Lighting the Imbolc Fire

Well, naturally we had to light another one. After all, it's a festival, is imbolc. Whatever it's all about.

I always reckon you can never have too many bonfires. Although, to be honest, this is one of the coldest bonfire days for ages. The Beaker Fertility Folk were hoping for the first rites of spring, but took to wandering around moodily wearing hoodies and thick coats.

At least at this time of the year there's a good reason  for lighting fires. They keep you warm. When the broken pallets started to run out we switched to any old brushwood we could find.

But then Young Keith got all over-enthusiastic. I suppose, in retrospect, that cutting down that leylandii to throw it on the fire was deeply appropriate on this, the last day of the Christmas/Epiphany cycle. It was like the last remnant of Christmas had gone. But fresh leylandi, even in the depths of winter, doesn't burn that well. The smoke was horrendous.

So we're back inside now. We've celebrated something - whatever that something was. And we all smell like car air-fresheners. I've had better celebrations.

Dragging you forward

It always drags you forward, religion.

Take today's twin celebrations of Imbolc and Candlemas. As with most celebrations, strikes me that their co-incidence is just that - a coincidence, since one is dated as half way from the Solstice to the Equinox, while the other is dated as 40 days after Xmas, which is 9 months after the Annunciation which is dated at a "perfect" Good Friday (25 March), which is dated for a modified calculation of the day after Passover, which is based on the date of the full moon after the Vernal Equinox. Which is why Imbolc and Candlemas co-incide. So the really interesting "fact" in the co-incidence of former Western religious festivals and Christian ones is that the human gestation period is approximately 9 months. Phew.

Now Imbolc is, as much as anyone can tell me, about the lifecycle of sheep. About this time of year the ewes are getting ready to have their lambs - a sign of spring, and mutton to come. While Candlemas is about the cross. About the child who was born at Christmas, but can't stay in the stable anymore. We've been thinking about God-with-us, and now we're thinking about God-leading-us. Leading us to Jerusalem, and we know what happens there.

They're both forward-looking. Christmas and Yule were forward-looking - one to the lengthening of the daylight, one to the growing of the light. The Solstices are the tipping points - the length of the days change very slowly. You can rest there for a while, but the reminder is that, though at Winter Solstice the winter's coldest is to come, the days are growing longer. While the darkness is at its height, there's a light shining in it which the darkness can't recognise.

And now the length of days is racing ahead. Yet the shepherds must look to long nights of work as new life starts to force its way into the world, anticipating the Spring. And the Christian looks forward, too. To new Easter life,but that life springing from the bloodied ground of Good Friday. The light is growing, but that light shows up the darkness in people's hearts and lives.

Have a happy Imbolc or Candlemas, whoever you are.

Imbolc Eve

Now everybody's been asking why we can't "just celebrate Candlemas like everyone else" tomorrow. Why, the Beaker People have been asking, can't we just light some candles and have another happy Christmassy thought about the Baby Jesus? What's with instead celebrating an ancient British festival that has some indefinable connection to the reproductive cycle of sheep?

To which I normally reply "because." I know some think that's an unacceptable answer but really it seems to work for me. It's short, for a start. Which frees up my time for other purposes.

But I do have some other reasons why. So I'd like to list them now. Then if all Beaker People could print themselves the list off and have a read they won't need to ask me. Maybe if this works, we can have them laminated (the copies of the list, not the Beaker People) and you can all keep them for next year.

The first is the answer to "Everybody else does it." Would you do everything that everybody else does? If you did you'd be calling for Fred the Shred, now he's been de-Sir-Fred-ed, to be beheaded as well. Which, to be fair, some of you are. But Drayton Parslow doesn't celebrate Candlemas because it has "-mas" in it. Although, strangely, he does celebrate Christmas. (And have you noticed it's less than 11 months away? I can't wait!)

The second is that the Feast of the Presentation of the Little Baby Jesus in the Temple is just a modern, liberal re-naming. The older name, the Purification of the Virgin Mary, tells us more about the inherent beliefs involved here. As is well known our ancestors (or at least those of our ancestors who were celibate and therefore were allowed to be the priests, vicars and bishops who ran the place) thought all sex was bad. Which was why I am now reflecting that they probably weren't our ancestors after all, and maybe it was just the other people who were our ancestors. That's the trouble when you start generalising about stuff you don't understand - you end up writing stuff that sound good but is actually drivel.

Where was I? Right. So if even Mary, who'd not had sex, had to undergo the rite of Purification, then clearly the whole business of reproduction was deeply flawed in those days, and a way to subjugate women. And that's too hard a thought for me to "unpack" right now. So I'll just assure you that it's a fact and that's why we're not celebrating Candlemas.

The second reason (or third, if you count both the first two) is that it's a shiny, candle-y kind of event. And yet this is the day we find out that the baby in Mary's arms is going to cause all kinds of upset, and Mary grief as well. And frankly it's just after Christmas, I've just paid the credit card bill and the weather's freezing solid and I don't think I can take any more sadness. The world's hard enough already. If it were just nice pictures of Baby Jesus, that we could project on the screen while playing Kendrick's Like a Candle Flame on ukulele and ocarina - fine. But all this growing up and dying horribly - not in February.

So tomorrow we're celebrating the ancient British festival of Imbolc. We don't know anything about it, so I can inform you that it's a happy kind of celebration. We will light some candles and drink the special Imbolc Cider we brewed last autumn and we'll play a happy video of baby lambs skipping through attractive but unthreateningly small amounts of new-fallen snow.

And we've a special dinner later. I thought roast lamb with all the trimmings would be appropriate. Or, for vegetarians, all the trimmings.

St Bride's Day / Imbolc Eve

Yes, you're right. That was a right strange mixture of music at today's ceremonies. Not everyone would have chosen to switch alternate songs between the Pogues, Enya and Westlife. But it's St Brigid/Bridget/Bride's Day. So we've had a little celebration of all things Oirish - if you like a kind of early St Patrick's Day but without the green beer.

Tomorrow is of course Imbolc. The day when we all mooch around wondering what on earth we're going to do without a groundhog to find out how long winter's going to last. But it's also Candlemas! So tonight we're going to light as many tea lights as we can find and see if we can blast the winter out.

Now in the past I've refused to bless the tea lights. What's the point, I always say, blessing something that only burns for one day, and then you have to buy another extortionately priced one in the Beaker Bazaar tomorrow. But I've changed my mind. In the great scheme of things, when you think about it, even the lifespan of a human being is as that of a gnat when compared to the life of the Universe - even if, like Drayton, you think it's only 6,000 years old and it's going to end next Wednesday.  So I've changed my mind. Carpe Diem, and let us gather our rosebuds, Caveat Emptor and all the rest of it. Let us bless short-lived things, for in the eternal Mind a moment will last forever. I'm completely sold.
And so, hopefully, will be a lot more tea lights.

The Massive Candle of Candlemas

I've introduced a new tradition this year.

It's happened once or twice in the past that we've collected up all the half-used tea lights around the place.  The first time I made a life-size model of Anthea Turner.  And the second, Young Keith produced a full-size wax car.
Well those were always very spontaneous, or - to put it another way - unstructured activities.  I think it would be nice if from now on, every Candlemas we gathered together all the odds and ends of tea lights, scented candles, earwax and what have you and created the Candlemas Massive Candle.  This year we've gone for a model of Richard Dawkins.  It's not that we particularly want to burn him in effigy - not again, at any rate.  It's more that, with all that essential oils in the scented candles, we like the idea of the good Professor (retired) giving off the calming odour of sanctity.  We hope that, as the smoke from our Massive Candle drifts off across the fields and down towards the M1, that heathen, Christian, atheists, Beaker People and Couldn't-Care-Lesses of all kinds will chill out, relax, stop shouting at each other and just get on for once.  Maybe some souls will be healed.  We like to think that, deep, down, it's what the Professor likes healing souls.
Next year we'll probably go for St Bride aka Bridget.  We're fond of her, her feast day's round about now, and she appeals to Celts, pagans and Catholics alike.  A bit like Bobby Davro, we suppose.

Imbolc

So a mixed start to the season of Imbolc (note - red hi-viz from now till Vernal Equinox).
Sometimes I wonder if we miss the obvious in worship. Take this morning. As we wandered out from the Great House to the Moot House, the pale pink moon, resolutely gibbous,was sinking away into the West over Woburn. While behind us, a red sun warmed our backs even on this frozen day, and made the grass - still vibrantly green beneath its frosty sheen - steam in our path. Truly a spiritual moment to savour.
And then we entered the Moot House, got through the first two verses of "When I feel quite touched" and Stacey, whose role it was to lead this morning, shouted "OK - let 'em in".
Now, maybe I'm just a bit fussy. I don't know. But driving a herd of sheep through the middle of an act of worship just feels wrong. The sheepdog didn't help either. Being trained to round up slow-thinking, wooly creatures he had six Beaker People in one corner for the entire Ceremony. Quite an achievement in a round building. The good news is that two of the sheep have joined the Beaker Course and are showing greater aptitude than the people they've replaced. And the shepherd tells me we can have our people back, just as soon as he can get them in off the fields. Apparently they're that breed of Beaker Folk that can get very attached to their patch of land.
Now can you all get back to the Moot House with buckets and shovels? We've some cleaning to do.

Important Imbolc Innovations

Apparently Imbolc (1 Feb) is an important day for thinking about the lactation of ewes.  Not being a subject in which I have a great interest, I didn't think about it for very long.  But that didn't stop Marston Mortaine for being arrested for sheep worrying.  Thank goodness it was Young Keith's uncle the police constable that caught him.  Marston's explanation, that he was just checking if the ewes were lactating, could have got him three years if it had made it to court.  As it was I'm not sure he wasn't pulling the wool over our eyes.  He's back in the Great House now, but looking a little sheepish.  We've told him he's baa-d.  But he assures us that  his innocence is as the whitest fleece that has been dyed in lye.  Whatever that is.

Imbolc and its Christian counterpart Candlesmas (2 Feb) are halfway from Winter Solstice to Vernal Equinox.  You could see it as the North-East of the year, if you imagine Yule as the North and Midsummer as the South.  In which case we can see that, at least in these climes, although the days are getting longer they're still very cold - North-East being the coldest wind direction round here.  In the Southern hemisphere please reverse all this.  You're presumably round about the warmest time of the year, but realising that the nights are getting longer. Go and have a beer... oh, you did already.

So it is a time for celebrating the return - albeit slow - of the light.  Knowing that from here on in the days will be lengthening rapidly, the warmth starting to return and - apparently - the ewes lactating.  Did the Ancients really have nothing better to celebrate?  It's got to be a long, cold, dark winter before the lactation of the ewes becomes a matter of much excitement.  Unless, presumably, you're a sheep.

Needless to say, the Beaker People celebrate Imbolc with a nice big bonfire.  No Wicker Person this time, though.  Nor, as Marston suggested, a Wicker Sheep.  And on Tuesday we're going to be celebrating Candlesmas with a Candle-lit parade round the grounds.
We realise that Tuesday we should be getting a groundhog (or, if you prefer, woodchuck) out to see what the weather is going to be like for the next six weeks.  But we're in enough trouble with Woburn Abbey as it is.  So instead, Burton will tomorrow be facilitating a three-hour seminar in applied xylozoomathematics, at which we will be able to work out precisely how much wood a wood chuck would chuck, in the unlikely event that it would chuck wood.
Apart from that, we've got the Community PA system set up.  At exactly 6am on Tuesday it switches across from Enya to "I've Got You Babe".  And then, rather amusingly, it will happen again Wednesday.  And Thursday.  And Friday.
It promises to be a big day tomorrow, and a long week all round.