editorial
by Melanie Fire Salamander
The end of a millenium comes. Or, if we follow the ancient Celts, we are in a new year already. For the Celts, the dark always came first: the eve before the day, the year's dark half before its light. Within that dark, the Winter Solstice symbolizes for us northerners the return of the Sun. In this issue, Damian muses on the Sun's rising, the birth of a new solar age. Donna M. Pinkston places the Sun against the background of other stars in Stellar Magick astrology.
Solstice for pagans of European heritage means Yule, Yule with its intertwined relationship with Christmas. We can recover from Christmas, that most pagan of Christian holidays, the twinkling lights on a bough (tannenbaum thanks to the Germans) and kissing under the mistletoe (thanks to the Celts and Norse). Nothing for me calls up a certain solstice magick like ornaments sparkling on a tree: little worlds, little galaxies and the woods brought inside. In this issue, Janice van Cleve describes her take on the magick that rules the world - the art of changing consciousness at will. George D. Jackson likewise discusses magick, specifically ceremonial magick, and the creation of a pole of power. Shiela Baker describes another different kind of magick, the healing magick of a shamanic journey.
This year I myself journeyed, back to my family home in Missouri, bringing back some of my mother's Christmas ornaments, fragile blown-glass things that fascinated me as a child. I will put them on my tree. That tree for me is a Yule tree, a fir indoors, whom I thank for giving its life. The tree brought indoors has all sorts of pagan resonance. Seasonal celebrants in the North of Europe for centuries decked interiors with holly, ivy, fir, pine, bayberry, rosemary and branches of the evergreen box shrub. The decorated fir is also sacred to Attis, a dying and rising god well-known to the writers who described the dying and rising Judeo-Christian Christ.
Yule is a time of resonance, of heritage. In this issue Catherine Harper writes of her grandmothers, real and imagined. Heritage looks forward, too, and Sienna gives us pointers on how to include our children in ritual. To our family of birth or choice, we give gifts, as our pagan forebears the Romans exchanged wax fruit, candles and dolls at Saturnalia - fruit for fertility, candles for the customary new fires of solstice, dolls perhaps as a remnant of human sacrifice. (So many Barbies beheaded, so many years! Not to mention Kens, and GI Joes.) For your informed gift-giving, Sylvana reviews calendars and date-books, and a book on Yule. Catherine covers The Wicca Cookbook. BlackCat not only provides his Speculum news but inspects The Wiccan Warrior, and Bronwynn reports on a talk by that book's author, Kerr Cuhulain, a Wiccan policeman from Canada.
The Yule gifts are opened, the paper lies scattered all over the floor, we lie back sated in our chairs from a Yule feast. I read once that nothing persists like a holiday. People don't want to give up their traditional parties. The peasants, the rural folk, the heathens, the pagans don't care what religion they nominally are - they want the symbols, they want the gifts, they want the drink, they want the feasts. In the words of the immortal song appropriated as "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" but clearly reflecting an ancient human impulse: "Oh, bring us a figgy pudding; oh, bring us a figgy pudding; oh, bring us a figgy pudding... bring some out here!"
Love and joy come to you, and may the God and Goddess rest you and send you a happy New Year.
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