Pagan Winter Quotes

WINTER'S GHOST: Autumn moon incautious in the dark river Winter’s ghost walks with a covered face and silver bones wait in all animals to be bone cloth upon her shoulder wait for her happiness in that they are silver

Across a golden Autumn tapestry appear the spirits of our ancient selves demanding recognition and reward for one haunted night. Sated, they retreat from winter’s onslaught and retire to subconscious hibernation for another twelvemonth.

I should add, however, that, particularly on the occasion of Samhain, bonfires were lit with the express intention of scaring away the demonic forces of winter, and we know that, at Bealltainn in Scotland, offerings of baked custard were made within the last hundred and seventy years to the eponymous spirits of wild animals which were particularly prone to prey upon the flocks - the eagle, the crow, and the fox, among others. Indeed, at these seasons all supernatural beings were held in peculiar dread. It seems by no means improbable that these circumstances reveal conditions arising out of a later solar pagan worship in respect of which the cult of fairy was relatively greatly more ancient, and perhaps held to be somewhat inimical.

Isabel took a drive alone that afternoon; she wished to be far away, under the sky, where she could descend from her carriage and tread upon the daisies. She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a sun-warmed angle on a winter's day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness. Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater. She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where people had suffered. This was what came to her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a companionship in endurance and the musty incense to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers. There was no gentler nor less consistent heretic than Isabel; the firmest of worshippers, gazing at dark altar-pictures or clustered candles, could not have felt more intimately the suggestiveness of these objects nor have been more liable at such moments to a spiritual visitation.

We read the pagan sacred books with profit and delight. With myth and fable we are ever charmed, and find a pleasure in the endless repetition of the beautiful, poetic, and absurd. We find, in all these records of the past, philosophies and dreams, and efforts stained with tears, of great and tender souls who tried to pierce the mystery of life and death, to answer the eternal questions of the Whence and Whither, and vainly sought to make, with bits of shattered glass, a mirror that would, in very truth, reflect the face and form of Nature's perfect self. These myths were born of hopes, and fears, and tears, and smiles, and they were touched and colored by all there is of joy and grief between the rosy dawn of birth, and death's sad night. They clothed even the stars with passion, and gave to gods the faults and frailties of the sons of men. In them, the winds and waves were music, and all the lakes, and streams, and springs,—the mountains, woods and perfumed dells were haunted by a thousand fairy forms. They thrilled the veins of Spring with tremulous desire; made tawny Summer's billowed breast the throne and home of love; filled Autumns arms with sun-kissed grapes, and gathered sheaves; and pictured Winter as a weak old king who felt, like Lear upon his withered face, Cordelia's tears. These myths, though false, are beautiful, and have for many ages and in countless ways, enriched the heart and kindled thought. But if the world were taught that all these things are true and all inspired of God, and that eternal punishment will be the lot of him who dares deny or doubt, the sweetest myth of all the Fable World would lose its beauty, and become a scorned and hateful thing to every brave and thoughtful man.

To those Romans December twenty-fifth was the birthday of the sun. They wrote that in gold letters in their calendar. Every year about that time, the middle of winter, the sun was born once more and it was going to put an end to the darkness and misery of winter. So they had a great feast, with presents and dolls for everybody, and the best day of all was December twenty-fifth. That feast, they would tell you, was thousands of years old- before Christ was ever heard of.

Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready-for what? I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. “For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see,” says Ruysbroeck, “and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else.” But what is the word? Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred, it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn’t make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note but I couldn’t catch the consonant that shaped it into sense.

This is the happy time, I tell myself. I am superstitious about happiness. I worry that too much celebration of immanence, of God-goodness and life force, invites its opposite. Some pagan part of me believes that too much light draws darkness.

The blue of winter, the brown of spring, the red of summer, and the fall of green. I seek the place of treasures past. I seek the truth of sand and glass. I call to the wind of seasons past. I bring with me the best of summer. I am the one with whom you bask. Deliver me and complete your task.

Among the nation’s early rulers was Václav (in English, Wenceslas), a devout Christian who incurred resentment among the pagan nobility due to his kindness toward the poor.

if God is supposed to have created everything, she must also have had a hand in the seasons and the sun’s position in the hemisphere and the pagans who celebrated it. So to not support the winter solstice is kind of rude to God.

Ugh. Would that Christmas could just be, without presents. It is just so stupid, everyone exhausting themselves, miserably haemorrhaging money on pointless items nobody wants: no longer tokens of love but angst-ridden solutions to problems. [...] What is the point of entire nation rushing round for six weeks in a bad mood preparing for utterly pointless Taste-of-Others exam which entire nation then fails and gets stuck with hideous unwanted merchandise as fallout? If gifts and cards were completely eradicated, then Christmas as pagan-style twinkly festival to distract from lengthy winter gloom would be lovely. But if government, religious bodies, parents, tradition, etc. insist on Christmas Gift Tax to ruin everything why not make it that everyone must go out and spend £500 on themselves then distribute the items among their relatives and friends to wrap up and give to them instead of this psychic-failure torment?

I am becoming pagan, Fraser wrote, that first winter. Here, in this muddy brown monotony, where blood’s the only colored thing. There is no God here, only the moon and the sky. And so I have made a pact with the moon. On clear nights she will bring me to you.

The months passed away. Slowly a great fear came over Viola, a fear that would hardly ever leave her. For every month at the full moon, whether she would or no, she found herself driven to the maze, through its mysterious walks into that strange dancing-room. And when she was there the music began once more, and once more she danced most deliciously for the moon to see. The second time that this happened she had merely thought that it was a recurrence of her own whim, and that the music was but a trick that the imagination had chosen to repeat. The third time frightened her, and she knew that the force that sways the tides had strange power over her. The fear grew as the year fell, for each month the music went on for a longer time - each month some of the pleasure had gone from the dance. On bitter nights in winter the moon called her and she came, when the breath was vapor, and the trees that circled her dancing-room were black, bare skeletons, and the frost was cruel. She dared not tell anyone, and yet it was with difficulty that she kept her secret. Somehow chance seemed to favor her, and she always found a way to return from her midnight dance to her own room without being observed. Each month the summons seemed to be more imperious and urgent. Once when she was alone on her knees before the lighted altar in the private chapel of the palace she suddenly felt that the words of the familiar Latin prayer had gone from her memory. She rose to her feet, she sobbed bitterly, but the call had come and she could not resist it. She passed out of the chapel and down the palace gardens. How madly she danced that night! ("The Moon Slave")

Wherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.

The other sources, even when they mention Hel, rarely describe it. But when they do, it's cast in neutral or even positive terms. For example, the mention that the land of the dead is "green and beautiful" in Ibn Fadlan's account is mirrored in a passage from Saxo (The medieval Danish historian, as you likely recall). In Saxo's telling of the story of Hadding, the hero travels to the "Underworld" and finds a "fair land where green herbs grow when it is winter on earth." His companion even beheads a rooster just outside of that land and flings its carcass over the wall, at which point the bird cries out and comes back to life - a feat which is highly reminiscent of another detail from Ibn Fadlan, namely the beheading of a rooster and a hen whose bodies are then tossed into the dead man's boat shortly before it's set aflame. In both cases, the emphasis is on abundant life in the world of the dead, even when death and absence prevail on earth.

The trees were still, bodyless and motionless as reflections now that the wind had dropped; waiting pagan and untroubled by rumors of immortality for winter and death. Far, far away across the October earth a dog howled, and the mellow long sound of a horn wavered about her, filling the air like a disturbance of still waters, then was absorbed into silence again leaving the dark world motionless about her, quiet and slightly sad and beautiful. Possum hunters, she thought, and wondered as it died away if she had heard any sound at all.

Like the folklorists spinning beguiling fantasies of ancient pagan rituals, Jerome, Borlase, Dickens and the Jameses (M.R. and Henry) were tapping into the old need for darkness within the new, Victorian, family Christmas, when people were meant to be getting cosy round the tree or roasting chestnuts by the fire with their nearest and dearest, and not rampaging drunkenly through the streets in a horrible mask. The traditions might have shifted, and the tales may have been rendered in a form that could be enjoyed quietly, at home, with your family, but everyone still wanted midwinter to be full of ghosts and monsters.

This, one suspects, may have been the reason which moved John to assimilate the newborn man-child to the figure of the avenger, thereby blurring his mythological character as the lovely and lovable divine youth whom we know so well in the figures of Tammuz, Adonis, and Balder. The enchanting springlike beauty of this divine youth is one of those pagan values which we miss so sorely in Christianity, and particularly in the sombre world of the apocalypse—the indescribable morning glory of a day in spring, which after the deathly stillness of winter causes the earth to put forth and blossom, gladdens the heart of man and makes him believe in a kind and loving God.

His tousled hair glittered like pagan gold as he pressed her to her back and dragged his open mouth over her flat stomach. Evie shook her head with groggy denial even as he bent her knees and pushed them upward. "Too tired," she said thickly, "I---wait, Sebastian---" His tongue searched her salty-damp flesh with assuaging licks, persisting until her protests died away. The gentle ministrations of his mouth lulled her into peace, her heartbeat slowing to measured beats. After long, patient minutes, he drew the swollen bud of her clitoris in his mouth and began to suckle and nibble. She jerked at the delicate aggression of his mouth. He drove her higher, his tongue flicking and swirling in a deliberate pattern, his arms clamping around her thighs. It seemed her body was no longer her own, that she existed only to receive this torment of pleasure. Sebastian... she could not voice his name, and yet he seemed to hear her silent plea, and in response he did something with his mouth that launched her into a series of incandescent climaxes. Every time she thought it was over, another ripple of sensation went through her until she was so exhausted that she begged him to stop. Sebastian rose over her, his eyes glittering in his shadowed face. She moved to welcome him, opening her legs, sliding her arms around the powerful length of his back. He nudged inside her swollen flesh, filling her completely. As his mouth came to her ear, she could hardly hear his whisper over the thumping of her heart. "Evie," came his dark voice, "I want something from you... I want you to come one more time." "No," she said weakly. "Yes. I need to feel you come around me." Her head rolled in a slow, negative shake across the pillow. "I can't... I can't..." "Yes, you can. I'll help you." His hand drifted along her body to the place where they were joined. "Let me deeper inside you... deeper..." She moaned helplessly as she felt his fingertips on her sex, skillfully manipulating her spent nerves. Suddenly she felt him sliding even farther as her excited body opened to accept him. "Mmm..." he crooned. "Yes, that's it... ah, love, you're so sweet..." He settled between her bent knees, into the cradle of her hips, driving hard and sure inside her. She encompassed him with her arms and legs, and buried her face in his hot throat, and cried out one last time, her flesh pulsing and tightening to bring him to shattering fulfillment. He shook in her arms, and clenched his hands into the warm spill of her hair as he gave himself over to her completely, worshipping her with every part of his body and spirit.

It was no mere astronomic festival, then, that the Pagans celebrated at the winter solstice. That festival at Rome was called the feast of Saturn, and the mode in which it was celebrated there, showed whence it had been derived. The feast, as regulated by Caligula, lasted five days; loose reins were given to drunkenness and revelry, slaves had a temporary emancipation, and used all manner of freedoms with their masters. This was precisely the way in which, according to Berosus, the drunken festival of the month Thebeth, answering to our December, in other words. the festival of Bacchus, was celebrated in Babylon. "It was the custom," says he, "during the five days it lasted, for masters to be in subjection to their servants, and one of them ruled the house, clothed in a purple garment like a king." This "purple-robed" servant was called "Zoganes," the "Man of sport and wantonness," and answered exactly to the "Lord of Misrule," that in the dark ages, was chosen in all Popish countries to head the revels of Christmas.

The Umayyad period (661-750) produced a frankly profane and worldly art, the like of which was never to be seen again on Islamic soil where there is normally no distinction between the sacred and the secular except in the use to which works of are put, and not in their forms; a house is built in a style in no way differing from a mosque. This worldly art of the Umayyads can be explained by the fact that Islamic art at this period was still in the process of formation, and by the sovereigns' need to surround themselves with a certain ostentatious display that would not fall behind that of their predecessors. But the works of art that adorn the hunting pavilions or the winter residences of the Umayyad princes are not only eclectic--paintings in the Hellenistic mode, Sasanid or Coptic sculpture and Roman mosaics--but are examples of actual paganism, even without judging them according to the standards and example of the Prophet's Companions. The sight of these scenes of hunting and bathing, those naively opulent statues of dancing-girls and acrobats and effigies of triumphant sultans, would have filled someone like the Caliph 'Umar with holy anger

In the deadness of winter, the spark of new life. I have news for you: the stag bells, Winter snows, Summer has gone, wind high and cold. Sun low, short its course, sea running high. Rust brown bracken, its shape lost, the wild goose raises her accustomed cry. Cold seizes the bird's wing; season of ice: this is my news.

In a letter of advice to the Augustinian mission, Gregory counselled them to treat conversion as a process of adaptation, telling them to offer the newly converted Anglo-Saxons Christian feasts in exchange for their existing festivals and to repurpose the sites of pagan shrines as Christian churches. The idea was that it would be easier for people to accept the new religion if they were allowed to keep aspects of their old festivals:

Ember Days, four periods of prayer and fasting corresponding to the four seasons of the year, which probably had their roots in pagan Roman rituals seeking the aid of the gods at different stages in the agricultural cycle.

In Halloween, we see echoes of the Gaelic pagan festival of Samhain, which marked the arrival of the “dark half” of the year. It was celebrated with bonfires

In the round of our rational and mournful year one festival remains out of all those ancient gaieties that once covered the whole earth. Christmas remains to remind us of those ages, whether Pagan or Christian, when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it. In all the winter in our woods there is no tree in glow but the holly.

The home religion celebrates three spring sabbats, one in early February, one in late March, and one on the first of May. Though Imbolc celebrates the first stirrings of the seeds underground, aboveground is still locked in deep winter. By Ostara, the longer days and milder weather cheers us, but the festival isn’t widely observed among pagans, especially since the Christians renamed it Easter and made it perhaps their most important holiday. Beltane, though! By May Day, spring is in full bloom.

The birth of the Lord began to be commemorated (on an annual basis) somewhere in the third or fourth centuries a.d. It is commonly argued that this was a “takeover” of a pagan holiday, celebrating the winter solstice. But it just as likely, in my view, that this was actually the other way around. Sol Invictus was established as a holiday by Aurelian in a.d. 274, when the Christians were already a major force. So who was copying whom? And Saturnalia, another popular candidate suggested as being an “ancestor” of Christmas, actually occurred on December 17.

EUROPA Europa costs you a dollar. No one cares, Including her. She’s got clean sheets And a fire in winter. Why bother Becoming a bull, O Zeus!

Uitlegging van de bosrand Nut or twig or tree, Hazel was decidedly pagan Er is weinig voor nodig om een bosrand te zijn. Zomer en de drie seizoenen maar het meest wel de herfst. De zomer is een lopende band. Maaiers en ruisende gaan ijlings langs je heen, en elk blad redt zich; nog eenvoudiger is de winter die de verpakking afhaalt en de lucht grijs omtovert in een stakingspamflet. De harde wind van de winter… Op de lente wachten wij altijd, wij hazelaars, maar de herfst is inniger; de wisseling. Vuur van binnenin brandt ons op; wij halen nauwelijks nog adem, om het rode lover doolt de wind als doktoren. Wij zijn de bosrand; de grens. Wij struiken het decor van de akker, de toneelvloer. En hoor hoor one tijding:

Hanukkah, officially instituted by the Hasmoneans, was, like Tabernacles, eight days, and it was also the eight-day period corresponding to the pagan winter solstice festivities celebrating the return of light, lustily celebrated in Greece and Rome. Triumphal days in the Greek style – like the Day of Nicanor commemorating the defeat of that general – were added to the calendar.

By that decade, such interpretations were being made at a feverish pace, so that, in a single presidential address to the Folk-Lore Society in 1937, it could be suggested that pancake tossing on Shrove Tuesday had been a magical rite to make crops grow, team sports on that day had begun as ritual struggles representing the forces of winter dark and spring light, and Mother’s Day was a remnant of the worship of the prehistoric Corn Mother. 12 By now, some theorists were intervening in seasonal local customs and attempting to ‘correct’ them if aspects of the current performance did not fit the particular interpretation which the experts concerned were making of them as survivals of prehistoric religion. 13

Brilliant. And how do you know he’s a saint?” “He’s got a halo?” “Excellent, and does that golden halo remind you of anything?” Hitzrot broke into a smile. “Yeah! Those Egyptian things we studied last term. Those . . . um . . . sun disks!” “Thank you, Hitzrot. Go back to sleep.” Langdon turned back to the class. “Halos, like much of Christian symbology, were borrowed from the ancient Egyptian religion of sun worship. Christianity is filled with examples of sun worship.” “Excuse me?” the girl in front said. “I go to church all the time, and I don’t see much sun worshiping going on!” “Really? What do you celebrate on December twenty-fifth?” “Christmas. The birth of Jesus Christ.” “And yet according to the Bible, Christ was born in March, so what are we doing celebrating in late December?” Silence. Langdon smiled. “December twenty-fifth, my friends, is the ancient pagan holiday of sol invictus—Unconquered Sun—coinciding with the winter solstice. It’s that wonderful time of year when the sun returns, and the days start getting longer.” Langdon took another bite of apple. “Conquering religions,” he continued, “often adopt existing holidays to make conversion less shocking. It’s called transmutation. It helps people acclimatize to the new faith. Worshipers keep the same holy dates, pray in the same sacred locations, use a similar symbology . . . and they simply substitute a different god.” Now the girl in front looked furious. “You’re implying Christianity is just some kind of . . . repackaged sun worship!” “Not at all. Christianity did not borrow only from sun worship. The ritual of Christian canonization is taken from the ancient ‘god-making’ rite of Euhemerus. The practice of ‘god-eating’—that is, Holy Communion—was borrowed from the Aztecs. Even the concept of Christ dying for our sins is arguably not exclusively Christian; the self-sacrifice of a young man to absolve the sins of his people appears in the earliest tradition of the Quetzalcoatl.” The girl glared. “So, is anything in Christianity original?” “Very little in any organized faith is truly original. Religions are not born from scratch. They grow from one another. Modern religion is a collage . . . an assimilated historical record of man’s quest to understand the divine.

The sabbats mark the Wheel of the Year, the turning of the seasons. For Wiccans and Pagans of some other traditions, these are the spine of the Craft, and some fall on dates that are closely aligned with those of major Christian holidays: Yule, the winter festival from which we get the Twelve Days of Christmas; Ostara, the spring equinox and the source of Easter’s fertility symbols (the rabbit, the egg); Samhain,3 the time of communion with the dead, dressed up in mainstream culture as Halloween.

There are a few things I love about the first week of February. There is Candlemas, or Saint Brigid’s Day, on the 2nd. Candlemas is the first cross-quarter day of the new year, midway between the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox. I love Candlemas because before it was a Christian observance, it was a Pagan Holyday, the day to celebrate Brigid, the prominent female deity from the Tuatha De Danaan, the pre-Christian Gods of the Celts of Ireland. So pervasive was her worship, that the Christians couldn’t stop the Irish from honoring her, so they adopted her into their own mythology as St. Brigid. February 2nd is close to the end of winter, and Brigid, among other qualities, is the Goddess of the hearth. Celebrants light fires and candles to ward off the dregs of winter and await the coming spring. I have celebrated Candlemas over the years by organizing a candle dance event, where people would gather to learn a few simple folk dances done with candles in our hands. It is at once solemn, graceful, and joyful, as we hold onto the light and step towards spring. Another thing I love about the first week of February is the Superbowl. Yes, that’s right. People are complex, you see. We are creatures of both spirit and banality. We celebrate with ancient dance, and also gladiatorial contest.

Wherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.

I am the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone.

Have you believed or participated in this infidelity, that some wicked women, turned back after Satan, seduced by illusions and phantoms of demons believe and affirm: that with Diana, the goddess of the pagans, and an unnumbered multitude of women, they ride on certain beasts and traverse many areas of the earth in the stillness of the quiet night.1 This isn’t the only mention Burchard made of women riding out at night in a host led by a goddess – of his two hundred or so rules, it’s the subject of four. And numerous other medieval churchmen complained about this idea as well as Burchard, a collection of angry fragments that suggests it was a commonly held belief, no matter how much the church might have tried to stamp it out. Sometimes the goddess leading the women is called Holda or Herodias, not Diana. Sometimes the women are able to pass through closed doors to sneak away in spirit, leaving their bodies lying in bed with their husbands while their souls cavort through the night.

Sixty years after Frazer’s Golden Bough, the poet Robert Graves wrote The White Goddess, a book entirely made up of delightful nonsense about pagan rituals and asserting that the death-and-resurrection mummers plays were ‘the clearest survivals of the pre-Christian religion’. This in turn inspired Sylvia Plath, who found herself identifying with Grave’s goddess – a sister of Holda – who he put at the centre of it all. It inspired books like Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, the children’s story from 1973 about the dark, pagan magic that bleeds through into Christmas and midwinter. Plenty of our most beloved horror stories are based on these ideas too, from The Wicker Man to Midsommar and, arguably, the entire genre of folk horror.

That is how the pagan festival of the winter solstice in late December became the festival of

The truth is that there is an alliance between religion and real fun, of which the modern thinkers have never got the key, and which they are quite unable to criticize or to destroy. All Socialist Utopias, all new pagan Paradises, promised in this age to mankind have all one horrible fault. They are all dignified…. But being undignified is the essence of all real happiness, whether before God or man. Hilarity involves humility; nay, it involves humiliation…. Religion is much nearer to riotous happiness than it is to the detached and temperate types of happiness in which gentlemen and philosophers find their peace. Religion and riot are very near, as the history of all religions proves. Riot means being a rotter; and religion means knowing you are a rotter.

Constantine was almost certainly a Mithraic, and his triumphal arch, built after his ‘conversion’, testifies to the Sun-god, or ‘unconquered sun’. Many Christians did not make a clear distinction between this sun-cult and their own. They referred to Christ ‘driving his chariot across the sky’; they held their services on Sunday, knelt towards the East and had their nativity-feast on 25 December, the birthday of the sun at the winter solstice. During the later pagan revival under the Emperor Julian many Christians found it easy to apostasize because of this confusion; the Bishop of Troy told Julian he had always prayed secretly to the sun. Constantine never abandoned sun-worship and kept the sun on his coins. He made Sunday into a day of rest, closing the lawcourts and forbidding all work except agricultural labour. In his new city of Constantinople, he set up a statue of the sun-god, bearing his own features, in the Forum; and another of the mother-Goddess Cybele, though she was presented in a posture of Christian prayer.