parallel calendars

PARALLEL CALENDARS

My talk was first composed for Michael de Ward’s
In The Presence II on the evening of saturday 9 june 1996
This version for Jeanette’s Beltane Bash 2006 is a substantial revision of the original

I was brought up as a Christian. Most people were in those days. It was the 1930s. Before the war began again.


paddington chapel

Sunday was very different from weekdays. We put on our best clothes and went to Paddington Congregational Chapel in the morning and to its Sunday School in the afternoon. I don't remember there was much difference from week to week except that, towards the end of the year, we sang

Away in a manger
No crib for a bed
The little lord Jesus
Lay down his sweet head

and a few months later we sang

There is a green hill far away
Outside a city wall
Where our dear Lord was crucified
He died to save us all

Christmas and Good Friday. The birth and death of Jesus, the Son of God.


st mary's bryanston square

When I was a little older, I joined the choir in the church next to our school. It was our Church of England parish church where, on Sunday mornings and evenings, the simple pattern of Matins and Evensong was regulated by a Book of Common Prayer which, by law, established which psalms were to be sung, which passages from the Holy Bible were to be read, and which prayers were to be said on each of the Sundays and major festivals throughout the year. It was a pattern first set up in 1549, during the reign of the boy king Edward VI, and revised in 1662 when the monarchy had been restored after the disastrous years of the Civil War and the Commonwealth.
This liturgical calendar, the pattern of the Anglican church's year, was close to the one common to most of Western Europe from the early days of Latin Christianity onwards. It focussed on the birth of Jesus, which was celebrated on December 25th, and 'his glorious death and resurrection' which was a moveable feast culminating on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring Equinox. Soon after this, in the Church of England, came the long succession of Sundays after Trinity, where nothing special seemed to happen until round about the beginning of December when we began to think about Christmas once again.
All this came to and end, so far as I was concerned, when I changed schools and left the choir.


the mercers' school

The main ethos of my new school was that of the English Gentlemen who had fought and died for their king and country in the Great War of 1914 to 1918. Christianity was not a terribly important part of our lives. An English Gentleman went to church on Sundays - that was part of his social obligation – but it was not anything to get too enthusiastic about. Yes, we did have a certain amount of religious instruction based on Bible Stories and the beliefs of the Church of England though, in other lessons, we read about the old gods of Northern Europe : Odin and Thor and Balder the Beautiful, who was killed with a dart made from a sprig of mistletoe. Later on, as we re-established our links with the ancient classical world of Greece and Rome, I began to become familiar with their goddesses and gods. In particular there was Zeus, the Sky Father of the gods on Mount Ólympos. He was married to the goddess Héra. Their children were numbered among the gods. Zeus had sisters. Some of these also became mothers of his children. Zeus had other lovers who were human. He came down to them in various disguises. Some of their children grew up to be heroes like Perseús and Heraklés. Then there was Seméle. She was a princess and she was very special. Zeus was the father of her child Diónysos and Diónysos was a god, the son of a god. And, eventually, Seméle was raised up and also became a goddess on Mount Ólympos. So perhaps it was here, in the dust and bustle of High Holborn, that a seed was planted. In church we had been taught about the young Jewish woman who had given birth to the Son of God. In afterlife, this same Jewish woman was raised up to be Queen of Heaven. So was this really an unique event? How could it be unique when there were so many similar stories of mortal women who gave birth to the sons of gods? It was a question neither answered nor posed in my schooldays.
More important to us was the procession of the seasons. Summer was that wonderful time of long languorous lazy halcyon days which came to an end only when we went back to school in September to begin not just another term but a new school year. Autumn was the fall of the leaf whose rich colours briefly decorated our streets and led us on to Winter when the branches were bare. As the evenings began to draw in. We turned on the lights, closed the curtains, and put another lump of coal on the fire. Winter was the time of frost and snow. There was ice on the pond. Nothing grew. The woods and the fields were asleep. Then, one day, the ice began to melt. The air felt different. There was a quickening. A faster pulse. The earth was beginning to come to life again. It was Spring, the sweet Spring. Poets took up their pens and wrote new verses. Musicians composed new songs and symphonies. Love was in the air. We took out our madrigal books and with Shakespeare and Thomas Morley gave voice ..

It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o'er the green cornfield did pass,
In spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.


rozelle

The early 1970s found me living in Australia. One evening I went to visit a friend in that part of Sydney known as Rozelle. My friend introduced me to the man from the house next door. He was a witch, a witch who spoke of an unbroken local tradition of witchcraft stretching back to the arrival of the first convict colonists nearly two hundred years before. I was very impressed by his story. It fitted in with the ideas I had recently come across in the works of Professor Margaret Murray. It is not going too far to say : I was ready for the witch and his story. The time was ripe. We began to practise in ways which incorporated some elements I now recognise as belonging to Alexandrian Wicca. We met. We met frequently. In the night and by candlelight. We often stood skyclad in the back yard. We stood there gazing up at the moon with a sense of connection and a sense of adoration. After dark was fine – but in the broad light of day there were problems. The eight major festivals of the Wheel of the Year just did not resonate. Not only were we living in the Southern Hemisphere where we expected the seasons to be topsy-turvy, but the seasons themselves were radically different. There was no Spring. No signs of rebirth. The ubiquitous gum trees, the eucalypts, were the same all the year round. They never seemed to change. And in December, as the solstice approached, it seemed that on all sides there were singers directing our attention to a 'bleak midwinter' where 'the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even'. It just did not fit with temperatures and humidity jointly reaching a full one hundred degrees.
It was not until I returned to England that I began to enjoy the fullness of our Pagan observances.


oxford

In Australia the hours of day and night changed hardly at all from month to month. In England the gradual transitions, day by day and even hour by hour, are part of the way we experience the world around us.
I have stood before dawn with the Druids on the ramparts at Avebury and scanned the eastern horizon for the first sign of a new day. It seems to take forever. I can well understand why, in times past, when men and women at last saw the first shaft of sunlight, they lit a great bonfire to signal to the watchers on the next high place in line that their time was fast approaching.
When we stand watching for the dawn, for that repeated renewal which comes with the break of day, we may call to mind those former times when the Sun was worshipped as a god in his chariot riding across the sky. This was common practice in the Roman Empire as recently as the 4th century of our common era. When Christianity, by imperial diktat, was instituted as the official statewide religion, priest and people still turned to the east to face the rising sun as they began the day with the divine sacrifice on the altar. The name was changed. The observance remained until 1965. Now its origins are quite obscured

Each day of our week is still marked and honoured by Anglo-Saxon reckoning. The Day of the Sun is followed by the Day of the Moon. Then come days watched over in turn by Tiw, Woden, Thor, Freya or Frigg, and Saturn. So the cycle unwinds and begins again and again. The old gods are still there for everyone who calls their presence into consciousness with each daybreak and nightfall.

For a substantial number of people in our Pagan community, the moon in its phases rides high like a goddess in the night sky. Meetings, celebrations and rituals are timed to coincide with her waxing and waning. It is a practice which has very ancient origins – even as far back as Palaeolithic times. I have already mentioned how the first full moon after the Spring Equinox determines the date of Easter – but that's about as far as it goes in the Christian calendar. For so many Pagans it is quite different. I have heard it said that in Glastonbury, for example, rituals on the night of the full moon take absolute precedence over any other activity. For those who watch the skies, the phases of the moon are one of the great natural rhythms that influence and enhance our lives. And, while this is happening, the thirteen moons of the celestial year are carpentered to construct the twelve months of the civil calendar.

12 is a very special number. Its significance goes back to Babylon and beyond. The ancient astrologers, so I am told, counted with a duodecimal system. But even before Babylon, so we are given to understand, our Indo-European ancestors counted in twelves on the finger joints of one hand - so giving us the old way of counting in dozens. And, by using the finger joints of the other hand, they kept track of the count up to twelve times twelve. It reminds me of the days when I worked in an office and our stationery supplies came in boxes holding twelve dozen items. Twelve dozen was called a 'gross' – a word, I guess, long gone out of custom. Now we count and reckon in a decimal system. On our fingers – and sometimes on our toes! But the significance of 12 percolates into all sorts of nooks and crannies. There are 12 signs of the Zodiac, which may be why we have 12 months in our year. There are (or there were) 12 tribes of Israel. Jesus Christ is reported as having 12 disciples. 12 inches still add up to the imperial foot. But 12 pence no longer equal a legal shilling.


today's pagan festivals

Many of us today order our lives by the rhythms of the earth below and the sky above. Like those from ‘times long past’ we stand, each in our own landscape, and observe the apparent annual voyaging of the sun as it approaches and recedes like a great pendulum in its implacable annual rhythms. It is nearest us on June 21st, Midsummer's Day, when there is great rejoicing, great ritual and festival on this, the longest day of our Northern year. For a moment the sun appears to stand still - the Solstice - then it slowly, oh so slowly ebbs away until December 21st, the Midwinter Solstice when, once again, it appears to pause awhile before its returning to us once more. On its journeyings back and forth, as perceived by us earthbound observers, it passes over the planet’s Equator. On its Southern swing it gives us the Autumn Equinox on September 23rd when day and night are of equal duration. And on its return it gives, on March 21st, the great Spring Equinox which has provoked so much poetry, so much music, so much mythology and religious celebration in our European homeland. These four festivals of the Sun are part of the great Wheel of the Year which today's Pagans integrate into their annual calendar. These are fixed feasts – their dates on the calendar determined by a regularly repeated astronomical phenomenon.
The other four festivals of the Wheel of the Year were once – and still can be – celebrated : not by looking at a calendar which is there for the benefit of city folk but by looking around at the natural evidence of field and forest. As the dark and cold of Winter continue into the Solstice and the weeks beyond, there is a gathering eagerness to watch for the first signs, the first heralds in the advance party of Spring. When the green certainty is established, then is the time of Imbolc; though now for the benefit of city folk remote from the frolickings of newborn lambs, Imbolc is pinned to the second day of February. Similarly, when the corn in the fields stands ripe, ready for the cutting of the first sheaf, it is the time of Lughnasadh - though city folk, with their different furrows to plough, mark the festival on the first day of August.
Then there are Beltane and Samhain now quite fixed on May 1st and the night of October 31st. There is a tradition which links the season of Beltane with the annual movement of sheep and cattle, with all the able-bodied men, from the village to the distant summer pastures. As the time of departure drew near there was much sharing of love and the making of love. Unmarried women were sure to find a mate and, as for the rest, there was absolute freedom for any mutually willing man and woman to couple together. It was a time of great joy and wonderful pleasure. Samhain was the time of returning. More celebrations. More loving. A great awareness of the coming back of those who had departed. And a time for the veil between the worlds to be lifted for the long-departed to be once more near their loved ones and their descendants.
These then are the eight feast days of the Wheel of the Year. A cycle with neither beginning nor end. A great rhythm as of the heartbeat of an immense celestial pendulum mirrored by earth’s awesome terrestrial pulse.


western christendom

The Christian cycle has developed by cross-fertilisation. Jesus was a Jew, and Jewish practices permeate the Christian liturgies. Jewish daily prayers became the monastic daily offices and are still echoed when Mattins and Evensong are recited. Like the Jewish precedence, there is great emphasis on the Book of Psalms and the reading of portions of scriptures enshrined in the sacred books. The Jewish Sabbath has been transformed and transported into the Christian Sunday and the once-a-year Passover meal inspired the daily celebration of the Mass.
Unlike the Pagan cycles, the Christian kalendar really does have a point of initialisation. In the old tradition it begins on the Eve of the 4th Sunday before Christmas with the season of Advent, the time for Christian souls to prepare for the coming of Christ into the world. At one time it was a season of penitence - to cleanse the mind of sin ready to receive the Christ child. It still is for some congregations. The celebration of Christmas itself begins at dusk on December 24th, Christmas Eve, when the candles are lit for the singing of the First Vespers of Christmas. There is a splendid mass at midnight – still honoured as the traditional time of the birth of Jesus. There may be another mass at the dawn or thereabouts, and faithful and faithless, both, flock to local places of worship on the morning of Christmas Day. It is a grand outbursting of joy lasting through various other feastdays and commemorations until January 6th, when Twelfth Night and the Feast of the Epiphany mark the end of the festal season. The Epiphany is a day for remembering the arrival of the Three Wise Men, the Magi from the East, who presented their gifts at the stable in Bethlehem - and in some traditions this is the day for the giving and receiving of presents rather than on the 25th of December.
Preparations for Easter begin well in advance. There is the Sunday called Septuagesima, about 70 days before. It is followed by Sexagesima and Quinquagesima Sundays (a sort of 60 and 50 days before). Then Shrove Tuesday when the faithful go to confession to be shriven for their sins. Today it is Mardi Gras - Fat Tuesday - when the last of the meat products should be used up before the period of Lenten abstinence - there are Jewish overtones in this - and there is much fun and frolicking until dawn brings Ash Wednesday and its own particular retribution for the excesses of the past several hours! Ash Wednesday is the day when the faithful go to mass and their foreheads are marked with the ashes of last year’s Palm Crosses which have been collected and incinerated for this purpose. Traditionally the days and weeks which follow were times of fasting and abstinence - if for no other reason than food stocks were low in agricultural communities. The last of the meat animals had been consumed and the remaining livestock and its feedstuffs had to be carefully conserved to provide the source for next season’s sustenance.
The whole week leading up to Easter Sunday is very special, very poignant. It begins with Palm Sunday processions re-enacting Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem when the people cast down palm branches before him as he rode in to the shouts of ‘Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord’. There is also a reading of one of the four accounts of the Passion of Christ. The others are read, each on their own individual day, later in the week. On Thursday - Maundy Thursday in this country - there is the mass celebrating the Last Supper and the institution of the Holy Eucharist. And in some places still, the re-enactment of the mandatum when Jesus washed his disciples’ feet and gave them a new mandate. ‘Behold, I give you a new commandment : that ye love one another.’ On Good Friday there are the quintessentially elaborate ceremonies recalling the crucifixion death and burial of Jesus.
Then the great interstice until the immensely powerful rituals of Easter Eve. (It begins with a Fire Festival.) The church is empty and in complete darkness. Outside the great west door, New Fire is kindled with flint and steel. The great Paschal candle is blessed and lighted from the fire. From this candle others are lit as clergy choir and people file into the church carrying the ‘Light of Christ’. The Paschal Exultet is chanted. Ancient prophesies are read. There is solemn procession to the font where the priest (as in an ancient fertility rite) ‘breathes upon the face of the water’ then he takes up the Paschal candle. Holding it vertically in both hands - it is about a metre long and proportionally thick - he dips its base three times into the newly consecrated water. The first time, he inserts it just a little; the second time, he takes it deeper; and the third time, it goes all the way. If there are new converts, they will be baptised now. And the first mass of Easter begins on the stroke of midnight. So there we have it - a Christianised fire festival and fertility symbolism still, at the climax of the Christian Year, showing unmistakable signs of its Pagan origins.


hand in hand together

To conclude, let me go gently through a complete year in the order of its significant events. I’ll begin in March because that was the first month of the year until the civil calendar was reformed in September 1752.
In March there are the two celebrations of new life : on the 21st, the Spring Equinox; and on the 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation - when the Angel Gabriel came to the Virgin Mary to tell her she would become the Mother of the Lord - and Mary sang Magnificat.

My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden and, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath magnified me and holy is his name.

On a Sunday nearby is Easter Day, still bearing the name of an Anglo-Saxon goddess and celebrating the paramount event of the Christian year: the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Sundays after Easter are likely to overlap with May 1st when Beltane revives old memories and when once the Feast of Saint Joseph the Workman called Catholics to their own particular devotion. And the whole of the month of May is dedicated to Mary, Our Lady, Queen of Heaven, who once walked the earth in mortal frame.
On a Thursday, 40 days after Easter, Christians celebrate Christ’s final Ascension into heaven. (Like Moses and Elijah before Him, He was taken up in a cloud.) And in the week before this there have been three Rogation Days with Litanies for blessings on the fields and their crops.
The Sunday 50 days after Easter is Pentecost (Whitsunday in popular parlance) when the first disciples received the promised gift of the Holy Spirit – which descended on their heads like tongues of fire.
June 21st brings the Midsummer Solstice and June 24th follows with the Feast of Saint John the Baptiser, ‘the voice of one crying in the wilderness: “Make straight the way of the Lord”’. And in the foothills of the Pyrenees they still light ‘Saint John’s fires’ with appropriate ritual and ceremony.
Our Summer months are certainly times to focus the mind on country (and, therefore, Pagan) events. It was once the time for human resources to be deployed on the land. (Our universities still cleave to the Summer Long Vacation, as once they did to release all and sundry to go home and help in the fields.) The first sheaf from the corn harvest is taken to be ground and baked into a loaf for the first Harvest Eucharist, the thanksgiving for blessings explicitly received. On August 1st we still have Lammas, the Loaf Mass, a day shared by Christians and Pagans alike.
August 25th is marked by the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, the Great Mother, the embodiment of all that is fine and good and desirable in the feminine. A transference of attributes from even older personifications of the Mother of us all. It is one of the more recent introductions into the sacred kalendar. The early days of Christianity held to a concentration on the masculine, paternalism, and the power of a patriarchal society. In later times of Crusading, veneration of the feminine returned to the Western World and with it a growth of devotion to Our Lady. Today, the wise ones cherish the balance of the genders, the intercourse of the sexes (without which there can be no new life) and the wholeness that each individual achieves when the masculine and the feminine within meld into one harmonious equality.
The Fullness of the Harvest comes with Pagan Mabon on September 23rd : the Autumn Equinox, a time of thanksgiving, and of setting aside a tangible token for the coming year. Harvest Festivals are a more modern re-introduction into parts of the Christian church when one and all give voice that ‘All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin’. And on the 29th of the month, Michael the Archangel, Guardian of the High Places, looks down benignly on the land and his people below.
The Wheel of the Year turns. Summer metamorphoses into late Autumn. The men and their herds return from the summer pastures. Spirits and souls of the righteous are near at hand for Samhain at the end of October. And on the 1st of November, the church has All Saints’ Day, a remembrance especially for those not given their own particular Saint’s Day at other times in the year. And on the 2nd of November is the Commemoration of All Souls, a day of requiem for ‘those known unto us’ who have passed beyond this earthly bourne. The Christian All Hallows and the Pagan Samhain, how they do interweave!
And so we come to Yule. Midwinter. The solstice. Germanic. Norse. Roman. The Holly King. The fir tree. The sprig of Mistletoe. The Saviour of the World. The Yule log burns on the festive hearth and the candles gleam bright for the Midnight Mass.
Then on to the beginning of February, when the ice begins to melt on frozen rivers and the first tiny shoots creep through earth kept warm by blankets of snow now disappearing. Life quickens in man and maid. The first intimations of new creation appear ever more and more greening the landscape. Imbolc is with us. Bride spans both Pagan and Christian kalendars. Candlemass blesses the waxen cylinders for sacred use in the coming year. Mary goes to the Temple for ritual Purification, taking the babe for Presentation. The agéd Jewish priest Simeon sings Nunc dimittis servum tuum, domine.

Lord, now lettest thou, thy servant, depart in peace. For mine eyes have seen thy salvation which thou hast prepared before the face of all people to be a light to lighten the gentiles and to be the glory of thy people Israel.

After the death of Winter, comes new life with the Spring. As surely as, after the going down of the sun with the onset of night, there is new life with each returning dawn. The Wheel turns. My beginning is my end and mine end is my beginning

et in saecula saeculorum amen

So mote it be