Today is Friday which still bears the name of the Saxon goddess who came to Britannia with the ancestors of the English. Our other weekdays still relate to the Old Gods of those ancestors : Saturn Sun Moon Tiw Woden Thor. Perhaps the observance of Saturn Sun Moon overlapped from Roman times as the names of their divinities ‘ruling’ three of the more significant days of the week. And perhaps, in due time, it was local British women who merged their observances with those of their Saxon menfolk.
We read in the First Book of Moses how the world was created in six days so that the Creator rested on the seventh. And that’s how we come to have a seven-day week with the Sabbath as our day of rest. We probably think of it as a Jewish idea. It is – but it’s one of those brought back from Babylon when the Captivity was ended – and from there it made its way, via the empire of Alexander the Great, to the Roman Empire of Constantine who decreed, in the year 321, that the law courts and the markets should be closed and silent on each Day of the Sun.
We can still see reproductions of the old diagrams with the Earth as the centre of a series of concentric circles, each circle being the path of one of the heavenly bodies influencing the earth and its people, each heavenly body being the manifestation of an ancient divinity. In the Latin language their names are still with us ; dies solis, the day of the sun ; dies lunae, the day of the moon ; dies martis, the day of Mars ; dies mercuri, the day of Mercury ; dies iovis, the day of Jupiter ; dies veneris, the day of Venus ; dies saturni, the day of Saturn, the father of Jupiter.
I find it interesting that the Latin names tend to imply distant gods with homes in heaven whereas the Saxons – and, later, the Vikings – kept constant company with their gods. That’s why, today, Wiccans can still say with confidence : we step into the world between the worlds and we are at one with the goddess and our gods.
francis cameron, 12 november 2010
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