Pagans Fear People Forgetting True Meaning Of Winter Solstice

Story by Egon Sinclair 

| Published Dec 15, 2009

Amid the hustle and bustle of the winter holidays, losing sight of the season's significance happens all too often. Now more than ever, area pagans are urging members of their covens to keep in mind the true meaning of the winter solstice.

For centuries, the nondenominational celebration of rebirth was pivotal to ancient cultures, indicating the proper time to mate animals and providing a frame of reference when comparing the year's food stores against the remaining winter months. But many pagans fear today's winter solstice would be unrecognizable to their heathen forefathers.

"I feel like the faith is brimming with 'convenient pagans,' people who only joined up to piss off their parents or because there was already a much prettier girl in their class who cut herself for attention," said outraged pagan priest Demitroch the Blightculler. "Most pagans today are just in it for the sex magic."

Like hundreds of others around country, Blightculler is advocating a return to a simpler time replete with more conservative pagan values. He hopes to resurrect winter solstice traditions buried by history, such as dressing up in florid costumes and committing mischief to procure bribes of food or money, or the annual burning of a yule log, an offering made to the Sun God in hopes of coaxing him to shine more brightly on his children.

"Slaughtering livestock in the temple to produce hlaut (sacrificial blood) and then smearing it all over the walls and each other — that was really something I was hoping to share with my children," said a 44-year-old pagan woman who, at the time of the interview, went by Callindre Moonbourne but has since informed the DerN she's changed her spirit name to Sylvanis Evertoken.

"But when I ask my kids to come outside to watch a thunderstorm, which is actually a phantasmal hunting procession of our ancestors chasing a hideous female troll, they look at me like I'm crazy.

"Or they'll ask me if I slowly lost my grip on reality and walled myself off in a bizarre but secure fantasy world because Daddy left," she added.

This year's winter solstice occurs on the 21st of this month, and both Blightculler and Moonbourne/Evertoken hope to make it the best one yet.

"We take our holiday very seriously, unlike some of those, ugh ... neopagans," Blightculler said. "Those idiots don't even know that we invented mistletoe and that "Stonehenge" isn't just a Spinal Tap song."

"Stonehenge! Where the virgins lie and the prayers of devils fill the midnight sky and ... oh, goddamn it," Blightculler added, mostly under his breath.