It’s Imbolc — Let the ewe’s milk flow

Clearly, the season is still winter. On the North Coast of America, we have gales and sleet to prove it. But the start of February marks a significant milestone in the progression of the seasons. We are now halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox. In the world of the ancient Celts, such “cross-quarter” days were of great import, and this particular one was know as Imbolc — roughly translated as Ewe’s milk. Not surprisingly, this was when the pregnant ewes began to give milk in preparation for bearing a new generation of lambs in the spring. Given the gestation cycle of sheep, this was a near certainty that the long dark of the Northern Winter was lifting and the rebirth of the green world was soon to come. This simple and agrarian signal would have been of great comfort that the natural order of things was proceeding as it always had, and in any case is a surer indication Spring is coming than some rodent in Pennsylvania catching a fright from its own shadow.

In our era of atomic clocks, digital watches and hard, fast calendars, where great and incredible facts about Earth and its minuscule place in the broad universe have been probed and reduced into pat little lessons in grade school texts or lauded to us in Discovery Channel Documentaries, it is hard to fathom how desperately these ancients craved any means to mark the continued status quo. In the vast isolation of prehistory, any proof that the world was still in business as usual and hadn’t abruptly halted to leave the them in perpetual winter, with no growing season, for as long as they could continue to scrape an existence out must have been cause for rejoicing.

The importance of scrawling some kind of order to the solar year is evidenced by megalithic (big-stone) sites throughout the Celtic and pre-Celtic Drudic world. All of these sites are aligned to mark the various significant astronomical days of the year, using the known reference points of local terrain and erected stones to pinpoint the sun’s transit. Stonehenge, which both marks the Summer Solstice Sunrise and serves as an lunar and solar eclipse predictor, is the most famous of these, but there are thousands of other examples. Often these sites doubled as burial mounds, perhaps indicating the person or persons buried within held the day the mound was aligned for in particular esteem. In any case, using primitive technology but highly advanced understanding of their world and the celestial bodies intertwined with it, the ancients went to great efforts to create some kind of landmarks to keep track of the natural order.

For us, whole cultures and epochs apart from the need mark the passing of time with massive stones, there isn’t much to celebrate at the start of the shortest month. Then again, if you’re into rodents and polkas, there’s Punxsutawney Phil. And Christians can celebrate St. Bridgit’s Day, since, with typical lack of originality and Disney-esque corruption of existing legends, the Catholic Church diminutized the goddess associated with this festival into a minor saint, and the cross-quarter day itself into her feast day. But aside from those modern adaptations, perhaps the rest of us can laud the notable lengthening of the days and the knowledge that they will keep getting longer at an increasing pace — because of Earth’s axis the daily increase in sunlight is the greatest in the whole year for the six week stretch from now until the Vernal Equinox. So, celebrate as you like. But for the gods’ sake drink something other than ewe’s milk.