Now We Live by Starlight ~ the Eighth Day of Christmas

Star of Bethlehem flowering at the 1,000 year church, April 2017

As we come closer to Epiphanytide, which begins on the evening of January 5th; the Twelfth Day of Christmas, we begin to live by starlight. If we take our Christmas decorations down then our homes can feel stripped bare and empty, cold as we sometimes imagine stars to be. But we also become open to the sky. There is nothing between us and forever, and eternity is at our fingertips.

To sink ever more deeply with our starlit journey we might watch this beautiful timelapse film by Harley Grady.

Stars have become more and more important to my own spiritual path and I hope to share something of that over Epiphanytide if I can find the words. But, for now, I want to share something of the star that is most important in the coming days; the Star of Bethlehem. 

Epiphany remembers the visit of the Wise Men, or Kings, to the Christ child, having followed the Star of Bethlehem to find him. There is a belief that our Christmas decorations, especially those representing stars or light, shouldn't be taken down before Epiphany Eve as it might prevent the Wise Men from finding their way. I love that, in folk belief, there is only now; the Wise Men are always travelling, and each Epiphany they arrive, with a little help from the twinkling star trail we put out for them. This is no small thing; we are not irrelevant, no matter how small we feel. Our smallest action is the pivot around which the universe spins. And when our fairylights have been put away and the stars have shifted, there is a little white flower who comes to remind us that that remains true, no matter what.

It's said that the Star of Bethlehem first appeared on the night of Christ's birth to guide the Wise Men, whose journey was made complicated by their maps and charts, to the child. When its work ended it burst into thousands of brilliant fragments and fell to earth. Where it came to ground a blanket of milk-white flowers grew.

You will know that you have found Star of Bethlehem when you see a flower with six white petals surrounding six stamens, each with a yellow anther. They bloom in the spring from early March until late May or early June. The flowers open in the early morning and are usually closed by noon revealing a beautiful green stripe on their underside, hence some of their common names; sleepydick, nap-at-noon, star-at-noon, johnny-go-to-bed-at-noon, and eleven o'clock ladies. When the flowers have died a three-celled seed capsule forms containing several black seeds.

Star of Bethlehem, Wiki Commons

Her genus name, 'ornithogalum', comes from the Greek words 'ornis' for 'bird' and 'gala', meaning 'milk', and was named and described by Dioscorides (40 to 90CE) in his 'De Materia Medica' due to her abundance of white flowers that 'when opened look a lot like milk'. 

In herbal healing she is known as the 'comforter' and is a gentle companion in sitting with the after-effects of shock, even those received long ago in childhood. She has been described as the 'Guardian of Grieving', and used in the treatment of those who are suffering from suicidal depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, offering a light to lead the afflicted out of the darkness. Indeed, she does that work for us all, blooming at the beginning of spring and reminding us of the need to come into the light after the dark winter months. She is the way-shower, a guide for the lost, just as she guided the Wise Men through the vast silence of the desert. Generous indeed for a star who has herself has been broken into pieces; the archetypal 'wounded healer', just as Christ is. I would never trust a spiritual path that didn't know how to honour the parts in all of us that are broken.

I find the image of the star fallen to Earth deeply moving and have often thought of her as a teacher, showing us that it's possible to follow diverse spiritual paths, whilst still being part of one wild and beautiful truth. In her myriad mirrored fragments, her many white petals, her brilliance of being, the Star of Bethlehem reflects them all. There is no 'other', just broken parts of one great beating heart. Perhaps that's why she is sometimes called the 'Reconciliation Star', the star of at-one-ment. And it does feel that there is much to reconcile, and to atone for. There is mending to be done, but we have our guide and she is pulsating with the energy that drives the universe towards justice.

Star Circle, Wiki Commons

But it doesn't feel that there is too much justice in the world just now; not when the President of the United States, who we might remind ourselves is also made of stars, appears to be wilfully driving us towards WWWIII, a war which many of our sisters and brothers would be justified in saying started many years ago. The world truly does feel shattered into a thousand sharp and ragged pieces.

Three years ago, in the wake of several star-shattering world events, a poem came whilst I was writing about the healing properties and folklore of this little white flower. Much of this piece of writing is based on that. If you would like to read it you can find it here. I continue to pray, as I did then, that by the time she returns in the spring there will be much healing between us to be held out in offering to her. Epiphanytide is our opportunity to realign ourselves with the star who, like Christ, fell to Earth to help us mend.

Star of Bethlehem is tired 

of dragging around the baggage 

that we try to hide, 

divisions that won't be reconciled, 

the willful non-seeing of the so-called wise.

Wakes bright with morning, 

asleep by noon, 

offers guidance with maps and tea; 

pours milk, leaves not bags, 

her best bone china 

slips from her exhausted hands, 

smashes into a thousand shards of stars 

on her kitchen floor, 

reads the auguries in their constellations.

Weeps for the weight of what she sees 

swept under the carpet. 

Star of Bethlehem carries diversity 

as a prayer in her shopping bag, 

walks with Jah, Allah, Shekinah 

wearing goose feathers in her hair 

in the stews of the Liberty.

Keeps a torch by the back door, 

shines a light on intruders ~ 

Guantanamo, Yemen, Syria, 

the housing of the poor, 

a nail bomb on Electric Avenue, 

knows that she can't take much more. 

No amount of bleach in her bucket 

will make this pure.

No amount of soap will scrub this whole.

And her batteries are running out. 

She may have to brave the dark. 

Star of Bethlehem hangs her head

in the churchyard 

closes in on herself at shadow fall, 

offers her flesh for the breaking of bread,

ties her scarf more tightly round her head.

Tuber or tumour, hate or hope. 

The murder of the innocents, 

child radicalised, 

drowned on the refugee boat, 

finding belonging in the EDL, 

bleeding out in the stairwell in Peckham Rye.

Herod turns his head, shuts his eyes, 

she opens her petals wide. 

And she is growing wild, 

escaping the confines of the flower bed.

Sinking her roots into holy ground, 

gathering up the pieces that she let slip, 

knows it's time to get a grip. 

She weeps for mercy, grieves for grace, 

what we might have been, what we are. 

Yet still she loves the pilgrim soul in us, 

the spark that journeyed 

from the furthest star 

and fell to earth forged in fire. 

She puts the kettle on. 

~ Jacqueline Durban, 2017

Star of Bethlehem flowering at the 1,000 year church, 2017

References:

http://radicalhoneybee.blogspot.com/2017/06/star-of-bethlehem-for-all-who-are-lost.html?m=1

Shrovetide & Turning the Fresh Page of Spring

(Image: Jacqueline Durban)

Today is Shrove Tuesday, the final day of Shrovetide or the ‘Pre-Lenten season’, which either lasts for three days or seventeen days, depending on your point of view. This is a period of preparation for Lent, which in itself is a preparation for Easter. I must admit that I like the slow mindfulness of this coming into spring. I often underestimate how much energy it takes to wake up from the dark and becoming more aware of that movement; of the ending of Christmastide at Candlemas, and then the intake of breath before Shrovetide and Lent begin, is valuable. The more that we are able to mark the holiness of our days the better.

The seventeen day Shrovetide begins on Septuagesima Sunday, the ninth Sunday before Easter and the third before Ash Wednesday. Septuagesima comes from the Latin word for ‘seventieth’, falling as it does around seventy days before Easter. The subsequent Sundays; Sexagesima, Quinquagesima, and Quadragesima, translate as ‘sixtieth’, ‘fiftieth’, and ‘fortieth’ respectively. These pre-Lenten Sundays were abolished as part of the liturgical calendar by the second Vatican Council and ceased to be marked from 1970. However, Septuagesima Sunday remains the first day of the carnival season in many countries.

Carnival, or Mardi Gras, is a period of public celebration, parades, and street parties; a welcome opportunity to rejoice before the ‘stripping back’ of Lent. Often carnival involves ‘over-indulgence’ in alcohol, meat, and sweet foods which will then be given up, which of course is the purpose of Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day; a chance to use up the last of our flour, eggs, butter, and sugar before Ash Wednesday begins. Another facet of carnival is the wearing of masks and costumes, the stripping away of individuality to allow for a deeper, collective experience. Oliver Rafferty SJ, notes that carnival’s “most important social function was as a highly ritualised challenge to the established order of Church and State” and that, “this was often done under the cover of anonymity and hence the need for the dressing up and masking of participants. This essential element gave individuals freedom to indulge in chaotic displays of anarchic behaviour which sought to undermine the sanctimonious seriousness of ‘normal’ life.” Carnival then was an opportunity to confront the dogma of religion and the strict monarchical hierarchy with a different reality.

Carnival might also be thought of as a sort of ‘wassailing’ of the year, with the last of the winter spirits being driven out in a cacophony of noise to make way for the new, but what that new might be is in many ways for us to choose. In Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1559 painting on the theme, ‘The Fight Between Carnival and Lent’, Carnival, depicted as a rotund king riding a barrel of beer, and ‘Lady Lent’, a starving nun with a beehive on her head (beehives being a symbol of the church), joust for dominance. Here are Carnival and Lent as two manifestations of the human experience; plenty and poverty, merrymaking and moderation, chaos and order; springtime Oak and Holly Kings of the human heart. 

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1559 painting, ‘The Fight Between Carnival and Lent’, Wikiart

We are really not very good at negotiating between extremes and so often find ourselves going far too much one way or the other; Carnival and Lent remind us to watch the path. Indeed, in Bruegel’s painting a couple are being led between both along a path of light as though being shown the dangers inherent in becoming too identified with either way of being. We all need our times of celebration and revelry, giddy with abundance like the hedgerows of autumn. We all need our times of being stripped back, waiting for new growth like the bare earth before spring.

(Image: Jacqueline Durban)

Whilst we might feel inclined to turn away from the austerity of Lent and to celebrate the liberation of Carnival, both have their dark and light. Carnival was often associated with violence and with the further pushing aside of the already marginalised, although of course we must always consider who was reporting such happenings. If we are honest about ourselves though we will see that in many large groups, liberated after being too long hemmed in, there is potential for things to go too far. It is this dark seam in rich strata of humanity that allows us to weave the crown of thorns again and again, for the migrant, the refugee, the poor, the vulnerable, the scapegoated, the fox, the badger, the cormorant, the Christ. This too we will consider in the weeks to come, and Carnival, among so many things, is a reminder of what we are capable of at our very worst.

Southwark Fair, which was held in September to coincide with the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary had its delights, including a ‘Mr Pinchbeck, who caused a tree to grow out of a flower pot on the table and flower and bear fruit in a minute’, and stallholders collecting money to help prisoners in the nearby Marshalsea. Nevertheless, amidst much reported criminality, a woman was trampled to death by the crowds in 1733, prior to the Fair being banned in 1763. Similarly, there have been many attempts to ban carnival itself. In 743, the Synod of Leptines in Belgium spoke out against the ‘excesses of February’, and dire warnings were also issued in this period against people who attempted to drive out winter via a ‘variety of less honourable acts’. Confession books from the period also tells us much about the activities of the common people who were noted to dress as an animal or an old woman during festivities in January and February, despite the severe penance required. This writing down of confessions in a book may explain where the name ‘Shrovetide’ comes from, as the original meaning in Old English of ‘scrifan’, whose root is in the Latin, ‘scribo’, is ‘to write’, but has now come to mean ‘confess’, to be ‘shriven’, perhaps then to ‘rewrite’ the book.

Moving to the present day, we find the annual ‘Shrovetide football’ game, which takes place over two days in the rural town of Ashbourne in Derbyshire and have been played in England since the 12^th Century and in Ashbourne since at least 1667. This game is played on a ‘pitch’ that is three miles long, stretching from one side of the town to the other, and any number of people are allowed to join in with birth in relation to the town’s river dictating whether one should join the Up’ards or Down’ards team. The game is characterised by much eye gouging, punching, and stomping, shops and boarded up and parking in the main streets of the town is much discouraged! There are very few rules involved but, tellingly, these include the prohibition of murder or manslaughter, with ‘unnecessary violence’ being frowned upon, the ball not being carried in a motorised vehicle or hidden in a bag, coat, or rucksack, and the avoidance of cemeteries, churchyards, and memorial gardens. Enough said I think! 

(football-origins.com)

In Bohemia in the Czech Republic, a Shrove Tuesday tradition sees a man dressing up as the personification of ‘Shrovetide’ and whoever is able to snatch a straw from his hat and place it under a hen is assured of a fine batch of eggs in the spring.

As for the, perhaps by now welcome, peace and quiet of Lent, it once would have made much practical sense to enjoy all our persishable foods, such as meat and dairy, before the warming days of spring, and then to give meaning to doing without them until a new season of food could be gathered. It would also give people of the land a chance to cleasnse through fasting and the taking of spring tonics to wake up the body, mind, and blood. This finishing up of our winter larder is expressed in many ways. The Syrian Orthodox church celebrate ‘Moonnu Nombu’ at this time, a three day pre-Lenten fast which recalls Jonah’s three days in the belly of the whale. In Byzantine and Orthodox traditions, ‘meatfare’ and ‘cheesefare’ Sundays are designated to help use up these ingredients. In Russia and other Slavic countries, the week before Lent is known as ‘Butter Week’. In Iceland, this day is known as ‘Sprengidagur’, or ‘Bursting Day’, and is characterised by the eatring of salted meat and peas. The word ‘carnival’ itself is said to come from the Latin, ‘carne levare’, to ‘remove meat’. The last three days of Shrovetide then are our final chance to use up all of these foods (not forgetting ‘Fat Thursday the week before).

Shrove Monday, also known ‘Rose Monday’ and ‘Merry Monday’, is known by the name of ‘Collop’, or ‘Collopy’, Monday in Britain. The ‘collop’ refers to the traditional meal of the day; leftover meat, or ‘collops of bacon’, and eggs, although in East Cornwall it is sometimes referred to as ‘Peasen’ or ‘Paisen’ Monday due to the local custom of eating pea soup on that day, presumably with bacon added. Interestingly, Lithuania have a similar tradition of eating pea soup on the last day of Shrovetide, Shrove Tuesday.

Known in Britain, and elsewhere, as ‘Pancake Day’ and in others as ‘Mardi Gras’, or ‘Fat Tuesday’, Shrove Tuesday is filled with tradition. Our custom of eating pancakes on this day dates back until at least the 16^th Century, although the instruction to be ‘shriven’ is much older. Church bells were traditionally rung on this day, the toll being known as ‘the Shriving Bell’, both to call people to confession and to remind everyone to start cooking their pancakes. Christianity is full of mixed messages!

‘Mob football’ games are a feature of Shrove Tuesday festivities in some towns, such as Ashbourne, mentioned previously, but also Alnwick in Northumberland, Atherstone in Warwickshire, St Colom Major in Cornwall, and Sedgefield in County Durham. In others pancake races take place, thought to be inspired by a 15^th Century housewife from Olney, Buckinghamshire, who was once so engrossed in making pancakes that, when she heard the shriving bell calling her to confession, she ran out of the house frying pan, pancake and all, tossing it to stop it burning in the hot pan! Pancake races still happen there, with only women allowed to join in and with the instruction to wear a bonnet and apron.

(Olney pancake race, Wiki Commons)

In Scarborough, it’s traditional for local people to skip over long fishing ropes from the harbour on this day, called by the town crier with a ‘pancake bell’. In Whitechapel, Lancashire children, echoing many traditions of going from house to house, visit local homes to ask, “Please, a pancake” before being rewarded with sweets or oranges. At Westminster School in London, the "Pancake Grease" is held, an event during which the schoolmaster tosses a very large pancake over a bar that's set to about 15 feet high. The children then make a mad scramble for the pancake and whoever emerges with the largest piece is the winner.

Choristers vs. staff and parents annual pancake race, Norwich Cathedral

And so, it seems that we begin our spring in the same spirit as we journeyed through winter, with our traditions full of the invitation to share what we have in unity and community, not to grasp or cling with the thought that we might then not have enough, but to trust the earth to give us enough, and freely; that what we give out will be returned when we too have need. It seems to me though that we are encouraged to trust less and less, to instead blame, to scapegoat and point the finger, to believe that everyone is out to take what we have and that it is our right to have it, even at the expense of another. In the invitation of our seasonal festivals we are shown both the best and the worst that we can be and Shrovetide and Lent reveal that to us in all the raw, stripped back, vulnerability that we can bear and bare, and perhaps even more than that. We may not like what we see but it is a blessing to be shown it. So, this evening let’s rejoice in our pancakes, and I hope that there will be far too many until we are full to bursting, and then let’s let it all go; the grasping, the fear, the meanness, the blame, the always wanting to be full, let’s turn the page of our confessional and give ourselves up to the green things of spring. We can be so much better than we are. They are waiting to help us rewrite the book.

(Image: Jacqueline Durban)

References:

On Shrovetide ~

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrovetide
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shrive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septuagesima
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/how-to-pregame-lent-septuagesima-carnival-and-shrovetide-56266
https://www.fisheaters.com/customsseptuagesima2.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrove_Monday
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrove_Tuesday

On Carnival ~

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mardi_Gras

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent ~

https://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/%E2%80%98-fight-between-carnival-and-lent%E2%80%99

On Moonnu Nombu ~

http://newandoldmonks.blogspot.com/2010/01/significance-of-nineveh-nombu-for-us.html

On 'Mob Football' ~

https://sports.yahoo.com/news/shrovetide-%e2%80%93-an-ancient--brutal-and-bloody-game-223015662.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Shrovetide_Football

Southwark Fair ~

http://www.exploringsouthwark.co.uk/southwark-fair/4593650298

A Personal Exploration of Easter

'Supposing Him to be the Gardener', Cross Bones Jesus by Barry Parman

I have always had a tense relationship with Christianity. I don't come from a religious family, although I enjoyed church on the rare occasions when we did go because I loved my dad's beautiful singing voice and rejoiced in my mum's equally loud but tone deaf singing. My main memory though is of always feeling that I was doing something wrong that I didn't quite understand. I went to Sunday School every week and sometimes to services at the Pentecostal church, which I loved because of the passion of the Welsh pastor, but my first truly spiritual experiences were ones of connection with nature; of feeling the grass growing and all life breathing. In my teens I went along to my local free church every Sunday, mainly because my best friend's family went, and noticed that often people there weren't very kind but felt superior to others because they had been 'forgiven' by God. In my early twenties, just before getting married, I visited a local vicar with my fiancé for 'marriage lessons' and he told us that, if we argued and couldn't reach agreement, the man should have the final say. After that not only did I not think much of church but I was angry. And, as far as I was concerned, that was the end of me and Christianity. Although I still loved going into churches, I had by then discovered the Goddess path and put institutional religion behind me.

Then, in 2012, I began to sever links with my Goddess community and, feeling heart-sore, I sought out a new place where I could connect with people of Spirit. Southwark had already become important to me and so I found myself in Southwark Cathedral and made a quiet home there amongst its pale~as~moonlight walls and gently beautiful services. I liked its connection to my beloved Cross Bones graveyard (of which more another time), I liked its politics, which I had heard were radical for the church and therefore in stark contrast to St Paul's which had recently evicted the Occupy Movement from its steps, and I liked the anonymity that attending a city cathedral can bring. I still wouldn't call myself a Christian but I felt at home and I still do; as a woman of the Goddess and a hedgepriestess of Afallon, I feel no inconsistency in lighting candles to Mary as an aspect of the Sacred Feminine, nor to Jesus who I am sure would be considered a heretic were he to walk into most Christian churches today. There was much that resonated with me there.

But I have always wanted to remain respectful to the religion which had unwittingly given me a home and have avoided Easter services, finding nothing for me in the concept of a blood sacrifice demanded by an angry God as atonement for supposed sin. As Philip Carr-Gomm says in his essay, 'The Fertile Christ' in Mark Townsend's 'Jesus Through Pagan Eyes' (1), “The story of Christ currently requires two images of his death and rebirth, but in practice it is the image of his crucifixion rather than his resurrection that is used as the central icon of the faith...it is his agonising death that occupies the centre-stage...”.

Through my many years of following the Goddess path, I already acknowledged Easter as a festival of the Germanic goddess Eostre/Ostara and of the rising of spring energy and a return of the light after the long, dark months of winter. There is only one primary source for this goddess and that comes from 'The Reckoning of Time' by Northumbrian monk and scholar the Venerable Bede (673 – 735), who said that, “Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated 'Paschal month' and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate the Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance..” (2). Later in the 1880s, Jacob Grimm wrote in his 'Teutonic Mythology' that the Anglo-Saxon name 'Eostre' is related to an Old High German adverb 'ostar', expressing movement towards the rising sun. He claimed that he had found evidence of the worship of a goddess named 'Eostre/Ostara' in oral tradition and said that “her meaning could be easily adapted to the resurrection day of the Christian God” (3). The 'Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture', published in 1997, says that, "a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn is supported both by the evidence of cognate names and the similarity of mythic representation of the dawn goddess among various [Indo-European] groups” (2). Whether she is an ancient goddess carried through oral tradition or a more modern invention makes little difference to me. I sense Goddess~as~Life moving through all that pulses green and newly unfurls its tender wings or petals at this time of year and celebrate the daily changes of life as it rises.

And so I had comfortably settled into celebrating the Sacred Feminine and the changing of the seasons at Spring Equinox and had chosen not to involve myself in the Christian Easter Festival. And then, this year, I visited Southwark Cathedral just as Lent began in February and saw German artist Angela Glajcar's 'Within the Light'. This was a large-scale installation made of several lengths of translucent white glass fabric hanging one above the other, some tattered like feathers, above the choir stalls. The light within the cathedral is one of its great beauties and 'Within the Light' was designed to reflect this light as it changed throughout the day. I found that this soft-winged beauty touched something within me and challenged my preconceptions about the heaviness and darkness of the 'blood-soaked' Christian Easter festival. Canon Gilly Myers' extraordinary sermon reflecting on the Lenten installation can be found here. I resolved to spend the season exploring Easter through my own spiritual understanding to find out whether there were ways that I could respectfully include myself in the life of the church at this important time of year. This has been a very personal exploration, and one which will continue, but here are some of my musings over the Easter period.

I am not the first person to equate the dying and rising Jesus with other gods, such as Dionysus, Tammuz, and Osiris, many of whom have similar festivals in the spring. In this way he becomes a vegetation god, a sort of Green Man or Green Christ. Coming from a land which is so green and fecund at this time of year this image resonates deeply with me. One of my favourite images of Jesus is an image which hangs at Cross Bones Graveyard, 'Supposing Him to be the Gardener' by Barry Parman, which depicts Christ as antlered, crowned with thorns and flowers, and holding armfuls of lilies. In her essay, 'The Lily Cross and the Green Man' (1), Mara Ede-Weaving talks about a medieval mural in a small church in Godshill on the Isle of Wight which depicts Jesus crucified on a flowering lily. She sees this as symbolising both Christ's sacrifice and that of the Green Man, who offers his own body in a seasonal cycle of growth, harvest, disintegration, and renewal. In the stories of both the Green Christ and the Green Man we can find the trust that we ourselves can be cut down, lose everything, and return. They are a reminder that Life wants to live (an energy which I see as the indwelling spirit of Goddess in all things), and of non-attachment to a particular 'shape' that our life might find us in. Last night, in the midst of struggling with this piece of writing, I dreamed of Hastings Jack-in-the-Green festival. This is ostensibly a morris dancing event which takes place every year around May Day. It begins with the 'Jack'; a frame covered in greenery, crowned with flowers, and wearing the mask of the Green Man, being 'danced' through the town, and culminates with him being torn to pieces in a wildly joyous frenzy and his highly prized green leaves being distributed amongst the crowd. This again symbolizes the sacrifice of the Sacred Masculine so that the seasonal cycle can continue; we let go so that we can rise again, we trust that life will hold us and bring us back to renewal. And so it is with the story of Christ on the cross if we choose to embrace its symbolic meaning.

Hastings Jack-in-the-Green

Victorian author and druid, Owen Morgan, believed that the “core of all true religions was the worship of the life force – in the macrocosm the sun and earth, in the microcosm, the male and female genitals; in both the activities that give rise to new life – were the foundations of all religious symbolism...in Pagan as well as Christian traditions” (1). And within this is the image of the masculine as an energy which rises, falls, and rises again, in contrast to the feminine energy which remains constant. Philip Carr-Gomm points out that, in all variations of the ancient story in which a god is sacrificed for his people, “the god represents the moment, the finite, while the goddess represents the cyclic and eternity'” (1). It is this right relationship between the masculine and the feminine which brings the renewal of life, rather than atonement for sin.

Which brings me to the place of the Feminine within the Easter story. For many years, I have equated the time between Jesus' death on Good Friday and his rising on Easter Sunday with the journey of the dark/new moon, which disappears for several nights before reappearing as a tender, newly reborn crescent; life from death. The date of Easter has come to be determined by the moon, with Easter Sunday falling on the first Sunday after the full moon on, or closest to, March 21^st. In this way Easter becomes a lunar festival in contrast to the solar festival of Christmas. Often the sun is equated with the Masculine and the moon with the Feminine and I have found Easter a powerful time to explore Christ as both. In her poem, 'A Prayer of Approach', Revd. Rachel Mann writes...

                                   Christ our Sister, unite us in your holy bleeding.

                                  As you took spit and dust for healing,

                                  take our hands, cracked and huge as washerwomen's,  for God's work (4)

It is also a time when we can reflect on the role of women in Jesus's story. Jesus often used feminine imagery in his description of the Divine, particularly describing God's wisdom in female terms, and there are many examples of the importance of women in the gospels. Jonathan Merrit's conversation with Mary Demuth, which can be found here, tells us more about Jesus's radical relationship with women and it was this radicalism which led to the historical Jesus being persecuted, and eventually executed, by the authorities of the time. Malcolm Guite, in his sermon in Southwark Cathedral on Easter Sunday 2015, spoke of Jesus choosing to reveal his resurrection from the tomb to Mary Magdalene before any other. This was at a time when women were rarely listened to, or respected, and yet a woman was chosen to carry such an important message to the rest of humankind. As Malcolm Guite said, Jesus rose at Easter but this was also a powerful rising of women, both socially and spiritually. If only the early Christian church, and wider society, had been willing to listen, then or now.

In the role of Jesus's mother, Mary, we can perhaps bring together the themes of the Green Christ and the role of women. In the Christian story as it has been given to us Mary is shown only as a helpless witness to the suffering and death of her son. Although it is important to reflect on the suffering of women and mothers it is possible to explore a more empowering role than this. In the Bible women's roles are often shown as passive ones. In many of the ancient stories, such as those of Isis and Osiris, Calliope and Orpheus, Rhea and Dionysus, Dumuzi and Inanna, it is women, and often mothers, who dismember and/or restore the bodies of sacrificed gods. This echoes shamanic initiations across all cultures and, in this way, women take on their roles as mentors and initiators of the male mythic journey. I am reminded of the maenads, priestesses of the god Dionysus, who accompanied him in his wanderings and were said to rip apart wild animals in the abandonment of complete union with primeval nature. It is best not to underestimate the power of the female! We can think of Mary as a similar initiatrix if we are able to free her from the shackles of churchianity and allow her to take her place amongst other divine women. And in freeing her we are also able to liberate the historical Jesus and the mythic Green Christ to spread their message of radical love, deep compassion, connection to nature and to the wounded healer within. He becomes the Fisher King and the Feminine holds out to him the Grail of wisdom and healing.

I have come to no conclusions from making my journey through Easter this year and these will not be ways of thinking that resonate with everyone. For myself, I feel that there is much more to uncover but I have followed many roots and paths through the hedge and have found much beauty. I am lifting a prayer that these explorations will move me closer to the Spirit of what moves through men and women and there will be much more to find.