Mothers' Night: Celebrating the Divine Feminine at Yule

During Advent it is customary in most Christian traditions to honour Mary, mother of Jesus. It is no coincidence that the Christian Church chose the time of the winter solstice for the celebration of the birth of Jesus, light of the world. Many pagan traditions honoured a mother goddess who gave birth to a child of light, representing the sun, as the sun is reborn at the winter solstice.

Since the end of the last ice age, Northern European hunter-gatherers have followed the reindeer migrations for their meat, milk, and skins, which provide food, clothing and shelter.  When the male reindeer sheds his antlers, the larger and stronger doe retains hers and leads the herds in winter.

The Sami, the indigenous reindeer herding people of the Nordic countries, honoured the goddess Beaivi by smearing warm butter, yellow like the sun, on door-posts at the winter solstice. Beaivi, the sun goddess, associated with fertility, motherhood and regeneration, flew through the sky as a reindeer, carrying the life-giving light of the sun in her antlers on the night of the winter solstice.  The offerings of the people helped her gain strength and fly higher and higher into the sky to return fertility to the land.  Saule, the Lithuanian and Latvian goddess of the sun, also flew across the sky in a sleigh pulled by antlered reindeer, throwing pebbles of amber into chimneys to symbolise the sun.  So next time you see Santa, spare a thought for the forgotten Mother Christmas!

I have never given birth to a child in the physical realm, but I feel very connected to the energy of gestation at this time of year. I am heavily pregnant with ideas and plans, straining to come forth into the light in the new year! What is waiting in the solstice stillness to be reborn in you, to move from the darkness into the light?

According to the Venerable Bede, the Anglo-Saxon pagans“… began the year on the 8th calends of January [25 December], when we celebrate the birth of the Lord. That very night, which we hold so sacred, they used to call by the heathen word Modranecht, that is, “mothers’ night”, because (we suspect) of the ceremonies they enacted all that night”.  (Wallis, Faith (Trans.) Bede: The Reckoning of Time, 1999.)

Many modern heathens celebrate Mother’s Night on the night before Yule, the Winter Solstice, as a celebration of the Dísir, protective female ancestral spirits, and mother goddesses, such as Frigga, goddess of hearth, home and family, and mother of Baldr, the Scandinavian Child of Light.

As part of my observance of Yule and Christmas I like to honour my female ancestors by lighting candles and spending some quiet time remembering them with gratitude. Many family relationships can be complex and difficult, and my family certainly has its fair share of those relationships.  Nevertheless, I am deeply grateful for the sacrifices my ancestors made to give me the precious gift of life.  In the Christmas story, Mary Mother of Jesus struggles through many hardships to give him birth. Just two or three generations ago, many of my female ancestors died in childbirth or were widowed early.

At Yule I think of women like my great-grandmothers.  On my mother's side were Elsie Maud Healey, who worked in a bicycle pump factory, which made ammunition in the First World War, and Ethel Ellen Higgs, who spent her teenage years in service. On my father's side were Lizzie Moore, a blacksmith's daughter, who married a farmer aged 20 and died of pneumonia aged 34, after having six children, and Nellie Crewe, who ran the family farm and brought up her five children alone when her husband Frank died in the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1919.  I honour my female ancestors by sharing their stories and their favourite festive foods at our family gatherings. Perhaps you do something similar. However you celebrate, may your Yuletide be blessed.