Celebrating the Winter Solstice

The winter solstice is an astronomical event marking the point when the Earth’s tilt is farthest away from the sun, bringing the shortest day on the land. In the two weeks before the solstice, the days get noticeably shorter and, in the two weeks following it, the light begins to return as Earth begins her movement once again towards the sun.

The winter solstice occurs each year around the 21st of December and the celebration of it is the inspiration for Christmas. It’s an incredibly powerful time and many people are naturally attuned to the energies. Perhaps not surprisingly, people often ask me how best to celebrate or mark the winter solstice and that’s a really good question.

There’s a sense that we need to or should mark this time and there is a hunger to understand how. So what tools do we have?

When we think about it, the question of how to celebrate the winter solstice really comes down to our cultural traditions, as it’s celebrated and marked the world over. But what if we have lost our traditions?

In the UK, where I live, the ancestral spiritual traditions of the indigenous people of the land have gone. What remains has been Christianised, hence the celebration of Christmas. Many people in the UK are hungry to connect with older, Earth-based traditions that marked such pivotal moments as the winter solstice. Where do they go to find ancestral wisdom to help them connect in these ways?

In many of the countries the UK and other European countries conquered in colonial times, the indigenous people to those lands practiced an Earth-based spirituality. Whilst Christian missionaries did untold damage in eradicating these traditions and the colonial state caused devastating trauma in trying to destroy cultural traditions (and often the people themselves), the heart of the spiritual traditions of many colonised people often survives.

Since the 1960s, there has been a surge of interest from (mainly) white Europeans in learning and often reframing many of the surviving Earth-based spiritual traditions of colonised people, particularly within the American continent but also elsewhere, such as India and North Africa.

Whilst many of these colonised people continue to struggle to revive their own traditions and survive in conditions strongly similar to that endured during the height of the colonial era, the European or settler interest in their spiritual traditions has often been fraught with challenges.

For instance, many Native Americans accuse people of stealing or appropriating their spiritual traditions and ceremonies, spiritual items such as dreamcatchers and plant medicine such as white sage and Ayahuasca.

Whilst Native Americans continue to be the poorest people within the American continent and continue to fight for land and cultural rights, many non-Native-American people are making a lot of money from their traditions. There is a strong sense of entitlement and white privilege with the idea that it’s ok to practice whatever spiritual tradition you want to. Equally there is frequent spiritual bypassing (IE if you criticise it, you must be operating at a “low frequency”) to justify it in the face of criticism.

In the end though, nothing can justify the continued oppression of a displaced people and taking their sacred traditions and practicing them outside of their context without permission is never ok.  

The other thing to bear in mind is that Earth-based spiritual traditions and ceremonies are just that, Earth-based. They are meant to be practiced within specific places and held by people who have strong historical attachments and ancestral heritage to that land and to the spirit beings on the land.

To take these spiritual practices away from the land where they were created misses the point entirely, leading to a real danger that the practices will be mis-used and have unintended consequences.

I have heard a Native American speak in this way to the mis-use of the sacred plant of tobacco and the untold damage this has caused to people everywhere since this plant was appropriated from the Native American people.

In recent times, with the rising popularity of the psychedelic sacred plant Ayahuasca, there have been reports of serious mis-use as, in the wrong hands, it becomes a money-making venture. Plant medicine such as Ayahuasca serves to open the human mind to the potential of spirit connection. Its medicine comes specifically from the land in which it grows and the spirit of the plants themselves are very powerful. Is it right to play God with such medicine?

When people ask me what specific ceremony would best fit this time, I find the word “ceremony” very loaded. Nowadays there are ceremonies for everything and there are many to choose from. Asking what I think might fit misses the point. Most if not all these ceremonies derive from another land and another culture and many have been appropriated and stolen.

It’s a murky world when the wellness sector is big business. It’s very hard to know for sure where exactly a ceremony came from and whether the people gave it voluntarily. Even worse is when the ceremony itself gets so watered down it barely shows resemblance to its roots.

In the UK the ancestral spiritual traditions are largely lost. There are some remaining folk traditions, though these are heavily Christianised. The recent Druid, Wiccan and pagan revival has done the most, I think, to try and recover some of the ancient practices that occurred on these islands but so much has been lost.

So how best do we mark, honour and celebrate the winter solstice?

I think the best way to do this is to connect with all that the winter solstice means from an Earth-based perspective. During the two-week period before the solstice, as the days get increasingly dark, we can tune into the changing energy and align ourselves with it. We can pay attention to the creatures living on the land – the hunting prowess of the owls, aided by the longer nights, and those that are sleeping or hibernating to conserve energy from the cold. Even the trees are unusually quiet, their energy deep down in the Earth.

When we really pay attention, we can feel the same energy moving within us – that of needing sleep and rest, our energy focused on specific tasks just like the owl hunting through the night. We can be incredibly focused at this time providing we take enough rest. These are the lessons from the land.

As the winter solstice peaks and changes, bringing increased light, the weeks to come will bring the start of the breeding season in the animal and bird world as, even though the beginning of the year is often the coldest, the growing light brings hope to all beings, which we can feel too.

Connecting with an Earth-based spiritual tradition is, then, about connecting with the Earth.

There is much that we do not know about how our ancestors honoured the Earth and marked the winter solstice. Yet we do know they did, simply from all the monuments they left behind.

The UK has a rich archaeological record of the lives of prehistoric people, including the indigenous hunter-gatherers and early farmers that once lived here. The physical remains they left behind are often associated with their Earth-based spiritual traditions rather than their domestic world. Clearly their spiritual traditions were important to them.

Many of their monuments, such as long barrows and stone circles, were orientated to the winter solstice. The tallest trilithon at Stonehenge was carved and placed to frame the sunset at the winter solstice. At Newgrange in Ireland and Maes Howe in Orkney, the light passes through a shaft to light up the whole interior chamber of the Neolithic tombs.

The focus on the light might signify that people felt that the light’s return brought hope for the year ahead and a knowledge that the darkness and cold would pass. We might envisage that people would dance around fires, drumming in ceremony, for days around the winter solstice at monuments such as Stonehenge, waiting until the sun moved once more and the days began to get lighter.

As you walk around the monuments you can feel the spirits of people celebrating, and to this day the ancient spirits dance on the land. We don’t know for sure what their ceremonies looked like and its unwise to try and recreate them. We don’t know the names of their Gods, nor what they honoured in the land or within their ancestral history. However there are things we can know, things that only come when you start to really connect with the spirits of the land and reorientate yourself to a more Earth-based way of viewing the world.

This is where peoples in other places can help us. Not so that we take on their traditions and philosophies but so that we can learn to remember and re-respect our own land and land spirits, by reframing our outlook and learning how to connect, just as they do with their own land. In that sense many peoples, particularly indigenous people, have a lot to teach us.

So to mark and celebrate the winter solstice, go out on to the land wherever you live and connect with the birds and animals, trees and plant beings, connect with the land, with the elementals, feel what is moving as the Earth tilts away from the sun.

If you can, go to a monument from prehistoric times, particularly from the Neolithic when people made monuments from stone to honour the winter solstice. When you are there, be still for a time and see if you can connect to the memory of what they did in these places. Can you feel the Earth move with their dancing and drumming?

Give thanks to the Gods for the welcome blessing of the return of the sun as you watch the setting sun on the shortest day, acknowledging that prior to our own era of knowledge, it was not a given that the sun would rise again. Give blessings and gratitude to the animal kingdom and all beings living within the area you find yourself in, knowing that platitudes are hollow and the only real lesson comes from bringing connection into your day-to-day life.

The real purpose of ceremony is to honour what you feel to be real. So that the only ceremony that means anything is one that comes from your heart, connected deeply to the land and to the beings that belong there with you. As you set an intention to honour the winter solstice, may it reverberate through all of your life, bringing reverence throughout your year as you deepen your relationship with the land and all beings.

Samara 13th December 2023