Q-zone: Oh Mary

Oh Mary!

by Terry Roethlein

Terry Roethlein is an activist, writer, filmmaker, and a priest-ess of the Goddess. Terry lives in New York City and is a vital part of the Radical Faerie community.

The traditional term for the Winter Solstice, "Yule," comes from the Norse word "iul," for wheel, the universal symbol for the cycle of life as well as the Sun, the source of all warmth and organic growth on the Earth. December 21 marks the longest night of the year, as well as the beginning of winter, the coldest and most barren season of the agricultural calendar. Paradoxically, immediately following the Solstice the days grow longer and the sun's light more intense. This theme of forbidding darkness and death pre-empted by light and rebirth runs consistently throughout the traditions and history surrounding the holiday, and the Goddess plays a crucial part in all this.

In the old religions, December 21 signaled the death and rebirth of the Sun God, brought to fruition by the Goddess. This is the Life-in-Death aspect of the Goddess, Queen of the cold void of creation, who not only slays the Holly King, but who also gives birth to a Child of Promise, personified by the Oak King, who "rules" the second, brighter half of the year.

The paradoxical death/birth aspect of the virgin goddess in the Winter Solstice goes all the way back to ancient Egypt. This vegetation God Osiris, torn to pieces by his evil brother Set, is mourned by Isis, his sister/wife, who circles his shrine seven times and chants a dirge. While a priestess would embody Isis, celebrants would burn oil lamps outside their homes all night, and at midnight priests would announce from the temple the joyous arrival of the child Horus, the reborn Sun God and son and lover to the virgin Isis.

Ancient Greeks observed the Winter Solstice by celebrating the Lenaea, in which Nine Wild Women, reenacting the death and rebirth of the harvest god Dionysus, would tear a god "stand-in" to pieces and then devour the morsels. Over time, only goat sacrifices were made and the Nine would evolve into mere mourners who witnessed the rebirth of the god.

With the dawn of the Christian era, the birth of the son of Yahweh, the "Son of Man," was strategically placed just a few days after the Solstice as a means of vampirizing the pagan holiday. Of course, by now the significance of the Mother Goddess, or the Queen of Heaven, was drastically altered by the introduction of Mary, the mortal, virgin mother of Jesus. In a remarkably successful attempt to replace the popular cult of Isis as well as the virgin/mother cults of Artemis, Demeter and Athena, Church elders in the 5th Century A.D. graduated Mary to semi-divine "sainthood," in the process stripping away vital traits such as her sexuality and the fiery potency that characterized her pagan predecessors. Nevertheless, although she was doomed to domination by a questionably more powerful deity, Mary evolved into a greatly cherished and abundantly nurturing benefactress with a formidable cult of her own. And in keeping with the rebirth motif, Mary participates, however passively, in the sacrifice of her miraculously conceived god-son, witnessing his degradation by the Romans and standing below him at his bloody crucifixion.

Just as the Christian divinities are bastardized reworkings of the old religions' deities, virtually all of the Winter Solstice traditions that we see today have their origins in an earth-based and goddess-informed rebirth cycle. The phenomenon of Saint Nicholas and the orgy of consumption he oversees as Santa Claus was borne out of the Nordic Holly King Woden, also known as Nik. The burning of the Yule log had its beginnings in the Yule bonfire, lit to feed the firepower of the Sun. The Christmas trees that now attest to our civilization's great disrespect for non-human life were originally symbolic Cosmic Trees of Life cut from the pine groves of the Mother Goddess with the greatest respect and hung with ornaments that were images of the sun, moon and stars. Gifts at the tree were offerings to slain Holly King deities such as Dionysus and Attis.

Finally, although the orgiastic rites that used to accompany the birth of the Oak King/Sun God are a far cry from the virtuous smooching that is now permitted under the mistletoe, perhaps those appetites still stir in the intoxicated gropings that go on at the annual office Xmas party. It's doubtful most people remember that the phallic mistletoe once carried healing powers and provided access to the Underworld or that its white berries symbolized the semen of the God while the red berries of the holly plant embodied the menstrual blood of the Goddess. Perhaps by remembering these ancient qualities we can once again invoke the magickal privileges they carry, and with them fulfill some of our sacred responsibilities toward the Earth Mother, which have been forgotten in the scramble to appease a Son of Man.