Hello and welcome to my personal, unhinged, reflections upon the Winter Solstice, the Goddess of Death and Hope, and why i suspect I may have been possessed by the spirit of a very hungry and horny bear.
I’ve spent the past few weeks immersed in researching the history of those who came before me, the mindset of the primordial spirit of Earth, and my archetypal Goddess of winter, history, labor-craft trades. When I say archetypal goddess, that means I don’t worship a specific, named goddess. Rather I identify a much broader Archtype I think exists in the collective human consciousness, either because we all share subconscious associations due to our common heritage, or because when we die, maybe we leave behind pieces of our soul that group together and form the gods and spirits we worship. Kind of like the logical conclusion of ancestral spirits and ancestral worship. So imagine how I managed to jump scare myself when over the course of my Winter research, i came across a video about Cailleach, the Celtic goddess of winter, death, protection, family, labor, and wisdom learned through harsh lessons.
Sounds VERY MUCH like my own private Creatrix, or who I call The Elder in my four sister Pantheon. Much like i believe my Goddess to be basically primordial in age, so too is Cailleach thought to be older than the Celtic religion. I’ve never heard of her before making my little pantheon, so these similarities really make me think I’m on to something here. There are a lot of broad stroke similarities, but also many differences. I don’t believe the Elder to be a storm Goddess (instead i associate her with earth and stone) nor do I place my Creatrix into such strict and traditional gender roles (Cailleach seems to be strongly associated with virgin-mother-grandmother pipeline, everything about feminine identity having to do with sex and marriage status)
I was surprised again to find a Celtic version of my Goddess of Love, War and Justice, Morrigan (also strange since my chosen name is Morgan) whom is the goddess of war, fate, justice, and being an adversarial quality tester of people in authority. Sounds like my kind of girl.
Don’t know much else about her than that, but I think this demonstrates the strange phenomena i found, and I suspect this idea of being able to reconstruct fundamental ideas from first principles is key to understanding the goal of the Druid-revival movement. Almost everything about the original druids is gone, we have no idea if what we’re doing is even close to what the OGs stood for, but we have to have faith that if we open ourselves up to Nature and the Spirits of the world, they will help guide us, as they did for our ancestors. And that maybe what we’re doing helps the Spirits and Nature in turn, so we may all live in mutual empowerment.
In northern European cultures, Mid-Winter is generally a time for feasting, family, gift giving, and a relaxing of social norms as we’re all just happy to not freeze to death. In Native American cultures, Mid-Winter is the start of the story-telling season. It is a time for huddling around a fire and passing on knowledge (no way you could get those kids to sit still and listen any other way, I’m guessing) and stories are seen as living beings with spirits and wills of their own, so story tellers and musicians hold sacred positions in keeping those stories alive. The tribe remembers the stories, keeping them alive, and the stories in turn continue to protect and guide the tribe. A way cooler concept in my opinion than Christmas, which is just Yule but in a culturally appropriated wrapping.
Speaking of cultural appropriation, I like the idea of stories being animate spirits, and winter being a time for gathering around and passing around knowledge so much I’m going to incorporate it into my own druidry practice. I’m going to talk my family into a story sharing circle to pair with the gift exchange of Yule/Christmas.
I’ve been studying to work a blue-collar labor job in Phoenix Arizona for the past few weeks. Part of the reason is because of my Creatrix’s associations with labor and the season, so in order to get to know her better it seemed appropriate to go and study a trade over the winter so I would be better positioned to take care of my family. I learned the culture in this kind of trade is very different than what I’m use to. No one is here because they are passionate about air conditioners. It’s simple, we’re all here in this boring ass job so we can work with a bunch of boring ass people and help take care of our families. That’s it. So the school really respects our time and makes the course very financially acceptable, and helps with job placement when we leave. There is no fluff or real emotion or connection. It’s all bare bones stuff tailor made to help out the boring old dad start his forever dead-end job (I don’t think they noticed I’m trans and have boobs, or the concept makes them so uncomfortable they pretend not to know).
It’s a kind of hell, no one here has any interesting opinions or hobbies, it’s all just awkward conversations about ‘the game’, fishing, bitching about relationship issues, and all other very safe and uncontroversial topics that don’t reveal anything about the individual except how willing they are to conform to general agreement with the crowd. It’s all just kind of fine.
Personally, I’d be ready to kill myself if I didn’t have my interesting hobbies to keep me stimulated. But this isn’t about me or my sense of self worth, or doing all I’m capable of, it’s about being able to get a job anywhere, and being able to make enough to take care of my family.
Immersing myself in this limbo of ‘it’s fine, not fulfilling’ goes against the grain of everything I use to be. I’ve been around the world, learned countless skills and countless lessons from so many interesting people, lead a sort of semi-nomadic life. I hate feeling like I’m the smartest or most interesting or insightful person in the room but wholly hell do these people have a case of NPC syndrome that makes me feel like the main character.
This is the lesson I feel the Elder has been trying to teach me. I have to deal with reality first, then I can fulfill my dreams.
Now I know what some of you are thinking, ‘What was that thing she was saying about being possessed by a horny bear again?’ Well we’re getting to that part!
So a vague association with winter and bears has been in the back of my mind since time immemorial, it wasn’t until this little working vacation that I dedicated some time to exploring that association. Injecting myself with Estrogen every week sometimes makes my life feel like a procedural comedy/drama, because the changes from the hormone comes in waves. One week i just feel kinda euphoric, one week I’m full of banger jokes, the next I’m depressed, or my tits hurt, put on weight super quick, get a week long headache.
Or in this case, one week I feel super hangry all the time, fantasize about having mind-blowing sex with hot strangers all day, and also feel the need to sleep all winter long. All at once. All the time. Puberty’s a bitch I can’t believe I’m making myself go through this again, except this time in episodic format.
So you can probably see how the timing of this made me want to look into the symbolic meaning of bears and winter to see what the universe was trying to tell me, and you might be surprised there’s an actual answer here:
Generally, bears symbolize strength, power, wisdom, introspection and protection. In native circles, they also generally symbolize medicine and healing. In celtic circles they additionally represent transformation.
In native mythology (keep in mind I’m white so I’m missing a lot of cultural context needed to truly understand these stories. I am not and expert no matter how much research I do.), bears can play powerful protectors of the forests, or horrible and unstoppable savage monsters. In the story of the Stiff-legged Bear, which is thought to be a story of mastadons, not actual bears, but still, the Stiff-Legged Bears made war with all the animal nations of the Appalachian Mountains, not the combined might of all the other nations, including Human, could stop them, and it took the Creator themself hurling lighting from the sky to drive them back.
I notice in a lot of native stories, they aren’t concerned with justifying violence. Or diving into why characters do it and what makes it right. It doesn’t matter WHY the Stiff-Legged Bears were waging war, it could be because they were wronged somehow, or they were fighting to survive, or whatever else, but no reason seems to be given. All that matters is that they waged war, they hurt and killed members of the other nations, so they banded together to wipe them out.
I think the lesson is that violence is violence. It is apologetically what it is like a wild fire or a storm. Violence causes problems when missused, like starting a war by committing offense, or using it to get your way within the tribe. But can also restore or preserve balance when used well, like a prescribed fire can lead to a healthy forest, or a storm can water a forest and rip away weak or dying trees. Violence, when used in fierce protection, or to right a wrong, can lead to a better outcome for all. It isn’t inherently good or bad, but there are inherently good or bad outcomes from using it. And it doesn’t matter if you FEEL justified or that you were right in your use of violence, if the family of the man you killed chose to go war with you over it, then it is what it is and the consequences are the consequences.
This kind of subltey changed the way I see violence. I’ve tried for so many years to come up with this moral framework to fit violence into, but this one clicks for me. It doesn’t really matter what I think and feel about what needs to be done (not necessarily about violence, but also small things like this job) we still have to suffer the consequences, so I need to judge the morality of an action by the consequences it has, not ascribing some inherent moral value to the action itself.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention: For the Solstice yesterday, I made myself a new pair of shoes (a Dedication to The Elder rather than an Offering, which gave me whole new insights into how I approach my crafts,) and hiked up the tallest mountain I could find in this city, and shared the most beautiful sunset with all the gods and spirits that joined in my SOP. All this training, study, and preparation really paid off with a beautiful evening.