One of the local notables in the village where I grew up was an aging-hippie type who'd have these huge bonfires in her yard every solstice and equinox. I was too young to remember them especially clearly but I remember how beautiful the flames were and how beautiful the evening sky always was, at the very least this time of year and in September, and what great fun it all was in general.
I've had quite a few people on Facebook mention it today. The inference of old celtic festivals seems to be a growing trend in post-Christian Scotland. It also helps today is sunny!
That's interesting! Are there any other old Celtic festivals in particular that you know people to have been rekindling interest in?
Samhain. In a non 'Barnes and Noble Pagan' sort of way. I guess a little exposition is needed. Oral history suggests that regardless of official dates, areas of Scotland remained untouched by Christianity (in terms of domination at least) until the 1350's and possibly later. And of course a few generations after that you get the Reformation. It is not uncommon to know of women who will attest to their great aunts or grandparent clinging on to some, heavily syncretic, but pre-Christian superstition. You had state Presbyterianism which either influenced national consciousness or was influenced by it which was not big on religious festivities. My grandparents worked Christmas day into the 1960's; it's often forgotten that it was the availability of television and the emerging British tradition of 'Christmas telly' that helped open the door to the English idealised Christmas which by this point had been secularised anyway. The main events in Scotland were Hogmanay and New Years and to a lesser extent Halloween (the etymology of which is itself Scots)
Scotland also has demarcated seasons in terms of night and dark. Today in the far north for example, the sun will 'set' at 11.30 with it starting to rise by 2am. Even where I am it's 11pm.
I guess you could say that the 'immediacy' of seasonal changes, circadian rhythm, more leisure time etc makes it inevitable that a country like this starts to move towards that sense of things. Christian festivals of course are equally syncretic so it's hard to untangle.
I think an American audience and even an English one are quite taken aback by a very rapid secularisation in Scotland. Even I am, when I reflect on 10, 20 years ago. It's like the bottom has just fallen out. Certainly there's innovation with respect to what people want to mark and how they choose to mark it.
I'm slightly secular-spiritual. I understand the significance of placing importance on the sun, the detritus of which formed almost every organic and non organic molecule on this planet and the rays of which grow crops and firm up our bones. I don't and cannot personify it because it is a process that is not aware of itself or of us. But for Michael and I it makes sense from a humanist and scientific perspective to mark it all in some way. It's easy to tap into the pagan spirit of the whole thing without bringing it to life.
