Another Life: the magic of the winter solstice
Mistletoe, druids, myth and magic in Ireland
Two in the bush: mistle thrushes feeding on mistletoe. Illustration: Michael Viney
Solstice is a fine soft word to slip off the tongue. It comes, the web tells me, via Old French from the Latin solstitium – sol for the sun and sistere,
to stand still, which was one way of understanding Earth’s significant
tilt tomorrow and the consequent shortest day of the year.
The
wilder corners of west Connacht abound in big rocks – standing, carved
or aligned – with a role in Stone Age calendars and magic. The east
coast’s great megalithic monuments, Knowth and Dowth, open their stony
hearts to the rise of the sun at dawns around the winter solstice. The
west has simple rows of rocks, lining up with the sun as it sets into
some chosen mountain notch in Connemara or Mayo.
Around
the corner of my coast, Croagh Patrick’s pyramidal sanctity has
warranted several such marvels. They include a row of boulders on a
mound in a saltmarsh (at Killadangan, five kilometres west of Westport)
where, at 1.45pm tomorrow, they should align spot on with the sun as it
dips into a niche in the shoulder of the Reek.
More spectacular is the happening
on a clear evening on August 24th, when, from a carved rock at Boheh, on
a hillside east of the Reek, the setting sun appears to roll down the
edge of the mountain’s seaward scarp like a flaming Catherine wheel.
It
will, however, be quite dark tomorrow by the time I join friends at
their annual winter-solstice party, complete with bonfire to celebrate
the true turning of the year. While its ruddy light may not quite reach
Croagh Patrick, across the bay, the mountain’s looming presence and the
roar of surf on the shore always give the evening a proper druidic
spice.
Little is known about the druids of
Ireland, considering their role as professional power brokers in
dealings with Iron Age nature. What I find intriguing about them is how –
or whether – they managed their magic without mistletoe.
Notable
now as a predator’s wand at Christmas office parties, it was then the
indispensable “golden bough” of druids throughout the Celtic continent.
This was the title of the monumental study of magic and religion by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer,
first published in 1922. The Roman Pliny, in his natural history, was
first to link druid rituals with the parasitic plant, but it was Frazer
who traced its role in so much European myth and magic (none of which
seems to have involved uninvited osculation).
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