If you are feeling a little sluggish, or down, or just uninspired, here’s the good news: it might just be that you are in tune with the seasons; tomorrow, June 21 at 11.28 UT is the solstice, the Celtic festival of Alban Arthan (which is welsh for Light of Winter) and the shortest day of the solar year in the southern hemisphere.
A few years ago when I was doing my Druid studies with OBOD (Order of Bards Ovates and Druids) I was always out of step because the lessons came from the UK. The seasons are opposite down under, so instead of being celebrated at Christmas time, we celebrate Alban Arthan in June. The Order says that this particular festival is 'universal, that it has been (and still is) celebrated by many peoples long before the coming of the Celts’. As the darkest time the return of the ‘Divine Child, the Mabon’ is welcomed as the ‘rebirth of the golden solstice Sun’ bringing ‘warmth, light and life back to Earth again’ - the sun is reborn. According to an older and more poetic interpretation, it is called "Alban Arthuan", meaning "Light of Arthur" where Arthur is poetically symbolised as the Sun, which dies and is reborn just as the mythical Arthur sleeps deep inside a mountain and wakes again when his people need him. Of course old myths are overlaid with new ones so the Christian ideology meshes perfectly with the winter solstice and ‘Christ’s mass’ or the birth of Jesus, the Light of the World in the northern hemisphere.
It is no wonder we are out of sync down here…...so I have been trying to follow the Noongar's seasons more closely because I figure they have been here a hell of a long time and know what really happens in nidja boodja (this land) The local Menang of course didn’t slavishly follow a date on a Roman calendar. I get quite annoyed when I hear the media declare that it is the ‘first day of winter’ or summer, or whatever. In reality dates mean very little and as one of the Menang elders said to me ‘land will tell’. This means that the land will decide when the seasons change, what will happen and when - it is impossible to impose that sort of order upon it.
The local Menang people still acknowledge six seasons and if you live down here in the south, they fit much better than the four or eight acknowledged in Western culture. That means though, that we are now smack bang in the middle of Makuru which corresponds roughly to the months of June and July. The Menang say that it is usually ‘cold and wet with westerly gales and heavy rain, that the dark green leaves and shed bark of the Whitegum signal the beginning of this season and Sheok trees begin to flower. Wild carrot and several species of Wild Potato are ready for harvesting. The traditional belief is that, as the Sheok tree flowers, the kangaroos are fat and ready to eat’. Just as well because it is also the season when the traditional population moved inland, away from the storms and cold winds, and coastal fishing was not quite so popular.
Druidry recognises eight ‘seasons’ during which significant days are ‘marked by special observances’. These are based on the ‘deep and mysterious connection between the Source of our individual lives and the source of the life of the planet’. The recognition of four solar and four lunar seasons pays tribute to a ‘balanced scheme of interlocking masculine and feminine observances’, which is one of the things that attracted me to the Order in the first place.
image: landscape by one of my Aboriginal students, Robyn McGlade, who has given permission for it to be used on the college promotional website.
information from the OBOD website and Kinjarling Report, 2005
It is no wonder we are out of sync down here…...so I have been trying to follow the Noongar's seasons more closely because I figure they have been here a hell of a long time and know what really happens in nidja boodja (this land) The local Menang of course didn’t slavishly follow a date on a Roman calendar. I get quite annoyed when I hear the media declare that it is the ‘first day of winter’ or summer, or whatever. In reality dates mean very little and as one of the Menang elders said to me ‘land will tell’. This means that the land will decide when the seasons change, what will happen and when - it is impossible to impose that sort of order upon it.
The local Menang people still acknowledge six seasons and if you live down here in the south, they fit much better than the four or eight acknowledged in Western culture. That means though, that we are now smack bang in the middle of Makuru which corresponds roughly to the months of June and July. The Menang say that it is usually ‘cold and wet with westerly gales and heavy rain, that the dark green leaves and shed bark of the Whitegum signal the beginning of this season and Sheok trees begin to flower. Wild carrot and several species of Wild Potato are ready for harvesting. The traditional belief is that, as the Sheok tree flowers, the kangaroos are fat and ready to eat’. Just as well because it is also the season when the traditional population moved inland, away from the storms and cold winds, and coastal fishing was not quite so popular.
Druidry recognises eight ‘seasons’ during which significant days are ‘marked by special observances’. These are based on the ‘deep and mysterious connection between the Source of our individual lives and the source of the life of the planet’. The recognition of four solar and four lunar seasons pays tribute to a ‘balanced scheme of interlocking masculine and feminine observances’, which is one of the things that attracted me to the Order in the first place.
image: landscape by one of my Aboriginal students, Robyn McGlade, who has given permission for it to be used on the college promotional website.
information from the OBOD website and Kinjarling Report, 2005
