Time turns and history is made. In the turning and the making is "chronos," the basis of our word for "time." In that dusty, chronological time we are now approaching the time of Kings, the winter festivals.
The winter solstice this year occurs on December 21 at 4:05 AM PST. At that moment the sun will move as far south as we can observe from the northern hemisphere, giving us our weakest light, our shortest day. Mythologically at the winter solstice, the sun reaches its fullest expression, its greatest potential, and then collapses in the next moment - born again an infant, a Prince of Light, carrying the hope of the world.
Throughout history the winter solstice has served to illustrate the decline and rebirth of the kings to whom we turn for illumination. Solar kings, like our own consciousness, are transformative. They are born, they age and serve, and when their energy, their ideas wane, they are overthrown.
We generally do not sacrifice old kings any longer, we soundly vote them out of office and replace them with a new king - a Prince of Light, whose vision and energy better suits the times in which we live. "The King is dead, long live the King."
But the old King was once the new King and as Teilhard de Chardin wrote, "matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen." The energy that ran through the old King is present too in the new King, it has simply changed form.
Historically, the months of December and January are populated by senex or Holly figures. These are positive masculine figures that represent age, bounty and wisdom. They are spirits that exist on the ancient border of time and our world and include Santa Claus, Old Nik, Saint Nick, Odin, the Green Knight, the Grail King, Father Christmas (in his many European aspects), the Holly King and Father Time.
Reflect on any of these figures and one will find structure and order. Holly kings reward civility, punish the stingy and represent a societal and moral order. These are elderly figures and though one might find compassion and generosity here, one will not uncover a great deal of vision, enthusiasm and energy. These Holly figures hold their place and their structure in the wintertime of our ideas - when a vision has found its fullest expression and is flowing back into the heart of the community through the actions of the individual.
The birth of the infant solar king at midwinter is the delivery of the Divine Child. Posed along with Father Time and his scythe, the Divine Child represents the vision and revelation that Father Time has concretized. Having only recently taken form, the Divine Child is still connected with the world of spirit and potential. There is an intuitive quickness, aesthetic, vigor and breadth of perspective that accompanies the Divine Child, but the steady containment of patience, structure and order will come only through the slow maturing of the year. The Divine Child, the Oak King, finds its place in the springtime of our ideas, where image is newly born and energy, warmth and fertility pour into the heart of the individual from the supportive landscape of a generative community.
In the story of the Holly king and the Oak king, the dark and bright months of the year battle for supremacy at midwinter and midsummer. Each king, each season of life, prevails in its rightful time. The youthful Oak king is vanquished, as youth always is, by age at midsummer. The aging Holly king himself passes away in the dark brightness of the winter solstice, to be born anew in the coming season. From this tale we might find the natural cycle of our best ideas, dreams and visions. If we can hold our creative energy, it will mature, grow and yield at the right time, then pass away, transforming into new energy and fresh ideas.
A midwinter tale by the name of Perceval, the Story of the Grail finds a young masculine sun-hero, Perceval, on a quest for a mythic cup, the Grail. His adventure leads him to the dry and wasting landscape of the Grail king, an old, maimed masculine spirit. Perceval, finally perceiving the suffering all around him asks at the right moment, "what ails thee?" healing his elder and the landscape. The insensitive energy of youth has matured, and that maturity turns the tide of sorrow to joy as Perceval ascends the throne with the old king's blessing.
The elder is a figure of the material world, the youth, of spirit. Together matter and spirit form a transformative pattern where vision develops into experience that matures into wisdom which transforms once again into vision. In order for these disparate figures to be fruitful they cannot be split off from each other.
January is named for the Roman god Janus and it is in that month that the old year has just passed away, the New Year recently arrived. Experience of the past and hesitation over the future are both at hand. The tension of that reality can be felt in the symbol of the Janus-head, a figure with one face looking forward and one looking back.
If the voice of experience cannot speak to the vision of the future, if the two Janus faces cannot relate to each other, a schism is created. The senex dries and hardens, developing an attitude of power toward the preservation of his structure and order. The youth, without mature containment, loses his valuable vision to dispersion and folly. Polarization, within the psyche and within society is the result.
The two faces, gazing different directions must relate. Looking at the Janus-form more closely, we find the symbol earlier belonged to Carmenta, who fittingly, was a Roman goddess of childbirth and prophecy. Considered to "look both back and forward," Carmenta was midwife to both matter and spirit. She brokered the delivery of life by seeing deeply into the past. Indeed it is the goddess, in her many forms, that gives birth to the Divine Child at the winter solstice.
Thus it is not just senex and youth that broker the difficult transition from past into future, it is also eros, the relating feminine factor, that aligns energies to broker emergence, the continual patterning of vision into form. Not only Father Time transforms with the New Year, but the underworld crone Cailleach, who emerges as Brigid, the maiden goddess of spring, bringing new form and life to our world.
These times remain dire, though a new light is dawning on the western world. I come to understand more deeply each year that chronos time is impossibly and unalterably connected with numinous patterns, cycles and energies that we cannot see, rarely comprehend, and that some would call divine. May we have the courage to hold our past and use it fruitfully to make the most of the future. Blessings of the Solstice to us all.