To Walk a Pagan Path: Practical Spirituality for Every Day by Alaric Albertsson Read Free Book Online

feast of the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre was celebrated at the full
    moon following the spring equinox, but has become equat-
    ed with the equinox in the Neo-Pagan calendar. Of course
    the pre-Christian Saxons and Celts lived together on an island
    roughly the size of Missouri, so cultural exchange was inevi-
    table, and Pagans today who follow a Welsh or Scottish path
    will also find that their personal spirituality blends very well with the Neo-Pagan wheel of the year.
    For the Welsh or Scottish Pagan, the holy tides of Beltane
    and Samhain are the most important celebrations. But it is
    Yule that takes precedence on the Saxon calendar. It includes
    both months of Ærra Geola and Æfterra Geola, and celebra-
    f 41 2
    the sacral calendar
    tions might take place at any time during these two months.
    The most important part of Yule is Mothers’ Night, the night
    of the winter solstice, when praise and offerings are given to
    our female ancestors, the mothers of our mothers. Today’s
    Saxon Pagans usually focus their celebrations on Mothers’
    Night and the twelve nights that follow, ending on or just
    after New Year’s. In my home we light one candle on Moth-
    ers’ Night, two candles the following night, three the night
    after that, and so on until twelve candles are burning brightly on the twelfth night of our celebrating. We will discuss Yuletide activities in more depth in the final chapter of this book.
    By observing the lunar cycles and traditional Saxon holy
    days, I honor not only my gods but also the ways of my
    ancestors. By this I mean my spiritual ancestors. I do hap-
    pen to have a good measure of English blood, with family
    names like Potter, Oak and Taunton in my pedigree, but the
    pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons are the spiritual ancestors of any Saxon Pagan regardless of his or her biological ancestry. It
    is the world view of the early Anglo-Saxons and their rever-
    ence for the earth that has inspired today’s Saxon Pagans and
    shaped us, in part, to be who we are.
    In addition to the months and seasons, a Saxon can incor-
    porate the days of the week into his sacral calendar. It can be argued that the seven day week originated with the Romans,
    but this construct was adopted very early in Saxon society.
    The English names for the days of the week are a veritable
    parade of Saxon divinity: Sunne, Mona, Tiw, Woden, Thunor
    and Frige. The only exception is Saturday, which retained in
    its name the reference to the Roman god Saturnus. We may
    never know the reason for this, but, since Saturnus was a god
    f 42 2
    the sacral calendar
    of sowing, I think of Saturday as a day sacred to the god Ing
    and the goddess Fréo, divine siblings closely associated with
    the wealth of the earth.
    My Saxon sacral calendar is a part of my personal prac-
    tice of Hal Sidu. It is a holistic calendar. Rather than accept a generic, “one size fits all” wheel of the year, it is a reflection of my spirituality. If you are a Pagan who follows a different
    path, you will want to tweak the calendar in a different way,
    but the principle remains the same. Your wheel of the year should be relevant to your spirituality.
    The names of the Saxon months (three-milkings, weed-
    month) show that the calendar is predominantly agrarian.
    This is not unusual for traditional Pagan methods of reckon-
    ing the passage of time. To learn something about the Irish
    sacral calendar, I spoke with my friend Diane Dahm, an Irish
    Pagan, who asserts that her own sacral calendar has a simi-
    lar focus. “Keep in mind that the significance of these holi-
    days had much to do with survival, and were not always the
    celebrations we view them as today,” she says. “When peo-
    ple were dependent on the earth and on the animals for their
    source of food, acknowledging the turning of the wheel was
    very much linked to where their food supply was going to be
    coming from.”
    Diane is aware that the traditional Irish sacral calendar is
    not the same as the