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Imbolc
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Imbolc It is now February 1 ---6 weeks after the Winter Solstice ...the ground lies covered in many places with ice and snow... but the days are now visibly longer than they were at the Solstice and Hope grows for the promise of Spring... The ancients knew this was a special time the Earth seems to quiver with anticipation off the sun's life giving warmth and with each passing day that promise gets stronger. The Irish and Scots called this day Imbolc or Lady Brighid's Day as Brighid was a local Earth Goddess who was worshipped in these places... Spring rituals such as the top to bottom deep cleaning of one's house were started on this day and as part of the cleaning the house wife used a special straw broom known as a Besom (we decorate house walls with the things these days and don't quite know what they are) to ritually sweep negativity and bad energy out of the house that had built up over the winter. The ancients assumed that the Earth Mother Goddess (known by many names) had given birth to the Sun God at the Solstice and they knew how long it took a HUMAN mother to recover from giving birth and so they assumed that it took their Goddess as long to recover ---the time period involved was about 6 weeks so they rejoiced that their "Mother Goddess" was now recovered from her labors at the Solstice....interestingly enough a modern form of this "wait 6 weeks for recovery" existed in the 15-1800's. In Britain and parts of Puritan America it a woman was considered "ritually unclean" after having a baby (although it was probably just that she was messy...dead tired and still bleeding and needed time for her body to reset after the ordeal)...the 6 week recovery period was imposed religiously and the day it was over was called "churching the woman" ---we don't QUITE do that any more there are medical reasons for the recovery time now.... The Hebrews also had a time period for waiting but they imposed it on sexual intercourse they said that any man who was with his wife carnally after she had had a baby was "unclean" and he AND the woman would have to go to the Temple and perform special sacrifices after the recovery period was over to "purify themselves before God"--- BUT their program was based cunningly on making the MOST babies possible so they could out breed their enemies not pacifying God.... some wise fucker among them actually had made a study of female menses and tailored their religious law to make a LOT of babies (but that's a topic for later posts) The Catholics and early Christians realized that they would never be able to take the power of this day away from the people they converted so they changed it subtly and altered its meaning over time. They called the actual holiday "Candlemas" and it became a feast day associated with making one's year's supply of<b> candles </font></b>---votive or lighting as incandescent lights didn't quite exist in those days. The focus was made to be CANDLES and the celebration of one saint or another not the REVIVING EARTH and the promise of spring and bountiful harvests to come. America had a unique twist to the change of this holiday---some one came up with the idea that a small rodent (supposedly) came out of the ground to observe his shadow or lack thereof and if he went back into his burrow to sleep without seeing his shadow then there would be 6 more weeks of cold ---6 weeks from Feb 1 being the middle of March about when spring is afoot in earnest they also changed the DATE of the holiday and its NAME to "Groundhog Day" its not even ABOUT the revival of the Earth after her long sleep its not even about the Sun moving north and days getting longer ---for the Americans its all about pulling some poor beast out of its hole in the ground in front of TV cameras and at 7 am when the SUN hasn't risen prognosticating on what the WEATHER is going to be like for the next 6 weeks (I can tell you it really doesn't work that way) |
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