RCG-I Seasonal Salon

Into the Darkness

I love December. It’s a powerful time to absorb knowledge, write, create art, chant, dance. To conjoin and celebrate, feast and rejoice in community or – my great pleasure at this season – turn within to search out the brilliance within the deep night.

What’s there, blazing up on that inner altar? It can be seen only in the dark, just as a campfire hardly shows itself in daylight.

We are in the Winternights, the Modranecht, Night of the Mother, and especially of the Old Woman. To her are dedicated the pagan Ember Nights, the Twölven (twelve pagan days between solstice and new year, or between christmas and epiphany). She comes looking in on our hearths to make sure we have spun off all the flax for the year. We’re supposed to make dumplings for her, or some kind of cooked offering, maybe a Hollenzopf (the golden braided loaf of Holle, the beneficent Goddess).

This Old Goddess, under any number of names and titles, rides with her hosts of land spirits and the ancestral dead, in the storms that are the signature of this time of year. (Well, in the northern hemisphere anyway – a shout out to you Kiwis and Aussies!) They move in the dark of the year, as the plants go deep into their roots, and the animals retreat into the shelter of Earth. The Moon rides highest in the heavens in this season of ultimate Yin, while the Sun is dim.

We’re in the realm of Great Mother Night, Hine Nui Te Po. She comes forth out of Te Korekore, the ultimate and inconceivable Void. The Kumulipo chant of Hawaii calls it

The source of the darkness that made darkness
The source of the night that made night
The intense darkness, the deep darkness
Darkness of the sun, darkness of the night
Nothing but Night. *

Korekore is the ultimate origin, the sea of potential, the divine “perfect time” which is outside all Time. Greeks called it Khaos, Hebrews Tohu Bohu, Chinese Hun Dun or Wu Wei. Te Po is the spirit realm of becoming. We the living exist in Te Ao, the world of manifestation, but we can access “the mystic sea of Po, where guardian and kindred spirits dwell.” ** Or in Maori terms,

The great night, the long night
The lowest night, the loftiest night
The thick night, the night to be felt
The night touched, the night unseen
The night following on… ***

We plunge into Mother Night, who annuls all charges and graspings. She returns us to utter Vastness and Totality, to absolute Unity, and in this experience all beings are irreversibly transformed. We get a taste of this washing in deep sleep, a cyclic descent and opening that every animal living must undergo –or die, and be swallowed up anyway. Even emperors and dictators and warlords become, for a few hours, like open-mouthed babies. All must pass through the arms of Te Po.

So too in the Russian skazki, the heroine is instructed by her animal helper to heal her companion’s wound by first pouring on the Waters of Death. They wipe away the injury without a trace, as if it never existed. Only then will the Waters of Life be able to do their work of restoring vitality.

There is always the possibility of renewal, to reconceive ourselves in Te Po, bathed in her magnetic and rich darkness. After dropping all that binds and weighs on us, we can pass into light and become again, changed like a cloth pulled through dye. A chrysalis dissolves into pre-cellular goo within its cocoon, dreaming deeply, and emerges from the Darkness entirely other than it entered the tiny world it spun. It comes out a butterfly, drenched in lunar honey, blinking with sticky wings into the almost-forgottten radiance.

In Mediterranean antiquity, the cry at Winter Solstice was “She brings forth, light increases!” The Egyptians regarded all their greatest goddesses – Neith, Het-heru and Auset—as mothers of the Sun. And this mystery is the basis for the Christian edifice constructed over the foundations of pagan thought. Perhaps its oldest form goes back to the primordial Egg which, according to a Kemetic creation story, swelled, vibrated, and split open to release the Sun, whose light then gave rise to all life forms according to the power of Maat, natural Law.

From conception the increase
From increase the swelling
From swelling the thought
From thought the remembrance
From remembrance, the consciousness, the desire. ***

The paradox in Chinese philosophy is that Yang is considered most powerful not at the climax of light during the Summer Solstice but just after the culmination of Ultimate Yin, at the moment when light begins to increase out of total darkness.

It is this possibility of renewal in the midst of Night that empowers us to transform everything.

Satyaa          Maat          Allat

Notes

* Noyes, Martha K. Then There Were None. Honolulu: Bess Press (2003) Based on a video by by Elizabeth Kapu'uwailani Lindsey; co-produced by Pacific Islanders in Communications and Hawaii Public Television .

** Kanahele, George Hu. Ku Kanaka: Stand Tall -- A Search for Hawaiian Values. Honolulu: University of Hawaii (1993)

*** This is from the Maori Creation Chant , Aotearoa (New Zealand). I can’t supply a source for these stunning verses, which I copied out back in 1969 a few months before beginning the Suppressed Histories Archives.