The 1st Day of Yuletide 2021

And the very night that is sacrosanct to us, these people call modranect, that is, the mothers’ night, a name bestowed, I suspect, on account of the ceremonies which they performed while watching this night through.
— The Venerable Bede

Modraniht/Mother’s Night and Frigg
Wreath
Thew: Evenhead
Mugwort/Cronewort, the dreamer’s herb

Mother’s Night is a day of honoring our Ancestral Mothers, the Disir in the Norse ways. The Ancestral Mothers are the mothers of our mitochondrial, or matriarchal, DNA, of our blood lineage. You might choose to include your patriarchal mothers, as well, and/or other female spirits who oversee family, clan, and tribe.


These are the Clan Mothers, the women who came before, and, I hope, the healthy, aware, supportive, attentive Ancestresses of both our lineages and of our lineages of Spirit.

How might you choose to honor your Ancestral Mothers?

Create a Yule altar to hold intention for the 12 Days and include images, relics, possessions from those ancestral mothers you hold in your memory—your mother, grandmothers, and etc. You will also wish to have items for the other days of Yuletide, of course, but as we begin by honoring our roots, our true, real, grounded bloodline from woman to woman to woman back to mitochondrial Eve, something representative of Mother is important. Mother is the creatress, the Birther of the Light.

Offer them food and libation. What did your ancestresses eat and drink? What would they enjoy? I love to leave a small glass of port and plate of cookies, candies, and maybe some cheese and crackers on my altar for them overnight on Modraniht.

Visit their graves. Leave a bit of greenery. Say hello, I love you, I honor you.

Pray for them. Do ceremony in their honor. Offer smoke of incense or smudge to them. Light a candle or candles in their honor.

Send them love. This, for me, is the biggest thing. When I think of my Disir, from my mother on back, my heart opens. I can physically feel the expansion. When I think of their lives, their joys and struggles and the love they shared into the world, all I can do is love them for everything they were and the lives they lived that made my life and lives of my children possible. I have so much love and so much gratitude for these women.

There are some who celebrate Mother’s Night on Christmas Eve. For me there are several reasons not to do this:
🍄It feels stifling to me, energetically, to cram this beautiful opportunity for ceremony with my Ancestral Mothers into a night that is usually spent with my children, grown though they are, playing games and watching movies.
🍄Solstice Eve intuitively feels like the Eve of a Birth. This is the night The All Mother labors to bring her Sun into being.
🍄Christmas Eve is really an arbitrary date chosen by the Catholic Church to celebrate Christmas. I don’t choose to celebrate my Motherline on the Eve of a day that Patriarchy and one of it’s most potent institutions have used to harm and diminish the power and presence of women in the World for thousands of years.

HISTORY AND A BIT ON HEATHENISM AND MY WORLDVIEW RE THIS ANNUAL WORKING

In traditional Heathenism, Frigg is honored on this night as she is known as the Norse Mother Goddess. Frigg is the mother of Balder, Hodor, and Hermid, and is the wife to Odin. She has her own home and hall named Fensalir (home on the marshlands). Her name, Frigg, means ‘Beloved’.

Frigg is a weaver, a Volva (a practitioner of Seder, Norse magic), and she is a known shapeshifter who carries the feathers of a falcon and becomes that falcon when she changes form.

In tracking my lineage I’ve found that I am a descendant of Frigg and Odin, given that historical sources are accurate, that they were real people, and all of the other vagaries of tracing a lineage back for two thousand years. On Mother’s Night I honor Frigg as not only an Ancestral Spirit of the Norse pantheon, but as an actual Grandmother of my lineage.

I also am a woman from the American South and everything I do is filtered through the lens of the World I live in. Basically this means that there will be some good old Hedgewitch flavor to anything I do and that intuition, and whatever arises in the moment are also play in.

In this light, I will do ceremony on Mother’s Night, and the ceremony will arise from what lies within my heart and belly as I connect the Heart/Womb through breath and breath my love and gratitude out through the ether, through the generations, through the blood and bone of my body, in honor of the women whose bodies made mine possible and whose souls hold me upright on the best and worst of day.

Mugwort, aka Cronewort

Mugwort, also known as Cronewort is the herb and essence for my working on this night. This is the Cailleach of the green ally world. Perfect for a night of honoring our Grandmothers.

Mugwort is known as the Dreamers Herb and a strong infusion, or better a decoction, drunk before bedtime is known to help induce deep dreaming. Placing an image of a goddess you wish to dream with, or of an Ancestral Mother who you wish to connect with in dreamtime, on your altar before sleep is a good way to direct your subconscious.

“Mugwort’s renown among common folks as a powerful systemic healer reaching into the reproductive, digestive, urinary, and respiratory tracts has earned this artemisia the nickname cronewort. Like the old woman who has passed through many moons, harvesting wisdom into the folds of her wide skirt, the common weed, denounced and torn up recklessly by the ignorant, truly works and lives amongst the people. As the village midwife once nurtured the heart of the community with compassion, knowledge, common sense, and magic, cronewort has soothed the pain of childbirth, eased the tenderness of aching joints, comforted bellies, and instilled vision among human beings for centuries with her knowing medicine.” Judith Berger, Herbal Rituals

Mugwort, Artemisia vulgaris is named, in part, for the sovereign goddess of the hunt, Artemis, she of the Bear Clan. As we move into the season of Cave Time, this bear medicine is an amazing ally who I am feeling deeply called to. The drink, the smoke as moxa or as smudge, and the smoke as a smoking herb in my little churchman’s pipe are all reaching into my psyche and asking for attention and use. Herbs are here for us and want to be used.

Mugwort is green on top with a silver underbelly and has many useful applications, including that of Moxa, which is used by acupuncturists everywhere. Mugwort is known as the Dreamer’s Herb and many who seek to have deep dreams and to remember them drink a strong infusion of Mugwort before bedtime—but give yourself an hour or so because you don’t want to drink too much right before bed and then have to interrupt your dreams to use the toilet!
Mugwort flower essence and the smoke, used either on the body as Moxa, or to bless the space where you will be dreaming, are great additions to the infusion.

Remember to call in your healthy Grandmothers to bring messages to you in the dreamworld.

The Wreath

Wreaths are circles and are symbolic of the Wheel of the Year. As we move into this 2nd Festival on the Wheel, this symbolism also becomes important because using evergreen boughs and bright berries remind us that the Wheel turns, that there is life even under the layers of leaves or snow, and the Light will come again.

Wreath as Wheel of Life

I have always loved making wreaths. At the beginning of December I love to go on a walkabout and clips bits of cedar, pine, magnolia, holly, and rosemary and bring them home. I then get out a wreath frame, place the greenery a little at a time onto it, wrap it with wire or ribbon or florist’s tape, until there is a beautiful evergreen circle in my hands.

These small, homely ways are what ground me in the spirit of the season. I love making things for those I love. One year I knitted hemp wash cloths for my whole family. They were wonderful but I am likely the only one who thought so. I’ve made and gifted elderberry cordial sweetened with honey from our hives and baked cookies and made fudge to give as gifts.

Wreaths are symbolic of the Wheel of Life, of the Wheel of the Year, and of the completion of a cycle. They are also representative of a cycle which never ends, the circle of life that spins on and on, with or without us, with our without our best beloveds.

Things here are active and messy and fun and full on Christmas Eve and morning with our 5 kids who are grown and who have expanded to 11 now! Santa Claus and wrapping paper and the whole American consumer Christmas thing…which I love heartily and with great fervor.

But…the lead up to that is quiet and small and I love this, too. More. The making. Dolly Parton singing ‘Hard Candy Christmas,’ and ‘Thistlehair the Christmas Bear,’ by Alabama, breaking to dance around when Suzy Bogus comes on with, ‘Two Step Around the Christmas Tree,’ as I’m pouring resin into crystal encrusted molds, or hand mixing maple fudge because I can’t find the doggoned electric mixer. Making the wreath. These are the things that bring the Spirit of Yule into true being for me. These are the ways the season is embodied in my body.

The Wreath is here, on this day, the one after Yule, the day after the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn that is the herald of the New Earth, the Age of Aquarius, because we have simply and completely and just now completed a cycle and yet the Wheel spins on.

Blessed Be.Thew: Evenhead

Equality. The recognition that those of the opposite sex are equal. (I am adding a note here that my personal practice of Spirituality includes a great depth of Shadow Work focusing on anti-racism and white allyship and this definition of Evenhead is conspicuously missing any part of that. I copied directly from the linked webpage but from here on out I will be including my own definitions for these Thews and that will include plain equality for ALL.)






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The 2nd Day of Yuletide 2021

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Cave Time