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The Wheel of the Celtic Year |
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The Medicine Wheel of
the Celtic Year |
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Click on the name of each
Festival for more
about that Gateway |
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The rhythms of the Celtic Year are woven
from the dance between dark and light, between the four seasons,
and between masculine and feminine. |
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The wheel of the Celtic
year is like an astrological
birth-chart, or a native
American
medicine wheel.1
Like a birth chart, the wheel is based
on the astrological principle of
As above, so below.
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In a birth chart, an
analogy is drawn between the birth of a child
and the birth of a day. Both the earth as
it spins and the child as it emerges from the
womb progress
from the dark into the light, and eventually back into the
dark again. |
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The
Wheel of the Celtic year explores the analogy
between the
daily
rhythm of dark and light and the
annual
rhythm of the seasons. |
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The
daily
cycle moves through the four Directions which
quarter the Wheel. Thus, at its
nadir
the sun lies below the earth in the North;
it emerges above the horizon in the East; it
rises to its apogee or zenith in the south; and
it descends
again to set below the horizon in the West.2 |
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In the Earth's
annual
orbit around the Sun, each of the four
Directions is associated with a particular season,
a particular element,
and one of the four stages in an individual
life. Thus Spring is placed in the place
of the East with Air and Childhood, Summer in the South
with Fire and Adulthood, Autumn in the West with Water
and Eldership, and Winter in the North with
Earth and Death & Transformation. |
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Four solar
festivals mark out the cardinal quarters of the
year. The two
Equinoxes mark the points where the light and
dark are in balance, the point of
transition between between the
introversion of the time of Dreaming, and
the extroversion of the time of Manifestation.
The two Solstices mark the points
of greatest imbalance, which is also the point
at which the year, like a pendulum
is poised to swing back towards balance again.
Together, these four Sun festivals map out the
defining points in the circular form
around which the year revolves. They are
Gateways at which we are invited to take stock
of where we have arrived, and through which to
step consciously into the next stage of the
journey. The Sun, in the Above, is the
mirror of the ordering, initiating,
consciousness-bringing quality of the Masculine,
the Shiva principle, in the Below. |
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But life on Earth is not only shaped by the
dance with the Sun. Spiralling round the
elliptic, the Moon orbits the earth once a
moon-month, passing through all her phases.
The dance of the Moon is all about flow,
transformation and aliveness -- the flow of the tides, the
flow of menstruation, the rhythms of fertility. The Sun and the Moon
in the Above are as the Masculine is to
the Feminine below. At the cross-quarters of the
Celtic year, balancing
the Sun Festivals at the Equinoxes and the
Solstices, stand the four lunar Festivals --
Samhain, Imbolc,
Beltane and Lammas, often referred to
as the "Fire Festivals".3
These gateways are particularly associated with subtle, inner changes,
moments when form dissolves, moments of shift
and change, like shifts
in the tidal flow of the year. So these
Moon festivals are about energy, rather than
form, about what is contained within the vessel
of this moment, the uniqueness of this
flow in this place at this moment
in this year. The dance
between the Sun and the Moon celebrated in the
cycle of the Celtic celebrations of Western
tradition is the Celtic version of what in
Eastern tradition is described as the dance of
Shakti and Shiva -- the dance of Energy and
Consciousness |
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A medicine wheel
organizes knowledge in a circular form, which
has no beginning and no end. We may start,
as the Celtic year does, with the inner journey
into the otherworld, which begins at
Samhain with the connection with our roots,
which are our ancestors. Or as the Christian
year does, with the magical birth of light in
the midst of darkness, in the dead of winter.
Or as a birth-chart does, with the newborn's
first breath as he or she emerges into the world
of daylight.
Wherever we enter or leave
the wheel, it is itself continuous, seamless,
without end or beginning. It is the the web
that holds us.
Robert Osborn
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Notes |
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1A
"Medicine Wheel" is the way that a
number of American tribes organize
knowledge through the use of
sophisticated circular patterns of
analogy, in which each category of
knowledge being arranged is assigned
its point on the wheel of
directions. See, for example,
Leo Rutherford, The View through
the Medicine Wheel: Shamanic Maps of
How the Universe Works, O Books,
2008, ISBN 978-1-84694-108-5.
Rutherford gained much of
his understanding from the teachings
of the Deer Tribe. On the printed
page, the convention is often
to orient such wheels the way we do
maps, with North at the top of the
page, but of course this is only a
convention.
2 The
convention, as in Rutherford's
diagrams, is to orient Medicine
wheels as we do maps, with North at
the top. But the plane of the
Celtic wheel is not horizontal, like
a compass or sundial, but vertical,
like an astrological chart. In
the Northern hemishphere, it is
therefore South, where the sun
achieves apogee, that is at the top.
This orientation also matches the
stages of a life with the pattern of
the year, unlike the Deer Tribe
system, which places childhood in
the South (which we think of as
summer) rather than the spring,
adulthood in the North (which for us
is the place of the darkest time, of
beginnings and endings), etc.
3Fires
are associated with the Sun
festivals too, though --
particularly with the Summer
Solstice, when in Irish tradition
the ash from the fire is sprinkled
on the growing crop, symbolizing the
way in which the sun fire is
absorbed into the earth to create a
rich harvest. There are
numerous tales of the revellers in
their exuberance setting fire to the
crops they were blessing in this
way. |
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