CALAN GAEAF: All Things Begin in Darkness

At the turning of the year, older ways of measuring time invite us to meet uncertainty with humility, imagination and hope.

In pre-Christian Britain, Calan Gaeaf was the feast of ancestors: a time to honour our beloved dead, sit in soft darkness and make ourselves available for guidance. Over time, older practices were overlaid with folk superstitions and later with customs such as jack-o’-lanterns used to scare away spirits. Beneath those layers, however, remains a deeper invitation: to restore our relationship with death, soul, spirit and an animate, ensouled world.

This night invites a twofold gaze. Like the stone heads carved by our Iron Age ancestors and placed near or within water sources, one face looks backwards: to what has been, to the lessons of history, to the lore of the ancestors. The other faces the opposite direction: towards the unknown future, the year ahead and the legacy we are forging for generations as yet unborn.

Our relationship with darkness is ancient, laid down long before we were taught to strive always for the light, or to imagine light as good and darkness as evil. Darkness came first. Seeds germinate within the earth; each of us was conceived and grew cradled in a dark womb. Darkness, then, is not merely absence. It is origin, incubation and primary home.

All Things Begin in Darkenss

The Insular Celts of north-west Europe, Britain and Ireland understood this relationship with darkness. Their days did not begin before dawn as ours often do today, but at twilight, just after the sun had set. Likewise, this dusk of the year, following the tipping point of autumn into winter at Calan Gaeaf, was understood as the ending of one year and the beginning of the next.

Julius Caesar, writing in Commentarii de Bello Gallico around 50 BCE, noted that the Gaulish Celts kept “days and beginnings of months and years in such an order that day follows the night.” The year was divided into a dark half and a light half; weeks were reckoned in nights. Echoes of this remain in Celtic languages today. In Welsh, a week is wythnos — eight nights — while pythefnos means fifteen nights, or a fortnight. English preserves the pattern too in “fortnight” and the now rare “se’nnight.”

The Coligny calendar and Celtic time

One of the most fascinating windows into this older reckoning of time is the Coligny calendar. In November 1897, in a field near Coligny in France, fragments of a statue and more than 150 bronze pieces were discovered. Many of those fragments bore writing, numerical values, vertical lines and holes. Although the lettering used Roman capitals, the language was later recognised as Gaulish,

the Celtic language of the region.

Archaeologists realised the fragments belonged to a calendar, originally a bronze tablet roughly a metre and a half wide and just under a metre tall. The lettering style and accompanying statue date it to the end of the second century CE, although researchers including Paul-Marie Duval and Georges Pinault have suggested that the calendar system it records may be older, possibly reaching back into the Iron Age.

Now on display at the museum in Lyon, the Coligny calendar is the oldest known Celtic solar-lunar ritual calendar. It reconciles the cycles of moon and sun through a complex arrangement that keeps a twelve-month calendar in sync with the moon by adding an intercalary thirteenth lunar month every two and a half years. It marks a five-year cycle of 62 lunar months, dividing time into bright and dark fortnights aligned with the waxing and waning moon.

Calan Gaeaf as a threshold

Calan Gaeaf, or Winter’s Eve, marked the beginning of winter around 31 October. It was a time to ask the ancestors’ blessing upon herds and hearths before the long nights ahead. It invited people to turn inward, to welcome the soft embrace of darkness and the creative stirrings of soul. We might imagine our ancestors through the Isles sitting through long nights, weaving cloth on looms strung with songs, spinning yarn and stories, whittling plans for the coming seasons, and watching visions rise in the flames.

Reimagining darkness as soul time

To mark the descent into the dark half of the year as the beginning of a new annual cycle is to radically reconfigure our relationship with darkness and winter. In much of the Western world, light is honoured while darkness is feared or avoided. Yet the psychologist and philosopher James Hillman described spirit as moving upwards towards light, while soul tends downwards into soft darkness, where deep transformation can incubate.

The late Wendell Berry, who crossed over earlier this year put it another way:

TO KNOW THE DARK

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings. 

~ Wendell Berry

The fear of entering the dark spaces within may be great, but their medicine may be greater. What if we found ways to embrace the slow winter months of frost and fire as soul time: a season to nourish intuition, attend to what is unresolved, and care for what might otherwise fester or stagnate?

What if communities gathered during the long nights not simply for distraction, but to support the necessary inner work of the dark time: to metabolise grief and rage, release unhealthy ancestral patterns, and celebrate difficulty as the seed of transformation?

What this old way offers us now

These older ways of embracing the dark as the beginning, of entering the dreaming before the doing, put contemplation ahead of action. That is profoundly different from the dominant habits of contemporary life, which tend to value doing above all else and offer reflection only afterwards. The ancestral pattern invites us to pause first. It makes room for the subconscious, for dreaming, for listening to guidance and the slow wisdom that cannot be forced.

Perhaps this is one of the gifts of Calan Gaeaf for our troubled times. At thresholds, we are not asked to have all the answers. We are asked to pay attention: to what is ending, what is beginning, what must be grieved, what must be carried forward, and what kind of future our manner of crossing may help create.

JOIN US ON 28th OCTOBER

While some of us are fortunate to belong to communities we can gather with at these times, many are not. This FREE Online Calan Gaeaf Ceremony is a reaching out to any who would like to be held in a circle to undertake this age-old ceremony of communing with ancestors. This will be an evening of deep listening and maybe gentle, tentative healing of lineages, of the pain of things left unsaid, the grief of parting. Also a celebration of lives lived well, and of the innumerable potent encounters of whom we are the result.

SOURCES FOR FURTHER READING & RESEARCH

FOLKLORE OF WALES by Anne Ross. Tempus Publishing, 2001

CUSTOMS AND TRADITIONS OF WALES by Trefor M. Owen. University of Wales Press, 1991.

COLIGNY CALENDAR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coligny_calendar