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We are all well aware that Christmas is fast
approaching. These days of the modern hectic life, the start of the season is rung in by the large corporation’s Christmas adverts reminding us how to be morally obligated whilst spending all our money in their stores. Surely Corporation Morality is an oxymoron?
We run around in a blind myopic panic grabbing material items to fulfil a need that has been foisted upon us from a greater elite structure of money filled obligation. Piped carols and songs fill the shopping centres with an artificial sense of meaning.
If we really step back from the melee of expectation we so dutifully adhere to we can see what our ancestors used this season for and how we can adopt some of our ancestral wisdom to a time in a lot of people’s lives that has become synonymous with stress, and more sadly, for some a deep loneliness and need for connection.
The Druids started their yule season by lighting what was called the yule log in the home, it was lit in conjunction with the dead embers of the last years yule log as a ceremonious way of keeping the light from years past, and a reminder that the Ancestral link was very much venerated.
I think of this often when seeing older people on their own at Christmas that are not part of the embers of anyone’s family anymore, just a discarded remnant of a family life once lived. Surely if our ancestors teach us anything it is that everyone has a role to play in this world.
The Druids often used the cold embers from the yule log to scatter around the home, to ward off unwanted spectral entities that they felt lurked in the long dark winter. The winter represented a time of resolute sparsity and spiritual hibernation.
Alban Arthan, or as we know it now, the Winter Solstice, was also an important part of the Yuletide tradition. The Chief Shaman of the Druids would a few days after Alban Arthan, cut a giant sprig of the sacred mistletoe and distribute it among the villagers to again ward of dangerous spirit that lurked in the deep winter.
Mistletoe was also deemed an aphrodisiac and a portend to fertility. Is it any wonder the traditions of our past still strand through our DNA today, When kissing under the mistletoe one is in actuality testing the fertility of the person of whom they are kissing. It was also used as a cure for illness and malaise.
Interestingly in homoeopathy Mistletoe or Viscum Album is used for cancer alternatives and Rudolf Steiner, the originator of Anthroposophic medicine, considered mistletoe one of our most important remedies of our time.
Holly also has a deep connection to our pagan ancestry; it was placed around the homes in wreaths again as a deterrent for those pesky dark ghosts, but also as a reminder that the evergreen it contained symbolised their linked souls to the bountiful earth. The berries represented the feminine blood of the goddess, a constant reminder that even through the darkest of days, the constant awaiting of the return of the light, would be there.
So when you light your holly and mistletoe candle from one of the big companies this Christmas, and place your wreath or mistletoe around your home, say hello to all of those that have passed over , and be reminded that even though we think we have it all and are so very enlightened, we have perhaps lost the true significance of what we truly represent in the world.
Light an ember for your loved ones, and those in your family that you have lost contact with or feel you cannot reach out too, try and remedy that, for at the end of the day, we are all entwined in a bigger mystery of earth, one that we have yet to understand. Let’s seek from the past our wisdom and reject the corporate sponsored “feelings” we are being told to have.
Make sure you embrace your family with love and kindness, for that alone can truly place a fingerprint into the consciousness of our ancestors. Kiss under the mistletoe, and look upon your holly wreath as a reminder that the earth uses only what it needs and our connection to our ancestral DNA lies at the heart of all our knowledge.
This Christmas, love more, laugh more, the dark night of winter will soon be replaced by the buds of spring, as without darkness we cannot have light. Make sure no one is alone this Christmas. If they are, invite them into your world even if for only a few hours.
Eat drink and be merry, embrace all that you can with a heart and soul filled with the knowledge that beyond the horizon of our perceived existence lays an interconnected web of consciousness that we are all a part of.
Like our ancestors we are still at liberty to align with our spiritual knowledge and in fact the more we move away from the spiritual into the material and the digital, we only need to look at the Christmas iconography all around us at this time to know our deep ancestral connection is still alive and kicking.
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