Blessings of Alban Elfed

Today is Alban Elfed, the Light of the Water, the autumnal equinox (known as Mabon for many others). It’s my first Druid holy day, and I’ve been incredibly excited—like, excited maybe out of proportion to what’s actually happening. After all, I’m not celebrating with anyone except my spouse (who is not a Druid but who will be happy to eat the enormous roast chicken dinner I’ll be making). Even if we weren’t in the middle of a once-in-a-century plague, I am at this point a very solitary practitioner with no plans to change that. 

But I think it makes sense to be hyped for an Occasion. I think a lot of us are starved for celebration. There hasn’t been much reason to celebrate this year. So this feels almost like a kind of defiance. 

The autumn equinox is the day on which there is an equal amount of light and darkness, a moment of balance before everything starts getting darker—leading up to the winter solstice, Alban Arthan (Yule in the broader Pagan tradition). Which also feels like a kind of defiance; it’s a celebration of light before the darkness starts to swallow it up in earnest. And one of the other reasons why I’m so excited to celebrate it is how it’s changed the way I think about winter. 

I don’t like short days, and I don’t especially like the cold. I’m much more of a spring and summer and early fall kind of person. February is always the most brutal month as far as my mental health goes; it’s less dark than it was but still dark, it’s often when we get some of our worst cold days, and I’ve just been mostly inside for so many weeks. Christmas is long over, and it’s still another long way to spring. So autumn depresses me a little, because I feel the warmth and the light slipping inexorably away from me. 

But becoming a Pagan in general and a Druid in particular has changed that for me, in significant part because of the Alban gates—the gates of light. Each one we pass through represents a new phase of the solar year, a new change in how the sun touches us and shapes our days. 

With the Alban gates, I’ve stopped thinking of winter as something to be apprehensive about and more as a part of a cycle to experience, as much an important part of life as spring and summer. The cold and dark might not be especially enjoyable, but there’s always the promise of more light in that darkness—just as there’s always the promise of more darkness in the light. Every season has lessons to teach; every Alban gate has its own spirits and its own blessings. The Eightfold Year encourages us to think about time and life as a cycle more than as a straight line; everything is in both a constant state of death and resurrection. 

As with everything in Druidry so far, this has actually led me closer to the more mystical Christianity I’d lost, by reconnecting me with the liturgical calendar—much of which is of course fitted onto the framework of older holidays. That calendar is also about a cycle of life and death and life again, following the life of Christ from his birth to his death, resurrection, and ascension. I feel like losing both the Eightfold and the liturgical calendar has had the detrimental effect of unmooring me in time, especially now, when time feels so ephemeral and tenuous, so slippery and difficult to keep track of. These regular holidays, rooted in the earth and the seasons and the movements of the heavens, reconnect me with not only time but that cycle of death and resurrection. 

Not too long ago I talked about the notion of Resurrection as both an ongoing practice and a task, something we can mindfully do regardless of what tradition we follow. The Eightfold Year and the Alban gates in particular have brought me back to a connection with that process, which is about both the acceptance of endings and the constant hope of new life. 

Today I’ll sit before my stone altar in my honeysuckle grove—really a thicket but I call it a grove—and invoke Esus the lord of tree spirits. Esus is also a woodsman who cuts the boughs with his mighty ax—firewood for the winter, warmth for the cold, light for the darkness. Esus is technically a god of destruction, but always in the service of life. He’s a reminder that the light never fully disappears and will return. In the same way, I’m already looking toward the next Alban gate and Christmas a few days after that—two divine births of light, two marvels of time. 

From now on there will be more darkness. But I no longer dread it. In the midst of a terrible year, that’s something to celebrate.