Many of the circles of standing stones have been found to align with specific sunrises or sunsets, or the appearance of the moon on the horizon. We have had to wait until computer graphics systems were developed before these ancient, mathematically accurate layouts of markers could be understood
for what they teach us about the wisdom of our ancestors. Stones, ditches, mounds, cuts in the horizon, straight and curved trackways, canals and pools, all have been deliberately engineered by ancient priests or scientists, to act as accurate calendars or time markers.
Time’s passage was always of importance to early people. Stone Age bone carvings track the pattern of the moon’s face through the sky in its twenty-nine-day passage from new to new again. It is likely that first tall poles and then heavy stones were carefully set to show the relationship between the sun and the seasons. Even before the time when the sowing of seeds introduced the very beginnings of agriculture, the passing seasons provoked interest and perhaps wonder in the early peoples of Britain and Europe.
Much scientific research has been centred on the calendar-like circles of stones, ignoring the fact that farmers then, as now, sowed seed when their own fields were dry and warm enough to allow them to flourish. Crops are harvested when they are ripe, or in order to save them from rough weather, not because some great stone sundial has marked out a particular day. Even the breeding of livestock has to be left to their own inclinations, when the ewes, cows or mares are receptive. A sunbeam falling on a particular spot in a sacred courtyard will not make the rams, stallions and bulls more willing. It might work in reverse, however; the farmers saw when their livestock mated and noted the time against these calendar-clocks, or recorded in some simple way where the sun rose when the soil was ready for sowing, or how the moon shone at harvest time.
This need for the organisation and activities of the people to follow the phases of Nature is largely overlooked now. Just as the monks of the early Church invented clocks and set fixed dates for their saints’ days, regulating the lives of all the people, so the modern witches often meet by the clock or the calendar instead of by the tides of the Earth Goddess and her Sky Lord. It is important to become aware of the actual phases of the moon, not by looking at a watch dial or printed poster on the wall, but by making the effort to go outside in the evening and look for the moon herself. It is worth rising early and seeing where and when the sun rises, for he too traces a different path along the horizon, from the north in summer to the south in winter.
If you are working alone, or with a friend or two, in the old manner, it will be easier for you to hold your celebration or meditation on the night of the new or full moon, at an equinox or solstice, or the first day after the snowdrops bloom in your winter garden.
Pre-Christian people in Europe worked out the passage of time in moon phases and because of this they probably had a moon-number of great festivals. The oldest seem to be the beginning of winter, the middle of winter and the end of winter. In summer they would probably be too busy to find time to gather and celebrate, working from dawn to dusk, hay making, weeding, tending livestock, shearing the sheep, then reaping the corn and stocking it, and carrying it into the barns and threshing out the grain. Then there would be the gathering of wild and cultivated fruits and vegetables and fungi to be stored for the ‘hungry gap’ of the winter.
In autumn, the beasts would be brought in from the hills and woods and some slaughtered and salted down for the winter. Fat would be rendered both for eating and to burn as lamp oil. At each change of occupation it would be Nature herself who would instruct the people what to do. Gradually several
overlapping patterns began to emerge, and it is from the cycles of the life of the land and the farm stock, and the magical lives of the Goddess and the God, that some of the festivals which are celebrated by modern pagans began to develop.
I think that if some of the witches of today thought more about the actual workings of Nature and less of book-bound, set knowledge, they would gain more power in their magics, more joy in their celebrations, and a greater sense of unity with their ancestors and the ancient faith they aim to follow. It was, after all, the Church that fixed the dates of the old Festivals, and it is from that restrictive form of belief that most of them are trying to untangle themselves! This is especially true at the end of the twentieth century, when it seems that great changes are occurring in our weather systems; spring is coming earlier in the south of Britain, with more winter rain, high winds and overflowing waterways.
Nature marked out the turning seasons with a series of alternating White and Green harvests, and it was from these that the original nine feasts came to be established. You don’t have to take my word for it, but look out of your window, observe and take note of those outdoor happenings which presage every change of season.
All over the world, the Goddess is seen or known as the White Goddess. White flowers, clothes or offerings have always been associated with her, from the snowy-white icefields of the north, to the white-hot burning deserts on the equator; to the southern lands, lying under the Long White Cloud. We see it today in the white dresses of brides at their marriage, when the young lady, for that day, represents the Goddess to her husband; in the white costumes, with their bells, ribbons and flowers, of the Morris Men, ‘Mary’s Men’, dancing in honour of the White Goddess. Even in India, a land where white is a colour of mourning, it is into the hands of the Goddess of Death, with her white face, that the departed soul will travel.
The White harvests represent stages in the lives of the Goddess and the God, defined at a moment when a certain kind of power was to be felt, and perhaps shared with the people. The ‘green’ festivals are set around the solar agricultural dates of the Equinoxes and Solstices. The old rites were simple and largely intuitive affairs, when a whole village or community would come together to act out part of the Old Ones’ story, to renew the bonds of dedication to the Lord and Lady, and those ties of kinship within the human relationships, or forge new ones.
There was no priest to intercede between the people and their deities, for even in the pre-Christian Celtic era when the Druids held sway, they seemed to have acted more as guides or masters of ceremonies than controllers of the ritual. Everyone in the community probably made a small offering, asked a boon, or offered prayers of thanksgiving, as appropriate to the season. If there was speech, it was from the heart and Goddess-given inspiration rather than set-piece sermons or regulated supplications.
As most such celebrations were carried out in fields or woods or sacred circles of standing stones, it is likely that much of the action was mime, just as today’s mumming plays enact the story of Life and Death, Summer and Winter, with a variety of local characters depicted. Song and dance too would have played a part in such gatherings, with music, drumming and probably the playing of games like those country children still play. Often those who acted out the characters of the story of the Old Ones
would be chosen by lot, with symbols baked into a cake, or hidden in a bag.
This allowed the God or Goddess to cast his or her part without the intervention of human will. When this method of choosing the parts for a ritual or celebration is used, those so chosen play their parts far better than might be imagined, even if they do not exactly fit the archetype they portray.
Starting at the beginning of the Celtic year, around the end of October in the modern calendar, when the first hard frost whitened the grass, shrivelled any green stuff and iced over a shallow puddle, the community began their preparations for winter. Cattle and pigs and sheep which had roamed the unfenced fells, moors or woodland would be brought back to the farmyards or perhaps one of the great earthworks which dot the southern hilltops. It would be a great round-up and time for sorting out the stock.