Solstice Ceremonies, 🕯️Vigils, Gifts, and Gods

Perhaps you’ve been preparing to circle about these fires with your fellow mages and mystics…in person, or in the ethers?

Perhaps you’re ready to help rebirth the sun and re-create our worlds, our relationships, and the shape of our soul’s imprint in our material realities?

In many ways, you are already doing it without even trying — guided by the strength of your ancestral spirits who live in each lingering ritual gesture of the holiday season.

In this missive, I will merely suggest ways that you can do this work with more intention, potency, and directness…

….giving you massively more rewarding results than the usual holiday weight gain, hangovers, and seasonal depression.

As I mentioned in my last email, we still have ample, deeply rooted, and rich traditions that hail back to those who have long done this world of rebirthing the sun for their families, villages, and civilizations.

For example, the central function of the enormous temple complex at Newgrange in Ireland (which is over 5,000 years old) seems to have been the winter solstice ritual.

Druids took up this practice in later years, keeping sacred bonfires to aid the dying sun in his battle and managing the passage of souls with sacred plants that we surround ourselves with now: Holly, Mistletoe, and Evergreens.

In Egypt, priests lifted the spine of Osiris and placed the sun at its top as his head much as we lift our Christmas trees and place a star at its crown.

Siberian shamans have long flown with the aid of Amanita mushrooms into this longest night to confront the darkness and bring back warmth and wisdom to their people. These flights live on in our lore around flying reindeer and the red and white of Santa Claus’ sacred attire.

What has not lingered in our culture; however, is a ritual for meeting and confronting the darkness and the beings that live there…a necessary step if we are looking for real change and healing in our lives and our world.

In our culture, few of us have Druids, priests, or shamans to brave the darkness on our behalf and help shape the world that will emerge come spring.

However, I promise, you are more than up to the task yourself, should you choose to take up that mantle and step into that sacred circle of the etheric solstice fires.

(Winter Solstice painting by Mary Louise Holt)

The darkness that you have to meet on your journey has been given many shapes and faces throughout the ages: Krampus, Gryla and her yule lads, Satan, the kallikantzaroi, the wild hunt.

These beings, whether you meet them in the flesh during your journey or not, are absolutely alive and well within us.

These incarnations of death, darkness, and wild abandon serve a vital function in societies that face winter’s harshness to temper and strengthen our soul.

The krampuses and yule lads show us, through trial and tribulation, the vital importance our cultural values and stories, our personal integrity and honor, and our connection to the eternal sun that lives within our hearts.

In short, these beings of darkness reinforce the importance of community, generosity, and compassion….those most human of values that make our lives worth living.

In the face of winter and the harshness of the world, we are tempted as a culture to embody that harshness ourselves.

👹 We want to steal from others when our resources run dry.

👹 We want to talk to trash on our neighbors when we feel like we are failing.

👹 We want to turn out or tune out those who are suffering or displaced when we feel like we don’t have enough ourselves.

👹 We are tempted to become monsters in a world where monsters reign.

Winter solstice ceremonies help us to connect to the deities, the plant allies, and the fae beings who keep humanity connected to their inherently solar natures…and give them the opportunity to strengthen and renew themselves along with the sun.

If you feel called to take up this task for yourself, I recommend a rather universal custom: an all night vigil to journey to the sun through the darkness and help him rebirth himself come morning.

Below I will leave a few instructions for your solstice vigil, should you choose to journey with us.

✨ Tend an all-night fire or else keep a candle (or many!) burning throughout the night

✨ Create a beautiful altar with your yule log (a log decorated with love and intention) as a centerpiece that you burn (or bury) before the sun rises.

✨ Prepare songs, stories, and prayers that you will fill the space with throughout the long night.

✨ Wear ceremonial clothing that is comfortable and represents the beauty and strength that you wish to bring into the world.

✨ Prepare a space and create an environment where you can relax in waves into liminal spaces but not fall asleep or lose connection to your conscious mind (this takes practice)

There are many rituals that we can perform during this vigil; however, there is only one vital task for you to take up on this journey…

… and that work will happen in the light trance state that you cultivated to merge your conscious and subconscious mind.

Your work in this beautiful liminal state will be done with the steed or the ally that you began forming a relationship with last week during the Sagittarius new moon.

🎄 Take up your drum, close your eyes, set your inner gaze wide, and begin focusing your attention on the dance your breath and blood as it subtly moves your body.

🎄 When your trance is effective you will feel portals open and become more aware of the viscosity of the air around you.

🎄 Call in your steed (or any other guide who appears) when you feel this shift. You will ride off to find the sun together.

🎄 How the sun looks in your vision/journey will vary from person to person, culture to culture.

The ancient Egyptians traveled to find pieces of Osris’ body. You may too travel to find a dismembered god.

You may seek a tree. You may seek a version of yourself. You may find a brilliant fire.

🎄 When you find the sun, you will know.

Your body will become warmer. Your heart will beat louder. Your body will relax.

However, before you find him, you will be tested, distracted, grieved, angered, dismayed, annoyed….whatever emotions are keeping you from fully connecting with the sun within you and without you will emerge to be purged. In this purging of emotion, you will forge the strength of your spirit and your body’s connection to its eternal allies.

🎄 Within the journey these tests will take various faces and forms.

The more that you can greet them in personified form within the journey, the more information you will receive about how to deal with them in the waking world.

If you are successful, they will never both you in the same way again in your waking life. If you are not successful, you will know much better how to deal with them when they emerge again….as long as you stay conscious during the process.

🎄 Leave the sun with a gift…a piece of yourself that no longer seems to fit before you bid him farewell in each journey.

🎄 Between journeys during your vigil, sing.

Use your voice to pray, to chant, to fill your space with your vibration…with your desires, your griefs, your love, your joy, your hope your vision.

🎄 There are many sacred plants that you could commune with and burn during your journey…some are special to the season, some will be special to you and your ancestors or the ancestral people of the lands where you live.

I look forward to seeing you on the other side of your journey, whether you choose to hold a vigil or simply be with your family in song, prayer, and laughter during these longest nights, the sun will be reborn for us all and joy will have a chance.

Those of you who choose or are fated to carry heavier loads, I tip my hat to you in your great work.

It takes many hands to lift a great tree or the body of a god. It takes many nimble limbs to place the sun back in the sky. I am honored to share this task with you all.