine of the thing but that does not matter. What matters is the moment: The reason is the moment.
Terry Pratchett was the author of Wintersmith, one of several humorous novels set in the alternate reality of Discworld. His fictional Discworld is a place where the cosmology seems unusual to us and magic is real. In that story the Lord of Winter falls in love with a young girl, mistaking her for his counterpart The Summer Lady. The actual Summer Lady is not happy about this situation, of course, and there is a real risk that Discworld will never have another springtime.
The scenario is based upon a personification of the seasons that is a common theme of many folkloric pagan stories about the midwinter solstice. Sometimes, summer is portrayed as a woman or goddess as in this story, and sometimes summer is represented by a male deity. Sometimes the personifications of summer and winter are lovers (a duality) and sometimes they are rivals who fight for supremacy.
I grew up with such a story. Every year the St. Paul Winter Carnival is held after the end of the Christmas/Yuletide season. There are 10 days of winter festivities, including a series of ritual conflicts between the court of Boreas, the winter King, and Vulcanus Rex, the Vulcan, and his rascally krewe who fight Borean for the return of summer. (One year when I was quite young my father was one of the King's guards, and in 1964 he was the Prime Minister, so I always knew which side to cheer for.) Every year the story ends the same way: King Boreas heeds the wise counsel of his Queen of Snows and retreats to rebuild his strength so that he can bring winter back the following year.
I have my own self-invented way to celebrate Solstice that has evolved over the years. I envision that on Solstice Eve or Solstice Day the animist nature spirits of life, led by the oak trees, are going into a desperate battle against the implacable forces of wintertime represented by the evergreens and led by King Holly. I decorate a special hat with flowers that I gather from the neighbourhood (you can do that in December in Victoria) and wassail the local deciduous trees, usually the big old oaks in Beacon Hill Park.
This entails sharing beer and malt whisky with them and wishing them and all of nature well both in their upcoming battle for the coming year. (One year a friend and I wassailed her parents' garden and the next year their plum trees produced their best harvest ever, so maybe it really does work!) Lately, my daughter Gillian, her husband Ross, and my grandson Reid often join me in this, and Gillian initiated blowing harsh-sounding New Year's noisemakers at the nearby evergreens.
I don't know to what extent people ever actually believed the personified tales of gods and goddesses; perhaps they were always recognized as being metaphors rather than as embodied spirits. Certainly, modern pagans understand the scientific explanation for the changing seasons, and they know that summer will return with or without their rituals. But the core of solstice's meaning is also the core of their beliefs – respect and appreciation for Nature and its rhythms of renewal and rebirth.
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