In the wheel of the year we have reached Imbolc, the first of the cross-quarter days.
The wheel of the year as many modern pagans honour it is a merging of two ancient belief systems – the sun festivals of the Norse people and the fire festivals of the Celts, which were tied more closely to the moon. I find it interesting that it is the Celtic ones that are known as the ‘fire festivals’. Perhaps with the Moon being a water goddess, the fire is to balance her, to call to her, yang to her yin. Or maybe it is just that if you are going to celebrate the Moon, you are most likely to do it at night, and if you are a Celt, you are in the northern latitudes and the nights are cold. I have long held the view that many of the tenets of all religions started out in pragmatism.
I feel the need to share a quick word on paganism: it isn’t actually a “thing”. It’s a freedom to choose one’s own thing. Pagan was a word that had a similar meaning to infidel. Not being of “the faith” – whichever faith that referred to. Essentially, it now means having some kind of spiritual belief that is not tied to any of the major doctrinal religions. Pagans may hold to their own doctrines or codes that are every bit as delineated as the mainstream religions, or they may not.
So when someone asked me what I am, in this sense of what do I belief in, and I first spoke out loud
in unfamiliar company that if I am anything, then I am a pagan it wasn’t to claim an allegiance, it was a moment of self-realisation. Long before that moment I had answered a similar question with the words: I believe in the interconnectedness of everything. Is that a faith? A religion? Or the simple acknowledgement of scientific principles?
For me it is the recognition that science and magic are the same thing, differentiated only by that which we believe we understand (frankly I think the jury is still out on a lot of modern science) and that which we know we do not understand.
Myths, legends, god-stories etc are all attempts to make sense of things we have only small clues about. Religions are the attempts to force groups of people to accept and honour one version of the story, and then to build a power base around that version.
I don’t think any one religion is any better or worse than any other. I think all of them have some beneficial aspect and outputs, but I also think that they are all ultimately harmful because they create division between peoples and because they set human people above, apart from, the rest of the natural world. These things may be beneficially intended, but they are harmful in consequence.
Faith, on the other hand, is a different thing. All of those religions are rooted in Faith – and so is paganism – and Faith is a good thing. Faith is the knowledge of the interconnection (even when we have no idea how it works). Faith is trust in the ability to weather the storms, even if that weathering means unbelievable change. Faith is honouring our place in the wildness of existence and being grateful for it. It doesn’t matter if you tie that faith to non-existent mythic beings that live somewhere beyond the clouds or to the local well and the moss that grows around it. If that faith makes you more grounded, more grateful, more content, it will by definition make you more loving, more kind, more empathic, and it will make you more resilient.
The trick is not to mistake religion for faith, or faith for religion. You may have one or both or neither, and it is for you to decide how well that serves you and those around you and the wider world.
Not such a “quick word” then, as it turns out, but for me an important one.
Back to where I came in...in 2023 the festival of Imbolc fell on the 2nd of February.
Imbolc (sometimes spelt Imbolg) is the first of the Fire Festivals, the first of the Cross-quarter Days. It sits mid-way between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox, and marks the beginning of
Spring.
It is associated with the Celtic goddess, Brigid. She is not the Christian Saint of the same name – a different person entirely – but it is no wonder that the early Christians should commandeer the
festival already sharing a name to honour their abbess – indeed the literal references to Brigid of Kildare are so scant that she may even be a fiction to simply pull the ancient festival into the modern calendar. Who knows?
The older Brigid, the goddess of that name, is a member of the Tuatha Dé Danaan – gods or heroes (in the Greek sense) or other forms of mythic beings – the boundaries get blurred in folk lore. As goddess, though, Brigid is represented as a female trinity: she is associated with the esoteric: wisdom & poetry, with the bodily: healing & protection, and with the material: blacksmithing and domestic animals. In some stories she is all three in one, in others Brigid is the poet and wise-woman and the healing of people and husbandry of animals falls to her sisters. It matters only as much as you want it to.
Likewise the etymology of the word itself is blurred and uncertain. The most commonly accepted version is from the old Irish I mbolc meaning in the belly and probably referring to the pregnancy of ewes at this time of year. The beginning of spring, then, not being when the new lambs are born, but when they are gestating. The beginning of life in the darkness.
I think we’ve created a problem in our modern attempts to revive the old faiths by focussing on the festival days: the quarter days and cross-quarter days, and forgetting that they were markers of transition points: into winter, into spring, into summer, into autumn… not midpoints, nor highpoints, but beginnings and endings, and like all beginnings and endings they were not sudden nor fixed,
the festivals were linked to the sun and the moon and the stars and the calendars, but the seasons for which they were named could fall early or late in any given year.
The celebrating of the festivals then, for me, is a way of marking the turning, and a reminder to look out for the shifting of the season, be it early or late.
In the UK, February feels a bit early to be talking about Spring. The weather is often still Winter cold, frost and snow and storms are all likely this month…and yet…there is also pregnancy. The blue tits in my garden are scouting out nesting sites. The robin sings loud and long in the heights of the plum tree. The hazel catkins are golden in early morning and late afternoon sunlight. There are as many azure days as there are leaden ones.
Daylight creeps in earlier and earlier, and the afternoons stretch a little later. The darkest days are behind us and there is an instinct to start planning ahead, not in the way of resolutions and midwinter promises, but in the way of clearing of weeds, tidying, mending, spring clearing, decluttering, making space for newness, in the way of nurturing what is already growing within us. It is a celebration of fertility and the feminine and the giving birth that applies to all aspects of creative endeavour.
I decide to celebrate Imbolc by looking for signs of Spring.
And then I decide to go to the beach instead.
My first proper beach-walk of the season. The tide has turned and is in flow, working its way back landwards, whipped and whetted by a westerly wind, arctic lace frilling its edges.
I walk westwards. The twinned suns track my progress, the brighter watches from the cliff-tops, the dimmer tracks my process in rockpools and wet sand.
The sea calls to me.
High above water the colour of washed out denim, the moon is held in a baby-blue sky. The not-quite-full moon reminds me I am only slightly mad, not quite crazy. I am not fool enough to brave the cold-shock of winter water to which I’m unaccustomed.
"So, then?" the waves whisper, "why not become so? Step by step, week by week, why not teach your body to love the sea as much as your mind and soul do? Your body has some catching up to do. It’s just a matter of training; don’t wait; start now; come and play.
I swap hiking boots for beach shoes, and hoik my leggings over scaley winter calves, and walk down to the strandline. I stand at the edge of the water’s reach. I stand still while frothing wavelets tease me, outrunning themselves before they reach me. I stand my ground and look at the sky. I notice that contrails have obscured the moon. The sun is there and then not and then again, as clouds scud across the space between it and me. Then the gentlest kiss of cold, sea-caress – the expected sharp intake of breath does not come – I merely know “cold” as a touch, not a slap – my feet are wrapped in it, rather than pierced by it. It is a soft gentle cold, more blanket of snow than needles of frost, but of course it is merely water and swirling sand.
I would love to say the charm held, but I am only slightly crazy and not totally mad. I waited for stronger waves and welcomed them when they came splashing above my upturned leggings. I plodged a little way along the beach and back again, but the truth is that I was in the water for a few minutes only – but they were a few February minutes – in the North Sea – if you sail directly north from here your first landfall will be some stray islet in the Norwegian Sea well beyond the country for which it is named, or it will be the polar ice itself. In that context, you might say the water was fairly warm. You would be wrong. After five minutes or so, my toes were thinking "ok, enough for one day, starting to hurt now."
But it felt like a beginning…something more than a start…more like a promise, a preparation, an Imbolc moment. This is the beginning of Spring. Winter has not departed, but in its belly new life, new lives, newness is gestating – I can feel this new year beginning to quicken into being.
And that is exciting.
