A Quaker Yule

Even thirty years ago, the word Yule would not have been completely foreign to English-speaking ears. After all, we've used the word Yuletide to refer to the Christmas period for some time. Indeed, the cognate jul exists as a modern word in the Scandinavian languages to refer to the Christian holiday of Christmas.

These days it's not unusual for people to be aware of the pre-Christian roots of the word, referring to a midwinter festival or holiday in the Germanic world. The exact practices among Germanic pre-Christians varied; while their languages and cultures, and indeed religion, shared common roots and themes, there was considerable cultural variation. We know, or at least think we know, of the dísablót and álfablót of the Norse, the public and private sacrifices that took place (as best we can tell, in some periods and some places) around the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice. The first honoured, perhaps placated, the dísir, a range of female spirits and gods, and the Valkyries; the latter the elves, mythic and folkloric figures attributed a great range of impacts of daily life. As the names suggest, each of these was a blót, an act of ritual worship generally involving a sacrifice, generally of an animal (though the similarity of “blót” and “blood” is generally understood to be coincidental). Some sources and evidence indicate that there was also human sacrifice, though evidence that is not questionable generally points to this being exceptional, and generally associated with war.

So far, so much interesting (if hideously simplified for brevity) history. What does it have to do with the world (or society) today, and especially what does it have to do with Quakers? We are not, after all, Germanic pre-Christians.

Your Ideas Wanted for New Post Series

As those who have signed up to my Patreon will be aware, I've been working for a little while on a longer piece, that will be published as a series of posts, looking at different approaches to the Divine and to Quaker business method. This builds on the ideas I presented at Woodbrooke earlier this year, looking at discernment in the context of a religious society that enjoys a wide diversity of beliefs.

In that presentation, I talked about the idea of conceptions of the Divine, along similar lines to those in my post on the subject of such conceptions (which rather drew on the work I did for the Woodbrooke presentation), talked about how they relate to different conceptions of what is going on in a Quaker business meeting, and laid out the traditional (theistic) view of business. I then followed this up with my own non-theist conception, and I was very gratified to see that people could largely accept that, while they could not be considered equivalent, not “the same thing in different terms”, they were compatible.

Pantheons and Archetypes: Wisdom

In an earlier post, I wrote about the role of pantheons in various faiths, and how liberal Quakers might find them useful in their own spiritual approach and practice. This post is the first of what I hope will be a series – if there is enough interest in them – of looking at specific cases of this principle, specific archetypes and the deities that evoke them in various pantheons. This will include ways that Friends might find meaningful to incorporate these ideas in their own practice, if they feel so inclined.

In this first such post, I will consider the archetype of the wisdom deity. Wisdom is, in this case, distinct from knowledge, and somewhat distinct from intellect – in that some examples we will consider see the ideas of wisdom and intellect as more interconnected, and some less. Wisdom is not related to the acquisition of knowledge, but may be related to the ability to put together information to come to an appropriate conclusion, and is generally related to the ability to determine the right course to take beyond a simple optimisation of the outcome – looking past immediate objectives to peripheral or longer-term results.

A Quaker Halloween

It's a strange idea, isn't it? After all, the traditional Quaker testimony against keeping of times and seasons holds that there is no spiritual significance to any day. Quakers do not, traditionally, take liturgical notice of Christian seasons and festivals, be it Lent or Advent, Easter or Christmas. How then can we have a Quaker Halloween, a festival that is now of limited liturgical significance even to mainstream Christian churches.

There's more to Halloween than the lack of liturgical significance, however, and more to Quaker approaches to Christmas and Easter than their lack of liturgical significance for us. The important aspect of many of these festivals is now, in the global economic north, cultural. Practising members of many faiths will celebrate elements of such holidays, giving presents and attending parties.

Pantheons and Archetypes

Quaker tradition is rooted in, incontrovertibly derives from, Christian tradition. Much of our traditional language was alien to Christians of the time, but likewise much of it was reassuring and familiar, and many Quaker concepts derive directly from biblical sources – albeit rather unconventional interpretations of them. However, especially in the liberal branch of the worldwide Quaker family, we have also added insights, ideas and language from other traditions. Those that, in my experience, have most permeated British Quakerism in terms of language would be from Buddhism. “Mindful”, and words related to it, would seem a key example; these seem to drop from Quaker lips as readily as Christian references, and the practice of mindfulness has Buddhist roots, as well as being very much in vogue in the world of mental health and well-being. Other south Asian traditions get a look in as well, and there's a fair amount of non-specific nature-worship related ideas and language as well.

In this post, however, I will be focussing on the idea of pantheon-based faiths, and what we could draw from them. This isn't an area I hear or read much about in Quaker thought, but it often comes to mind for me. Of course, I live with someone who was massively into ancient Greek and Roman (mostly Roman) culture and mythology when she was a kid, and I have many friends and acquaintances who identify with or practice various neo-pagan faiths, so that may not be a surprise.

This is going to get a bit rambling, but please bear with me – it does all come around to add up to something in the end.