The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/sol-invictus)
In this week’s Pagan Community Notes, we celebrate Cherry Hill graduates and honorees, as discussions of Sol Invictus and Yuletide traditions make their expected appearance in mainstream media. We are also saddened to share that Faelind has crossed the Veil into the arms of the Goddess. As always, Star offers her Tarot of the Week, and Moon the cat channels Bastet on solstice morning at Stonehenge.
Pagan Perspectives
Today’s column comes from your humble Weekend Editor, Eric O. Scott, who has written for The Wild Hunt since 2012. He has a PhD in English from the University of Missouri and his first novel, The Lives of the Apostates, was published by Moon Books in 2013. The Wild Hunt’s weekend section is always open for submissions. Please send queries to eric@wildhunt.org. I was in London on midwinter’s day in 2016, and at 4:30 PM it had already gone dark.
This weekend, many Pagans, Heathens and Polytheists in the Northern Hemisphere are marking the Winter Solstice with celebrations, feasts, and rituals. The solstice will occur on Tuesday, Dec 22 at at 04:49 UTC. It is a day traditionally thought to be the longest night and shortest day of the year. This time of year is held sacred within many different modern Pagan and Heathen traditions, and has a rich history in ancient Pagan religions. The solstice time was important to pre-historic peoples in both Ireland and England. While there is scant evidence of specific celebrations, it is generally thought that the pagan Celts did, in some way, honor the time around the solstice.