Alternative Wheel: Other seasonal cycle stories

When this column started, it was all about exploring different ways of thinking about the wheel of the year, reflecting on aspects of the natural world to provide Pagans alternatives to the usual solar stories. It's still very much an alternative wheel, but there's a developing emphasis on what we can celebrate as the seasons turn. Faced with environmental crisis, and an uncertain future, celebration is a powerful soul restoring antidote that will help us all keep going, stay hopeful and dream up better ways of being.

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Oak King, Holly King

Modern Pagan traditions have the Oak and Holly kings fighting at the summer and winter solstices. It’s a good excuse to evoke some mumming drama and get some chaps to hit each other with bits of wood, and as such is not without merit. But what of the oak and the holly?

Winter is certainly holly’s season. The deciduous trees shed their leaves a month or two ago, so the dark glossy hues of the holly stand out. Red holly berries can be one of the few bright things in a winter environment, still vivid even on gloomy days, and vibrant against backdrops of snow. Holly is certainly King at this time of year, but in practice he’s probably been King since Samhain.

Holly is a slow growing tree, it takes it years to get anywhere at all. As a consequence, it tends to be one of the shorter trees in the wood – part of the ‘underwood’ along with hazel, dogwood, thorns and rowans. When the rest of the wood comes into leaf, the holly is much less obvious and tends to fade into the background.

Oaks are of course very much in power come the summer. They might be slow growers, but a big oak will often be the biggest tree in the wood, mighty in girth as well as height, with far reaching branches forming a dramatic canopy. The oak tree houses and feeds a remarkable number of other life forms and in the summer the oak is an ecosystem in its own right. Oaks are amongst the later trees to come into leaf, but by June will reliably be in full swing, full majesty.

There is a transition time, in autumn and spring, as we move from the season where deciduous trees dominate to the rule of the evergreens, and back again. It’s not an event. In practice, it is nothing at all like a sudden fight for dominance between two kinds of tree, and it is about as far from the solstices as you can get.

But then, the Oak and Holly Kings have everything to do with twentieth century thinking, with Robert Graves and his tree calendar, and with modern narratives about the wheel of the year. In folk tradition, the old year does indeed die off and the new year is born with the return of the sun – but this is a solar story, not a tree story. In a traditional mumming play, you’ll see George fight a dragon at this time of year, or some other heroic figure take on a Turkish knight, or similar. The good guy dies, and is brought back to life by curious ministrations from the doctor. The pair will fight again, the good guy will win, no one restores the villain (until he gets up to take a bow). Then the devil may well comer round to collect your spare change. Traditional mumming is a death and rebirth and conflict story, with added getting money out of people – an integral part of the proceedings. There probably are echoes of older things.

 

Our modern Oak and Holly kings come to fight, seasonally, with little reference to what the oak and holly trees are doing, and the most tenuous nod to traditional, seasonal plays of death and rebirth. All traditions start somewhere, but this one seems to have rather weak roots, and not much to hold it firm. It’s a shame because there’s powerful, archetypal possibility here, but while the kings of oak and holly are so out of sync with the realities of oak and holly, they don’t really work. If we moved them to the equinoxes (a tough time for finding good ritual content as those festival lack for traditions) it might all work a lot better.

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Nimue Brown is the author of Druidry and Meditation, Druidry and the Ancestors. Pagan Dreaming, When a Pagan Prays and Spirituality without Structure. She also writes the graphic novel series Hopeless Maine, and other speculative fiction. OBOD trained, but a tad feral, she is particularly interested in Bardic Druidry and green living.

Comments

  • Jenn
    Jenn Sunday, 04 January 2015

    Great post! I work with the Holly King aspect quite a bit and I have always celebrated his "coming to" at the Autumnal Equinox. I feel that his power is strongest at Yule and though the preceding weeks he is weaving his magic and his strength apeaking at Yule, then sustains though the winter finally waning at the Spring Equinox.

  • Alban
    Alban Monday, 05 January 2015

    I have been having this debate with myself for some time now. I have come to think of the seasonal changes as a life cycle rather than a cycle of combat. Something like the Holly King becomes the Oak King at the Summer solstice and a new King is born at the Winter Solstice...As always Nimue, your posts seem to come at the "write" time...oh boy...I'm tired...:)

  • Gerald  Norviel
    Gerald Norviel Monday, 05 January 2015

    Very simple and intuitive...I like blending with (nature) with the sabbats it gives a deeper feeling of spiritual contact than just the surface elements of celebration

  • Chiron Cane
    Chiron Cane Saturday, 21 February 2015

    .:.

    White Unicorn .:. Red Maiden


    https://vimeo.com/30142658

    .:.

    A visual journey through several centuries of sacred and encoded art which tells the myth of the Lady and the Unicorn and reveals a continuity of imagery which is seldom recognised.

    We tend to envisage the legendary unicorn as white in colour and yet a careful exploration of secular, sacred and encoded works of art reveals an even stronger connection between the Maiden of unicorn folktales with the colour red.

    One of the constants in the vast majority of examples is the fact that the Maiden is robed in red and that this is seen as being a symbolic of purity.

    That is why the young woman dressed in scarlet appears in allegorical paintings with depict the virtue of Chastity - even when these are in a pre-Christian Classical setting.

    .:.

    The colour coding continued for centuries until it was denounced as heretical by the Vatican and new rules were laid down.

    .:.

  • Chiron Cane
    Chiron Cane Saturday, 21 February 2015

    .:.

    the theme of the Oak and the Holly - like that of the Robin and the Wren - is reflected in folksong, folk custom, traditional narratives and - of course - centuries of encoded iconography

    https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/e0/51/6a/e0516a24b92bc96c6ee3d7f139951084.jpg

    SOURCE :

    https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/371547037980060561/

    .:.

  • Chiron Cane
    Chiron Cane Saturday, 21 February 2015

    https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/db/38/6e/db386e101148458f62736556c47e7d29.jpg

  • Chiron Cane
    Chiron Cane Saturday, 21 February 2015

    https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/e2/aa/8d/e2aa8ded912e464cc1992cd6e3c52d3c.jpg

    .:.

    The Oak King, the Holly King and the Unicorn:
    Myths and Symbolism of the Unicorn Tapestries


    by John Williamson

    Publisher : Harpercollins
    Date : April 1987
    Language : English
    ISBN-10 : 0060960329
    ISBN-13 : 978-0060960322

    SOURCE :

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Oak-King-Holly-Unicorn/dp/0060960329

    .:.

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