Tag: pagan Anglo-Saxons

The Pagan Calendar for Thursday, December 24th

winter
The Pagan Calendar for Thursday, December 24th

The Mothers -The Venerable Bede, writing about the customs of the Pagan Anglo Saxons in England, mentioned their practice of celebrating a holiday he called Modranicht or Modresnacht on the eve of Christmas. In his account of the Pagan calendar in 725 CE, he said:

“And the very night that is sacrosanct to us, these people call modranect, that is, the mothers’ night, a name bestowed, I suspect, on account of the ceremonies which they performed while watching this night through.”

This ‘night of the Mothers’ was evidently a sacred night devoted to a group of feminine divinities, like those pictured on carvings and statues all over Celtic France and Britain which show three women together, holding children and fruit, fish, grain and other bounties of the earth.

In Shetland, into recent times, it was called Helya’s Night when each child was committed into the protection of Mother Mary. Helya may be a corruption of the Old Norse heilagr, meaning holy. This is probably Mother’s Night overlaid with a Christian veneer.  [237] An account written in the nineteenth century says that, once the children were in bed, the old woman (the reporter’s grandmother) rose from her place by the peat fire and made her way over to the cradle where the youngest lay. Raising her hands over the slumbering infant, she spoke aloud:

Mary Midder had de haund
Ower aboot for sleepin-baund
Had da lass an’ had da wife,
Had da bairn a’ its life.
Mary Midder had de haund.
Roond da infants o’ wur land.

This procedure was repeated over all the children, while the grandfather sat raking the peats in the hearth. The old man was also thought to have been reciting something but, unfortunately, his softly spoken words were inaudible.

Anna Franklin, Yule (The Eight Sabbats)

Interesting Everything We Know About Mabon Comes From A Monk


Mabon Comments & Graphics
“Everything that we know about the religious festivals of the pagan Anglo-Saxons comes from a book written by the Christian monk, the Venerable Bede, entitled De temporum ratione, meaning The Reckoning of Time, in which he described the calendar of the year. The pagan Anglo-Saxons followed a calendar with twelve lunar months, with the occasional year having thirteen months so that the lunar and solar alignment could be corrected. Bede claimed that the greatest pagan festival was Modraniht (meaning Mother Night), which was situated at the Winter solstice and which marked the start of the Anglo-Saxon year. Following this festival, in the month of Solmonað (February), Bede claims that the pagans offered cakes to their deities. Then, in Eostur-monath Aprilis (April), a spring festival was celebrated, dedicated to the goddess Eostre, and the later Christian festival of Easter took its name from this month and its goddess. The month of September was known as Halegmonath, meaning Holy Month, which may indicate that it had special religious significance. The month of November was known as Blod-Monath, meaning Blood Month, and was commemorated with animal sacrifice, both in offering to the gods, and also likely to gather a source of food to be stored over the winter. Remarking on Bede’s account of the Anglo-Saxon year, the historian Brian Branston noted that they “show us a people who of necessity fitted closely into the pattern of the changing year, who were of the earth and what grows in it” and that they were “in fact, a people who were in a symbiotic relationship with mother earth and father sky”.”

– Anglo-Saxon Polytheism