We anticipate the Celebration of light and return of the sun.
The Winter Solstice on the 21st of December marks the returning of the light and provides us with a powerful opportunity to pause, reflect, bless, and integrate all that has transpired in the departing cycle. This sacred time creates a short portal for us to carry the gifts and wisdom of the completion forward as we set intentions for the coming year.
The Spirit of this season is the antlered Winter Goddess.
Across the North, since the Neolithic, from the British Isles, Scandinavia, Russia, Siberia, the land bridge of the Bering Straights and into the Americas, the female reindeer was venerated as the ‘life-giving mother’. She was the facilitator of fertility, the anima of wild places, forests and mountains, the otherworldly steed of fairies and magical folk.
Across the North, since the Neolithic, from the British Isles, Scandinavia, Russia, Siberia, the land bridge of the Bering Straights and into the Americas, the female reindeer was venerated as the ‘life-giving mother’. She was the facilitator of fertility, the anima of wild places, forests and mountains, the otherworldly steed of fairies and magical folk.
This image can also be found in Hungary, Mongolia, Russian Steppes and China, where the symbol of the cosmos and the mother of the sun was symbolized as a large horned female doe “carrying the sun in her horns.”
So this solstice remember to look out from your warm cozy home into the cold of the darkening eve. Remember the forgotten winter goddesses of old and their magical reindeer. And on the sacred night when the sun is reborn, look for Mother Christmas waiting silently as a deer in the temple of nature, carrying a bird in her horns.
http://gathervictoria.com/2014/12/04/doe-a-deer-a-female-deer-the-spirit-of-mother-christmas
