PART IX The Winter Solstice

While all the great seasonal rituals required precision in their performance, in none were the potential repercussions of a false step or a missed cue as serious as in the Winter Solstice Ceremony.

The spring equinox rites had begun as a commemoration of the birth of the first child of the Earth-Goddess and the Sun-God but had taken on a broader connotation, recognizing the drive of life to renew itself through sexual union. As the vain attempts of less perceptive religions have proven, this is a force that is impossible to thwart, and in any case, the crux of their ritual observance lay in delivering the most lavish tribute they could, as it was assumed the gesture could be counted on to compensate for any minor errors or lapses in their accompanying invocations.

The pivotal event of the Sacred Summer Solstice Ceremony, celebrating that divine conception, was conducted in strict privacy by the designated priest and priestess, and it was simply assumed that, whatever form it took, that rite would be satisfying to those involved.

The outcomes of the autumn equinox and winter solstice rituals, however, could not be and were not taken for granted. In each, the slightest laxity—an invocation mischanted or an essential dance step omitted—could undo the whole of their labors.

Should that occur in the execution of the autumn equinox rituals—as it had once when Herrwn’s great-grandfather had been the chief priest—the question of whose fault it was that the curtain separating the living world from the realm of the spirits did not part, allowing the spirits from the other side to pass through, was a cause for both individual and communal soul-searching, but that failure could be—and was—remediated the following year.

There was no known instance in which the winter solstice rites had been carried out with anything less than absolute fidelity, word for word, to the invocations spoken every year on the night that the first of their ancestors interceded in the lovers’ quarrel between the earth and sun, persuading the earth to forgive the sun’s misdeeds and calling on the sun to return to the earth and her children.

Despite the accuracy with which their priestesses could track movements of the sun, precisely pinpointing when the days would stop diminishing and begin to lengthen again, still there lurked the fear, What if …?

What if, through some failure on their part, the sun and earth were not reconciled and the sun continued moving farther and farther away?

While Olyrrwd, during his lifetime, had frequently grumbled that most likely what would happen should that dreaded misstep occur was that the earth and sun would go about their business as they had before there were any Druids to nag at them about it, even he had carried out his part in the winter solstice rites with the exactitude with which he had recited his healing invocations.