It is not a popular opinion, but I LOVE Winter, especially Winter in the Arctic! To me Winter is a Mother who welcomes me Home, embraces me and invites me to rebirth myself, at this time of year. I am flying to Sweden later today and on Saturday I will perform a ceremony for all mothers (alive or ancestral, human or animal, personal or collective etc.)
My original plan was to send out this essay on Saturday but I just changed my mind: if I send it out today, some people, who might be new to this, have a few days to prepare for their ceremony or celebration!
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How do we know about Mōdraniht?
In De temporum ratione, the medieval historian Bede wrote that the pagan Anglo-Saxons:
Incipiebant autem annum ab octavo Calendarum Januariarum die, ubi nunc natale Domini celebramus. Et ipsam noctem nunc nobis sacrosanctam, tunc gentili vocabulo Modranicht, id est, matrum noctem appellabant: ob causam et suspicamur ceremoniarum, quas in ea pervigiles agebant.
... began the year on the 8th calends of January [25 December], when we celebrate the birth of the Lord. That very night, which we hold so sacred, they used to call by the heathen word Modranecht, that is, "mother's night", because (we suspect) of the ceremonies they enacted all that night. (SOURCE)
As a “Flying Dutchwoman”, who divides her time between London UK and Sweden (but I also spend significant amounts of time in the US and Greenland and I currently have one son moving to Vietnam, which will add another location to my life!), I have felt at odds with the usual Christmas celebrations for all of my life. I have always sensed deeper, darker and richer mysteries awaiting just below the surface. I have a profound yearning for ancestral stories to be told, and for pre-Christian deities to be honoured, again. For that reason I am engaged in a labour of love: “peeling the cosmic onion”, applying paint stripper to Christianized versions of older traditions and festivals. My (so called) “Dutch book” is a good example of this:
One event that changed the trajectory of my life was meeting my Swedish husband (at age 19). Over the past 35 years I have celebrated most major feast days in Scandinavia. My soul had came home! The intuitions and glimpses from childhood started to make more sense and acquired spiritual substance, in the Land of the Midnight Sun.
Modranigt or Mōdraniht was Anglo Saxon celebration which opened the new year. For ancient people, whose lives were not ruled by screens, apps or smart watches, the true new year occurred when the light returns (and the days start getting longer).
This point is of course the winter solstice. We generally mark the winter solstice on our calendar for December 21st and this year (2024) the astronomical solstice does indeed happens on Dec 21st here in Europe, (at 10.20 AM in Sweden, 9.20 AM in London to be precise).
In the past intense preparation occurred, such as cleaning the house and making sure all animals were extremely well looked after. In Scandinavia Modraniht was viewed as quite a dangerous night, a night when trolls and gnomes drew closer to human settlements and checked on what human beings were up to. If they were not pleased they would make their presence felt and sabotage things! (This is one reason why Scandinavian people decorate their house with tomtar, wooden gnomes with red hats, for Christmas. Porridge and whiskey is left out for the Tomte of the Homestead).
Women put their spinning wheels away and cleared their distaffs, knowing that Frau Hollewould visit and check that everything was ready for Yule.
People also stayed alert to The Wild Hunt riding out, as winter storms raged across the land. It was considered safest to stay inside, brew ale or bear, light candles everywhere and to bake a large variety of Yule treats, which all have symbolic shapes (such as the solar wheel or so called "Lussekatter" with two raisins, representing the eyes of Freyja's cats, see my recent piece about the Feast of St Lucia!)
COLLECTIVE HIBERNATION, painting by the author
Today variations occur in when people believe Mothers’ Night ought to be celebrated. Some people prefer the actual winter solstice, others opt for Christmas Eve (December 24th) and some people have settled for a date in-between, such as December 22nd. I guess that people do this to give Modraniht its due attention and step away from the traditions (and expectations/demands) that Christmas Eve usually brings in our culture.I will freely admit that I do this myself.
The word solstice literally refers to the sun “standing still”. Today the term solstice is used to describe the exact moment when Sunna (the sun) reaches her northernmost point (that marks the summer solstice around June 21st ) or southernmost point on the horizon, the point where she rises (around December 22nd) from the earth’s equator. On Dec. 21, the sun stops moving southward, pauses, and then starts moving northward again.
This three-day pause falls in the days between the astronomical winter solstice and our Christmas. It is a very sacred window of time, that sets those days aside from other days in the year. The Latin word sacer (from which our modern word sacred is derived) literally means “set aside from the everyday realm”. It is a powerful time for spiritual work (and getting ready for the birth of a new year).
The key concept of Mothers’ Night, or a Night dedicated to Ancestral Mothers, is to honour all the women in our life (in the widest possible sense). For me this means my human mother and grandmothers (and aunts etc.) as well as women who played an influential role in my life or were a mentor/role model for me. It also includes the ancestors: the women I never met, who passed on their genes and features (and quirks) to me. The women who shared my passions and interests, as well as my bloodline.
DAUGHTER OF A FROG MOTHER, (painting made to honour my mother after her death in 2022).
For me this includes the mothers of my spiritual lineage: all the healers, witches, seers, herbalists, wise women who have passed on their shamanic skills to me. I cannot express enough gratitude for this gift. Nor can I express enough gratitude for living in a time and place where Witch Trials no longer occur (though the witch hunts now take other expressions in our culture, think of “Cancel Culture”).
This line-up also includes the Deep Ancestors in my ancestral field whose names I do not know (and will never know). I reach out especially to women where I still sense pain or imbalance in our ancestral web.
For example: my husband’s great grandmother lost three children in one week to diphtheria before having one more child that became my husband’s grandfather. As a mother of three (living) children I reach out to her, I honour her pain and strength. In that moment the boundary of time and space between generations dissolves. I know that we are one, that past and future are one, that we always meet in the HERE AND NOW.
I also extend my prayers to any women who shaped, mentored or taught me in this lifetime. (In ancestral healing work we speak of biological ancestors, ancestors of lineage and ancestors of affiliation). Some of my advanced students have started calling me an ancestor of spiritual lineage, which moves me to tears!
I honour goddesses who have a connection to home, hearth, loving relationships and children. This includes the Norse goddesses Frigg and Freyja, Germanic Frau Holle and even Sigyn (Loki’s wife) who is a cherished teacher in my life (appearing to me as The Poison Mother!)
YOU ARE THE SUN AND THE MOON! (Every child deserves devoted parents, but that is not a reality in our world)
For me this work does not stop there. Weaving our way back to Christmas for a moment: when I wrote the earliest version of this blog in 2018, I was working on a film (TV Project for the Smithsonian Channel with Blink Films) about the Mesolithic site of Star Carr in Yorkshire, where many antlered head dresses were found by archaeologists.
What I find an astounding piece of intelligence (found in circumpolar tribes all over Northern Europe as well as Siberia and Mongolia) is that an ancient deity called The Reindeer Mother was said to carry the Sun in her antlers. The reindeer is the only deer species where the females are bigger than the males and they retain their antlers in winter. This means that any reindeer with antlers you will see in Winter is going to be female!
On the night of the Winter Solstice The Reindeer Mother flies up in the sky. It is likely that this image (or vision) set the blueprint for our “Coca Cola version of Father Christmas flying around in a carriage pulled by reindeer”.
Reindeer love eating fly agaric mushrooms, the notorious red caps with the white dots. Reindeer herders were said to collect and drink their urine, as a safe way of ingesting the holy mushrooms and achieving altered states of consciousness). I work with fly agaric mushrooms but I have not tried “the reindeer method”!
I honour The Cosmic Deer Mother especially on Mothers’ Night and ask if I may accompany her on her journey to retrieve and return the sun! I much prefer this magical mystical experience to listening to Jingle Bells in shops full of cheap Christmas tat.
There is a Slavic Winter Goddess called Rozhanitza. She too is depicted as having reindeer antlers (in traditional embroideries from Russia and nearby countries). She has many names and there are many stories about her, but ultimately all these stories put us in touch with one key ancestor: a great indigenous circumpolar deity. She was worshipped over a large geographical area (long before the internet existed so there was more effort involved in people learning about each other’s cultures on trade routes and so forth).
My cairn on the land there, at my Forest House and Forest School, contains a figure of the Deer Mother that I carved from antler bone. I will make offerings, say prayers, drum – just as I did for the Álfablót (see my essay about that).
About the presents under the tree
In his book "Mushrooms and Mankind” (The Book Tree, 2003) the late author James Arthur points out that Amanita muscaria, also known as fly agaric, lives throughout the Northern Hemisphere under conifers and birch trees, with which the fungus — sporting deep red caps with white flecks — has a symbiotic relationship. This partially explains the practice of the Christmas tree, and the placement of bright red-and-white presents underneath, which look like Amanita mushrooms, he wrote.
"Why do people bring pine trees into their houses at the Winter Solstice, placing brightly coloured (red and white) packages under their boughs, as gifts to show their love for each other … ?" he wrote. "It is because, underneath the pine bough is the exact location where one would find this 'Most Sacred' substance, the Amanita muscaria, in the wild." Source
I wish you all a most magical Yuletide. Please spare Mother Christmas a thought whenever Father Christmas is mentioned!
And I happen to think that presence (as in being fully present, giving someone our undivided attention and truly see them) is the best present we could ever give! (Presence not presents!)
I try (but sometimes fail) to get out at least one essay a week (sometimes several), due to travel, international teaching commitments and family care responsibilities (our family lives with Alzheimer’s and I have written several posts about that). All artwork shown in Substack posts is my own, unless credited differently! If you would like to see regular posts about about Nordic spirituality and my life as a Forest Witch (and of course short videos of all the wildlife here!), please follow me on Instagram or Facebook, thank you!
Imelda, London UK
Hibernation in the snow at -22 Degrees Celsius (Sweden, January 2023)
BIO FOR IMELDA ALMQVIST
Imelda Almqvist is an international teacher of Sacred Art and Seiðr/Old Norse Traditions (the ancestral wisdom teachings of Northern Europe). So far she has written four non-fiction books and two picture books for children. Natural Born Shamans: A Spiritual Toolkit for Life (Using shamanism creatively with young people of all ages) in 2016, Sacred Art: A Hollow Bone for Spirit (Where Art Meets Shamanism) in 2019, Medicine of the Imagination - Dwelling in Possibility (an impassioned plea for fearless imagination) in 2020 and North Sea Water In My Veins(The Pre-Christian spirituality of the Low Countries) was published in June 2022.
The Green Bear is a series of picture book for children, aged 3 – 8 years. The stories and vibrant artwork, set in Scandinavia, invite children to explore enchanting parallel worlds and to keep their sense of magic alive as they grow up.
Imelda has presented her work on both The Shift Network and Sounds True. She appears in a TV program, titled Ice Age Shaman, made for the Smithsonian Museum, in the series Mystic Britain, talking about Mesolithic arctic deer shamanism.
Imelda is currently working on a handbook for rune magicians (about the runes of the Elder Futhark) and on more books in the Green Bear Series. Imelda runs an on-line school calledPregnant Hag Teachings, where all classes she teaches remain available as recordings, which can be watched any time.
Very interesting. I'm all for reinstating the feminine where and whenever it has been supplanted. Happy Mothers' Night to everyone!
Such a profound article, I will be celebrating the Winter Solstice with the Mother very much in mind and heart. Yule blessings xx