An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Yule

Yule is the Anglo-Saxon word for the festival of the winter solstice. Our celebration of Christmas is compounded of several different traditions, Celtic, Roman and Saxon, with the whole adapted later to Christianity.

The Celtic festival of the winter solstice was called by the Druids Alban Arthan, according to Bardic tradition. It was then that the Chief Druid cut the sacred mistletoe from the oak, a custom that still lingers, with our use of mistletoe as a Christmas decoration. Mistletoe is usually banned from churches at Christmas, owing to its pagan associations. However, at York Minster there used to be a different custom, which Stukeley, the eighteenth-century writer on Druidism, notes: “On the Eve of Christmas Day they carry Mistletoe to the high Altar of the Cathedral and proclaim a public and universal liberty, pardon, and freedom to all sorts of inferior and even wicked people at the gates of the city, towards the four quarters of Heaven.”

This custom was undoubtedly a relic of Druidry. York is a very old city, known to the Romans as Eboracum.

The idea of holding festival at the winter solstice, to celebrate the rebirth of the sun, was so universal in the ancient world that the Christians adapted the popular feast into the celebration of the birth of Christ. No one really knows when Christ’s birthday was; but by holding this feast at midwinter, Christ was mystically identified with the sun.

The Romans celebrated the winter solstice with a merry festival called the Saturnalia. The winter solstice takes place when the sun enters the sign of Capricorn; and Saturn, the ruler of Capricorn, was supposed to have been the ruler also of the far-off Golden Age of the past, when the earth was peaceful and fruitful, and everyone was happy. So at this time of year the houses were decked with the boughs of evergreen trees and bushes, all normal business was suspended, and social distinctions were temporarily forgotten in the atmosphere of festival. The servants and slaves were given a feast, and the masters waited on them at table. People gave each other presents, and the Saturnalia became a byword for riotous fun and merriment.

The pagan Saxons celebrated the feast of Yule, with plenty of ale and with blazing fires, of which our Yule Log is the last relic. The latter is the midwinter, indoor equivalent of the outdoor bonfires on Midsummer Eve. Its ritual nature is made evident by the fact that there was an old custom, ’for luck’, of saving a piece of the Yule Log to kindle the next year’s Christmas blaze.

The word Yule, according to Bede and various other authorities of the olden time, is derived from an old Norse word Iul, meaning a wheel. In the old Clog Almanacs, the symbol of a wheel was used to mark Yuletide. The idea behind this is that the year turns like a wheel, the Great Wheel of the Zodiac, the Wheel of Life, of which the spokes are the old ritual occasions, the equinoxes and solstices, and the four ’cross-quarter-days’ of Candlemas, May Eve, Lammas and Halloween. The winter solstice, the rebirth of the sun, is a particularly important turning point.

Hence modern witches celebrate Christmas with a will; only they recognise it as Yule, one of the great Nature festivals of old. They deplore the money-grabbing materialism which is taking all the old-fashioned happiness out of Christmas, and turning it into a commercialised racket.

Alban Arthan, the Saturnalia, Yuletide or Christmas, the midwinter festival was traditionally a happy time. With the rebirth of the sun, the giver of warmth, light and life, people had something to be genuinely happy about; and all kinds of merry old customs, rooted in the distant pagan past, thrived in the English countryside.

People in those days had no mechanical entertainment, such as the cinema, radio or television. They made their own fun, and kept up old customs because they enjoyed them. Christmas lasted a full twelve days, and work did not start again until Plough Monday. In many places, to make sure that all the winter festivities were duly observed, a Lord of Misrule was elected, a kind of make-believe king of merriment.

It is significant that the reign of the Lord of Misrule was said to begin on Halloween and to end at Candlemas. Both of these dates are Great Sabbats; at Halloween the Horned God, the principle of death and resurrection, comes into his own at the beginning of the Celtic winter season; while at Candlemas the first signs of spring appear.

The evergreens for Yuletide decorations were holly, ivy, mistletoe, the sweet-smelling bay and rosemary, and green branches of the box tree. By Candlemas, all had to be gathered up and burnt, or hobgoblins would haunt the house. In other words, by that time a new tide of life had started to flow through the world of nature, and people had to get rid of the past and look to the future. Spring-cleaning was originally a nature ritual.

The old mumming plays, which were and in some places still are part of English Yuletide festivities, are linked with the rebirth of the sun. Saint George in shining armour comes forth to do battle with the dark-faced ’Turkish Knight’. Saint George is the sun, slaying the powers of darkness. They fight, and the dark knight falls. But the victor immediately cries that he has slain his brother; darkness and light, winter and summer, are complementary to each other. So on comes the mysterious ’Doctor’, with his magical bottle, who revives the slain man, and all ends with music and rejoicing. There are many local variations of this play, but the action is substantially the same throughout.