![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
haptalaonthere are always children - let's start there. The children are a key component of a lot of our lore (because they're mostly children's books!). Despite not being a Narnia fan, I tend to feel like the four children from Narnia are the thing (as opposed to, say, the three children of Owl Service - whose identities are very clearly known as echoes of the Welsh mighty ones).
We're in that part of the wheel expressing Solar-Lunar (Horizon), the coming together of blue sky and green earth in balance and tension - where it is beginning to become lush with the wetness of springtime, but still cold. The wooing of the land and sky, that the weather will roll back and reveal the sun to ripen the crops - and set into motion, visible time. It is, among other things, a bird - that is, our sudden delighting awareness of the return of the birds.
The lore is overlapping: not one cycle to describe the year, but several; but I've diverged from the Wiccan and Thelemic trend to make the son into the father into the son over and over, feeling that these sons are new people - new generations, not that this makes sense in an ever-overlapping-and-looping year. In this, I suppose it's more akin to the Greek pantheon, which never apologised for celebrating multiple generations of gods all at once.
That is, perhaps, why the image of these four as children is so strong at this time: the year is not one child, but several.
The Changeling is the daughter of the Winter King and, like all princesses of fairytale, she is motherless - raised by the cruel stepmother of winter. She is the coming of the flowers. She is Solar-Stellar (land), the changes of springtide and autumntide that are warm and dry and refer to the changing of plants and animals; but in March she is pre-Stellar, her aspect before the touch of the fairy-dark.
The Stepmother of Winter crafts for herself two children (and these, are fatherless). Twins - born on the winter solstice, holy day of St Thomas Didymos - st Thomas the Twin, and Doubter - following the lore of Aradia, Lucifer and Diana - the sun and moon, expressing the mystery that these lights are twins and yet separate. They are Solar-Lunar (Light and ? Sky[?]), respectively the Sun-of-Moon and Moon-of-Sun, cold and dry. Both figures have some gender going on, a sort of queerness as people who have not quite separated out into a man and a woman, but each retain a little of the other (however one wishes to express that in human terms).
Lucifer's role is to reject the Stepmother of Winter, who saw him as her beloved heir - his nature is always to rebel - and to wake the Young Sun King (because we split out the traditional role of the Wiccan God; light precedes land; land is light formed into shape, expressed as life). I'm somewhat unclear here, but have an image of him waking a sleeping youth from within a barrow, supporting him as the king with himself as counsellor and supporter (of course, his nature is always to rebel: in time, the Lightbringer morphs from the Young King's guiding Merlin to his opposing Mordred; they are chosen-brothers, but also rivals)
(Diana does not speak to me; I have a sense of her as a magician, as something cold but clever, always an outsider and sometimes a guide - in the sky, but in no sense a Sky Goddess; but it's speculative, not revealed. I use the term Diana because that's what is used in Aradia, but I am uncertain that it is not misleading. After all, Diana has a Lunar-Stellar (Hekatean) face to do with childbirth and illness, and so another word might fit best)
The Young Sun King is a complex figure. He's an expression of energies that takes form as mythic figures (but those figures are somewhat similar, as they express the same energetic root). In one loop, he is land (cold and wet), the young and noble seeker - pure of heart - seeking the hand of the Landmother (who is sky, cold and wet). The young king is birdlike. And together, through their truce, they bring the summer into being. This Young King travels down the skyward path and back up again to the village.
But there is a second Young Sun King - his heir - and it's he who comes forward as part of this tetrad, part of a Bronze Age rather than the mythic distance of the coming of agriculture and the seasons. The role of this second kingly figure is, I suppose, to express a darker aspect of the Sun King figure: a failed king, sprung from the same root, but all too human. And I get the sense that this figure travels instead down the landward path, is too connected to the bestial and earthly to wield material power with wisdom. In this age, the Bronze king's eyes are blinded to the light and sky and to the lunar balances and stellar truces which made his predecessor thrive. He does no harm in March, as an ambitious young man; but his appearance throughout the rest of the cycle is as an expression of a Bad Prince. He woos and seeks to wed the Changeling to sure up his position as king (but he is the prince she flees to find the forest). He rules with the Lightbringer at his side (until the Lightbringer rebels and brings chaos to the land opposing his rule. What happens after this point is unclear: is this rebellion the Ragnarok-Camlann of our lore, renewing the world entire? Where does Penda fit into this? And the final shore?).
They express the criss-crossing of the Lunar across the path: how Diana can be queen of the Night Flight of the witches, and yet the Changeling leader of the dance and fairy-bands of the witches; both, traditional witches with one-foot in the fae-world and one foot in the woods. And how a Robin Hood can exist as rebel and bringer of rebellion, but also as king of the greenwood. It is in the moon's nature to wander. To create overlapping subfragments of myth that we must recombine, the broken stained glass window where the wind comes through. These figures are, in part, anthropomorphised experiences of the numinous: because they exist in similar places on the Map, so their functions and symbolism have commonalities.
And it is in the nature of Lunar things to go awry: this touch of the moon on all the children of this generation points to the ways none of them will become what they were formed to be.
It is March. The Lighbringer is the coming up of gorse-flowers, daffodils, the spear of sunlight in the morning, fresh-renewing joy. The Young King is the fresh delight of wet green leaves. The Changeling is the promise of other flowers to come, especially the may-flower. Diana is a mystery to me. She is not water, nor frost; she may be nothing organic at all; or she may be my missing hunter, the reaching out of the spirit to arise and wander; or the freshness of the air. All four are birds - and overlapping birds. Lightbringer and the Young King are hunting birds; Diana and the Changeling are owls; the Young King and the Changeling are little birds, the sparrows, robins and wrens; Lightbringer and Diana are ?. Doves, perhaps. But then Diana is almost certainly also a hunting bird. All four are young, and happy; it is that kind of time.
They don't quite map onto the Narnia protagonists. Changeling is certainly the childlike delight and curiosity of Lucy; but she also has Susan's arc as the girl who goes wrong somewhere. Do they all have a second, then, like with the birds? Like Peter, the Young King gets to be King (but not a good one, which would also make him Susan - the lost destiny). Lightbringer has Edmund's betrayal and lawmaker qualities; but the potential within him as Peter, the true king. Diana is an archer, I suppose, like Susan, and is certainly the more mature sister; which leaves her Edmund as well, the intellectual brother.
(but it probably does best to leave aside those four moulds and just consider the image of four princely young people, momentarily happy, with destiny at bay. And this, for me, resolves my contradictions about how to spend the Spring Equinox: it is for these four figures as a momentary group, with all their potential and frankly, their joy. It's March. The winter is cold and we have earned delight.)
Part of the pleasures of seeking and serving the Landweird is to potter around the garden, preparing the pots for the year, and meditating on this sort of arcane nonsense. Perhaps it will all come together as sense, and perhaps it will not. Probably, I will slip further and further off the map as a mad magician whose scribblings are comprehensible to no one (in part, because they are only for the elevated and the wise; in part, because they are utter bollocks; i think the best magic contains a little of both). A nice way to be, I think, increasingly conferring with the beyond, muddled in with one's imaginings, but always seeking, creating, always at play, always with knots to resolve.
no subject
Date: 18 March 2022 17:30 (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 March 2022 07:00 (UTC)Is this possible?
no subject
Date: 13 March 2023 12:21 (UTC)I think you're right about the brothers - that is, a sort of good king (Solar-aspect) and a bad king (Stellar-aspect, that is, what happens when the Solar turns to the bad); and also that Changeling as Lunar-Stellar works well, the interplay between the fairy liminal and the deep cosmic. I like that a lot.
Another thing I've reflected on since last year is that Changeling and Lightbringer are both "bad children", one Skyish and one Landish. They are both born and raised to have a certain destiny, but run away from it.