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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Sun Wheel
The Turning Wheel: Folk Tradition and Myth

 

There’s a house across the hill from mine that has a wagon wheel mounted on a post in their front yard. It’s painted white with eight spokes, and in front of it is a small garden bed with flowers. I’ve seen wagon wheels in yards and even mounted on house exteriors before, but I never thought much about them until recently. When I noticed this particular wagon wheel on the way to my son’s school one morning, it struck me as one of those old traditions that have been practiced consistently for so long that people have forgotten what they mean. But still they use them, out of superstition (a code word for lingering belief in folk magic and religion), a love of tradition, or both.

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Paganistani Children's Games (Winter): Wheel-Tag

It's Deep Winter, and we're well into the holiday thirtnight known variously as Yeaning, Ewesmilk, and February Eve*. If where you live is anything like where I do, the snows lie piled deep.

Ergo, it's the perfect time to play Wheel Tag.

Wheel Tag is just like regular tag—non-binary “It” and all—but you play it on a track in the snow.

Here's how you play.

Lay out a Wheel in the snow and tromp it down well (or, if you're ambitious, shovel it out). If your track is relatively small, make a Wheel with four spokes. If you've got room to spread out—the snow on top of a frozen lake is ideal for this—go with eight spokes.

Then pick an It, and away you go. Remember: you have to stay on the Wheel. Anything that happens off-Wheel doesn't count.

Like most traditional kids' games with a grounding in ritual, the purpose of the game is to play itself through and start over again, around and around: like the year, like Life. Like a Wheel.

In Witch Country, even games are profound.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Let's Build a Wheel-Cairn

You know that cairn that we've been talking about building? The one where people can depose the ashes of the dead?

Well, here's an idea: let's build it in the shape of a Wheel.

Check out this wheel-cairn from Sälle in Fröjel on the island of Gotland (Sweden). (It's about 2000 years old.) Let's build one like this, oriented East-West, big. I'd see the spokes and rim as maybe a foot high, the Hub- and Quarter-cairns higher.

It's a Sun Wheel, of course. That makes it a prayer. As the dead go West with the Sun, so too may they be reborn with him in the East.

And it's the Wheel of Time, the Wheel of the Year. As time, as the year, move in a circle, so may those who were be reborn to the People.

The Wheel, of course, is also the Journey. The dead have a journey to make. As our people have followed the Sun, traveling from East to West, so do the dead continue their journey.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Wheel Dance

At the very heart of our Yule each year turns the Great Dance of the Wheel, the dance of the Sun's Rebirth.

Listen while I tell of it.

Wearing holly, the circle of men faces outward. Wearing ivy, enclosing, the circle of women faces in.

The two circles take four steps toward each other, then four steps back.

Then the circles wheel. One moves sunwise, the other, widdershins.

(There's a metaphor to be savored here, but that's for later.)

Again the concentric circles expand and contract. Once again they wheel, reversing direction.

Then repeat.

The song that accompanies the dance tells the seasons of the Sun's life: winter, spring, summer, fall, and back again to winter. In one infinite instant, the Sun is begotten, born, begets, and dies. Like the dance, the song wheels, returning again to its own beginning. In the end, it becomes a round, turning and turning on itself.

In this way, we work our magic.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Good question, Ian. I would think that what you wanted to wear and where you wanted to dance would be up to you. Tradition is fixe
  • Ian Phanes
    Ian Phanes says #
    What would you do if a non-binary person (like myself) wanted to dance?

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Deeper Names

The great god of the Northern Bronze Age was the Sun, and His sign was the Wheel.

Happy were they who saw His sign standing in the sky.

Today, in the winter skies of the North, we see it there still.

“Parahelia,” they say, or “Sun dogs.”

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