Gods of the Morning

by John Lister-Kaye

  It was probably clear that their chieftain was not long for this world. Perhaps he had been a bit of a hero, no doubt a thoroughly good bloke. He’d probably sired fine sons, won battles, lopped off a few truculent heads and kept the local raiders out. He might even have headed up a bit of a dynasty. In any event, they thought he deserved a special tomb.

  Well, they did him proud. Thankfully, the result of their deliberations and their remarkable skills, the chambered cairn of Maeshowe is with us today more or less intact. It is thoughtfully constructed, with a low entrance tunnel and a square central room beneath a vaulted ceiling and three much smaller chambers off – an edifice of refinement and beauty, a result to be proud of. Historic Scotland, the government agency responsible for its upkeep, describes it as one of the finest architectural achievements of prehistoric Europe. Others call it a ‘Neolithic cathedral’ and attest that the stone masonry involving individual slabs weighing up to three tons each would seriously challenge today’s masonry skills. Luckily they surrounded it with a large circular ditch; it is the carbon-dated peat from the bottom of that ditch which gives us the near-as-dammit accurate date of 2750 BC.

  For me, by far the most galvanising aspect of Maeshowe is that the entrance tunnel is precisely aligned with the setting sun on the shortest day of the year – the winter solstice. Exactly similar solar alignment can be found at Stonehenge or New Grange in Ireland, or in Egypt at the temple complex of Karnak on the Nile, built in the pharaonic reign of Senusret I (1971–26 BC). It is present, too, in China’s winter season, when the dark yin is exactly balanced with the light yang. All these and many more ancient cultures, monuments and traditions pay homage to the winter solstice, 21–22 December, as an awesome, mysterious and powerful phenomenon of prodigious ritual or religious significance.

  I have been to Maeshowe many times and I always come away feeling I am missing something really important that they knew; something of the gut, honoured and believed as a life force; some almost palpable otherness – Emily Brontë’s ‘tyrant spell’ – which may have brightly coloured and reassured their lives. What was it that required them to position the whole splendid edifice so that the last rays of the setting sun pierced the darkness of the tomb on Orkney’s shortest day, the darkest moment of the northern calendar, flooding the long entrance passage and the back wall of the spacious interior with golden light? We know it as the winter solstice, direct from its Latin derivation, the day when the sun stands still.

  It is the moment of rebirth, of the beginning of a new solar year, the sun’s rising again, every day inching higher in the sky, bringing with it (in due time) the spring and the revival of growth and opportunity. Hardly surprising, then, that whoever they were, they should have seen it as such an important event. Perhaps they even believed that rolling back the large entrance stone, allowing that spiritually charged light to flood in, would also aid the rebirth of their dead into another life.

  Much later, we know from the Orkneyinga Saga, the tomb was raided and probably looted by Vikings under the leadership of Earl (Yarl) Rögnvald and his crusaders on their way to Constantinople in 1153. They left their signatures and explicit graffiti etched in runes on the interior walls. At that moment they seem to have had other things on their minds; the significance of the building to the winter solstice was probably lost on them, but in their own culture it would nevertheless have been as important in their lives as the Norse festival of Yuletide.

  They were warriors, fighting men more interested in women than the calendar. Their observations are just what you might expect of such men – although some are rather touching. ‘Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women’ and ‘Ingebjork the fair widow – many a woman has walked stooping in here a very showy person’ signed by ‘Erlingr’. These endearments are somewhat sullied by ‘Thorni fucked’ while ‘Helgi carved’, an insight studiously omitted from the Orkney guide books.

  Now in disguise, in our own confused cultural tradition the winter solstice survives obliquely in the form of Yuletide, Yule being the old Norse month of ýlir, or jol, which we celebrate as the twelve days of Christmas. In ancient Norse tradition everyone stopped work and took some time off to give the new solar year a chance to recover and fire itself up.

  What particularly grips me about these seemingly obscure connections is that they are a very good illustration of how far we have removed ourselves from the seasons and the constantly turning wheel of nature that has governed human lives ever since we strode out from the primeval forest. To our infinite loss, the materialist vortex of modernity has sucked us away from these ancestral influences, so much so that it is hard now to imagine just what their meaning was, or how important they were to our predecessors, whose lives were lived very much at the mercy of what was often a dangerous and hostile environment.

  For many millennia in the accentuated seasons of the northern hemisphere, human survival depended upon the success or failure of harvests. After a bad harvest it must have been deeply worrying – not to say frightening – to witness every autumn the sun slipping lower and lower in the sky, knowing that nothing would grow again for many months. Vegetation died away, offering nothing. Lakes and streams iced over, rendering fishing difficult or impossible, mammals vanished into hibernation and most birds migrated south. The days grew ever darker and colder. Then, at last, came the solstice: the moment in the year when, regardless of the chill and the gloom, everything started up again, even though there would still be many weeks of winter to endure.

  Throughout the northern hemisphere mean winter temperatures continue to fall until mid-January because of the angle of tilt of the Earth’s axis to the sun. Only as the angle steepens does the vital absorption of solar energy take effect. Despite this, the sense of relief at seeing the sun climb higher and higher every day surely made this a moment for great rejoicing.

  The pagan celebration of Yule was so powerful and widespread across the known world that with an if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em twist of pragmatism, early Christians reluctantly pitched in, perhaps partly to make Christianity more acceptable to a wider audience. After endless pious debate, and quite possibly glimpsing the recruitment potential, in AD 350 Pope Julius I (now St Julius) conveniently agreed to shift the hotly contested birth of Christ (Christ’s Mass) from the best contemporary scholars’ historical and astronomical calculation of 6 February, 6 BC to 25 December, a shifting of the goal posts that was nothing if not expedient and could probably only have been achieved by a pope. Even so, the move was highly controversial and wouldn’t be fully adopted by the wider Christian Church for many decades. In his own words, the cantankerous Atticus, the fifth-century Archbishop of Constantinople, accepted it only because it allowed him to celebrate Christ’s birthday undisturbed while the ‘heathens were busy with profane celebrations of their own’.

  Pope Julius probably didn’t fully realise what a flash of accidental genius it would turn out to be. It was a master-stroke, a cunning twist of calendric doctrine that would hijack so many pagan festivities right across the non-Christian world and smear them seamlessly into the Christian liturgical cycle, as if they had been there all along, thus catapulting Christianity into the vanguard of popular religious appeal.

  The logic for this canonical legerdemain was undeniable. No festival to celebrate the birth of Christ had existed before the fourth century, whereas the Romans had long been honouring the Mithraic festival of the winter solstice, held, interestingly, on their 25 December, which coincided exactly with the 21 December of the Gregorian calendar. The Persians called theirs the ‘Birthday of the Unconquered Sun’. Norse culture celebrated the birth of their god Freyr, god of sunshine and weather (among many other burdensome responsibilities, such as potency and virility) at the solstice; and even more conveniently for evangelising Christians, the unruly Celts and many other pagan cultures celebrated the solstice as the rebirth of the sun, which, with uncanny serendipity, they knew as the ‘Birth of the Divine Child’.

  Christm
as quickly caught on, but the ancient pagan Yuletide connections with Christmas by no means ended there. Yule festivities essentially celebrated the death of the solar year and the birth of the new, the swerve away from darkness and the blessed beginning of the return to light. Long before Christianity claimed it, the symbolic selection and harvesting of a sacrificial living tree was also an important ritual found in many pagan cultures. The only green trees in winter were the evergreen conifers, nowadays, of course, the Christmas tree. Among the Celtic peoples of northern Europe, evergreens – yews, pines and spruces – were widely celebrated as sacred because they retained life and vigour when everything else died away during the bitter cold. Druids made processions into the forests to pay homage to the renewed life the conifers symbolised. The Roman priests also cut sacred pines, decorated them and carried them into their temples as an offering.

  More than this, it was customary to perform other pagan celebration rites that have been subsumed into the Christmas story and are easily recognisable today: bearing gifts for gods (the three kings) as a way of ensuring the return of longer, warmer days and placing them as offerings under the tree; decorating the Yule tree with ornaments representing fruits, nuts and berries was to ensure survival through winter and the return of spring; the handing out of specially prepared confections and cakes (Christmas cake and pudding, mince pies); wassailing or singing carols from household to household; abstaining from hunting and fishing (a holiday) for the twelve days of Yule; and the burning of the Yule log, still widely practised in many European countries.

  *  *  *

  Our big, rumbustious family merrily shrugs off the deception and joins in with the festivities, like everyone else. Throughout all the growing-up years, rushing off into the woods to choose a tree was an essential forerunner to the whole deal, and it was fun. I remember our teenagers almost fighting to perform the deed – ‘It’s my turn, you did it last year!’ – then suffering the taunts from those left out: ‘It’s too big. You won’t get it in the door’; ‘That scrubby thing won’t do. Go and get a better one!’; ‘Is that the best you could find?’ and so on, all of which assured me that the ritual significance of the tree to the whole festival of Christmas was still alive and sprouting.

  Yet for all the parallels of our modern Christmas festival with the ancient past, never once have I heard anyone make reference to the winter solstice. We have lost it, and I am sad about that. It has gone the way the British harvest festival is rapidly heading. Gone are the days when whole agricultural communities, entire villages and towns viewed their harvest festival in church as a highpoint of their year. Aisles and altars overflowed with produce: baskets of apples, pears and plums, cabbages, eggs, leeks and onions, potatoes, swedes and turnips, marrows and pumpkins cluttering the communion rail; urns of grain, stooks of corn and bales of hay adorned the chancel steps and decorous loaves of specially baked bread rimmed the pulpits, all punctuated with home-produced Kilner jars of plums, gooseberries and other colourful preserves, and cloth-topped jars of jams, pickles and chutneys. Herbaceous flowers and colourful foliage adorned the few remaining spaces. ‘We plough the fields and scatter . . .’ reverberated through ancient hammer-beam roofs and across graveyards the length and breadth of the land. The shrinking congregations of today have lost their connection with the soil and as a consequence such festivals as are still observed are a lame parody of their former agricultural bounty.

  This year, alas, the Aigas solstice was a flop and my plans to revive paganism with a cosy sunset party of mulled claret at the loch with my home-coming family came to naught. Thick cloud and no sun at all. ‘The storm is fast descending.’ It rained viciously all day on the 20th and 21st, and all that night, icy and driven by a wind possessed. The morning of the 22nd revealed the valley awash; the burn was in roaring spate, like a train that never passed, and the low-lying fields had been gobbled up by the river as if they had never existed. When, at last, on the 23rd the storm abated, the clouds thinned and a lame sun limped briefly into view, the mood had passed. It was too late and too underwhelming to celebrate anything.

  I turned in for bed that night subdued, wondering what, precisely, we had missed. Wasn’t there some faint echo of biorhythmic memory locked into our genes? Shouldn’t I have felt some inner awakening, a frisson from the tyrant spell of those ancient ghosts? Shouldn’t the passing of the sun’s nadir have aroused my winter spirits? Fired me up? Perhaps you’ve got to be there and witness it first hand to get the proper message, like standing in front of some exquisite cave painting, telling as much of man as of beast and leaving us in awe of both.

  My brooding was premature. Our loyal and resident tawny owls rescued me from the doldrums. My habit of sleeping with one ear cocked to the window beside me, flung wide regardless of the weather, has long been a means of keeping me in touch with the outside world. December into January is an important moment for tawnies. The adult birds are busy defending their territories from adolescent incomers. On still nights the air rings with echoing calls as they battle for space. For me that night the hooting, shrieking and yelling calls of the owls around us were an important return to base. I was back in touch with the wild world I love. I fell asleep thanking the owls and longing to get out there as soon as I could.

  With my two Jack Russells, Nip and Tuck, I was up and out early on the 24th. The dawn was cool and clear. The wind had vanished and the floods were seeping away. The rain threat had been displaced by that of Christmas Eve and my lifelong unpreparedness and inability to match up to expectations, a failing I’ve never managed to crack or to conceal. The very thought seemed to be dragging me away from the whole prospect of the holiday’s overblown materialist imperatives. I decided to head off up the hill for a proper walk.

  Forty minutes later I puffed and panted up the steep heather slope to our own archaeological high point at seven hundred feet on the glen’s rim, an Iron Age fort – now just a pile of stones – overlooking the Beauly River and the snaking glacial valley of Strathglass far below. My timing was immaculate.

  Like molten gold from a crucible, the first touch of sun spilled in from the east, from the glistening horizon of the Moray Firth, so bright that I couldn’t look at it, flooding its winter fire up the river, right past me and on up the valley. The river trailed below me, like a silk pashmina thrown down by an untidy teenager. Strands of mist over the water were fired with yellow flame, as though part of some mysterious ritual immolation. The new-born light raked the steep glen sides, floodlighting every rocky prominence and daubing deep craters of black shadow so that the familiar shape of the land vanished before my eyes. I was in a wonderland, strange to me and a little unnerving. The dogs sat uncharacteristically silent at my feet, noses lifting to test the air, but stilled as though they, too, could sense the moment.

  Unaware of our presence above him, a roe buck was slowly picking his way up the slope in front of me. He was out of the dogs’ sight and I stood still, despite being silhouetted against the western sky. I hoped he would keep on coming. Dense broom and gorse crowded the south-facing slope and I lost him in it for several minutes. I was about to turn for home when he reappeared, much closer now and to my right, still heading up. There was no wind.

  I could see that he was beautiful, not a bit scrawny as winter roe can sometimes appear, but refined and shapely, the taut musculature beneath awarding body and form to his winter fur, as soft and uniform grey as a Lifeguard’s greatcoat. His nose was jet black and a bright white gorget stood out from his throat, like a mayor’s badge of rank. He had cast his short, spiky antlers back in October and the new set was growing under dense furry velvet, liquid bone oozing up day by day to be hard and ready by April. They were well on, like the stumpy horns of a giraffe, the spiky tines still fully to form. He radiated quality. He had entered the winter well, with fat rounding his shoulder blades and flanks. Even if it proved to be hard weather for the next two months, he would emerge fit and strong at the end of it, well placed to begin the lo
ng build-up to the July rut.

  He wasn’t just beautiful – he also knew it. He was idly browsing on broom and bramble shoots, plucking them with the insouciant air of a narcissistic aesthete in sharp little flicks of the head. Every few moments he would stop chewing, lift his head and look around with a studied pose of self-belief. There was no hint of alarm or even wariness, just a haughty and quizzical exploration of his domain, perhaps to see if any other buck had dared trespass on his patch. As he did so, his raised head, in perfect profile, was as elegantly statuesque as one of those expensive life-size bronzes to be seen in sporting galleries.

  A rag of cloud slid across the sun, dulling its fire for a moment. I looked down at the glen and the river fields and they were there again, as they always had been, familiar and predictable. When I looked up my roe buck was only a few yards away. He had risen to a small rocky spur at the same level as me and the dogs. He had seen me, but hadn’t yet identified me as human. His head was up and he was delicately testing the air for scent. Black nostrils twitched and his ears swivelled. As is so often the case with deer, he needed the confirmation of scent to believe what he was seeing. He was staring straight at me. Our eyes collided in a silent, slow-motion crash. He was magnificent. It was a stretched, frozen moment of gripped breath and a riveted stare, impaling him and willing him to stay. Just then the low sun punched through the cloud in a fury of dazzling fire, instantly turning my roe buck and the rock he stood upon not to bronze but to the purest, gleaming gold. It was as though someone had stolen him from Tutankhamen’s tomb and planted him on that rock, like a totemic effigy atop an outrageously ostentatious sarcophagus.

  Here was my Maeshowe moment, my witness to rebirth and the beginning of the new solar year, the sun’s gilded rising bringing the renewal of life, growth, opportunity and the spiritual fillip I had sought.