Rituals of Celebration by Jane Meredith

Author:Jane Meredith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sabbats, wheel of the year, seasons, wicca, pagan, druid, crafts, rituals, imbolc, beltaine, samhain
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2013-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

Sacred Marriage

The Summer Solstice is midsummer, the longest day and shortest night of the whole year. The sun, along with all divine powers associated with it, is at its strongest, and this Festival is dedicated to the glory of light. It is celebrated with the flowers and fruits of summer. This is literally the height of summer; although the weather will continue to warm, once past the Summer Solstice the days get incrementally shorter and the nights lengthen until the Autumn Equinox, three months later, when the nights and days will be equal again. At the Summer Solstice, the sacred marriage between the sun and earth is celebrated.

As the earth changes form throughout the year, so does the Goddess. She is a maiden in spring and becomes lover and fertile mother as the year moves around through Beltaine and the Summer Solstice. She is pregnant (with the year’s crops, or next year’s God) at Lammas and the Autumn Equinox and metamorphoses into the crone at Samhain (although still carrying her child to be born at Winter Solstice, just as she herself is reborn from crone into maiden). The transitions of the God in this same story are even more dramatic. He is newborn with the sun at Winter Solstice, young and growing throughout the first half of the year, and then already dying or dead at Lammas. At the Autumn Equinox he is present in the fruits of harvest and then he appears as the Lord of the Dead at Samhain. It’s at the Summer Solstice he is at his fullest power when he enters into divine union with the Goddess.

Sacred marriage is a challenging concept. By definition its primary meaning is a marriage between Gods. But even they, when we examine their stories, do not inhabit that state continually. The act of sacred marriage is only part of their story, a condition that is realized only briefly, periodically, or seasonally. It’s possible to view their entire relationship as a sacred marriage—including his birth and death—but this is not usually what we think of when yearning for sacred marriage to manifest in our own lives. We concentrate on the aspect of union, mutual love, and sexual fulfillment that is only briefly depicted in the cycles of the year. The general understanding of sacred marriage is limited to the lovely idea of two beings joining together, each of them completing the other.

Sacred marriage can be seen as two halves of one whole coming together, reminiscent of a jigsaw puzzle where the parts fit together perfectly. This idea appears in the story Plato tells of the original humans having four arms and four legs until the jealous Gods split them in two, leaving them to search always for their other halves. This story has underpinned the concept of soul mates and also the dialectics of masculine and feminine within our culture, offering the idea that each contains aspects the other does not have, and each needs the other in order to be whole.

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