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These holidays are drawn from various Slavic traditions and nations. Some of them are reconstructed and some of them are continuously celebrated in their countries of origin. Some of the continuously celebrated holidays are also celebrated by Christians.
April
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For 2018, I'm posting a 4-part series of Slavic pagan holiday dates, one for each season. I'm posting the Winter 2018 dates in December of 2017, and I'll try to post the dates for Spring just before Spring, and so forth. These holidays are drawn from various Slavic traditions and nations. Some of these holidays are reconstructed pagan holidays from modern day reconstructionist pagan religions. Some holiday dates are currently celebrated in their countries of origin. Holidays which have been continuously celebrated from ancient times down to modern times are also celebrated by Christians.
January
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For real this time! The publisher has fixed the error and the Heathen Calendar 2018 is now ready to order.
The calendar contains heathen holidays from various traditions such as Asatru, Theod, Urglaawe, Forn Sed, etc., and heathen related holidays still celebrated in their countries of origin in northern Europe. For example, April 30th is May Eve in England, Walpurgisnacht in Germany and Austria, Valborgsmässoafton in Sweden, Valborgsnatten in Norway, Maitag Vorabend in Switzerland, and Valborgsaften in Jutland, Denmark. That is one of the holidays that falls on the same date every year, but other holidays shift depending on moon phase and other reasons.
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The ancient Greeks dated years from the (mythic) foundation of the Olympic Games.
The ancient Romans dated years from the (mythic) foundation of the city of Rome.
We, however, date our years from the (mythic) birth of Christ.
Call it “Common Era” if you like, but clearly we need a more fitting way to count sacred time. We need some other pivotal mythic event from which to number our years.
For my pentacles, the best proposal to date comes from Merlin Stone's seminal 1979 essay “9980: Repairing the Time Warp,” in which she proposes that we date our old-new year-count from the beginning of agriculture.
For better and for worse, agriculture has changed everything that came after it. It's an event of both historic and mythic proportion. Better yet, it's something that we all share.
The 2018 Heathen Calendar and 2018 Slavic Calendar need 12 artworks each. Caliburn Press is offering royalties.
The 2017 calendars were our first calendars, and we chose to use public domain art for our first year. This time we want to use art by living artists. We would like for the art to be suitable for use as devotional art after it is used for the calendar year. That is, we intend that these calendars not be disposable objects, but rather that the art will be removed and framed or used on altars. That's why we print them on heavy paper stock.
Imbolc tends to be associated with snowdrops – which is reasonable enough because they do reliably turn up at this time. We don’t talk about blackthorn much, but for me it is the tree of the festival. Blackthorn can come into flower around this time of year, too (in my experience) and it’s an ogham tree as well.
The Woodland Trust site has blackthorn down as flowering between March and April so it may be in part about where you live. The Woodland Trust covers the whole of the UK, and I’ve never lived further north than the Midlands. There are significant regional differences. I’ve always seen blackthorn as one of the first flowerings in the year. There was a roadside tree on the way to my Midlands ritual place that always came into flower around the time of Imbolc rituals, which gave me the association. At present I’ve got a wild plum locally that flowers very early and is likely to open any day now. It points to the way in which tree events can be very specific and local, depending on microclimates, and the unpredictable nature of trees.
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There's an article circulating on the net claiming that "before patriarchal times" Friday the 13th was a sacred day for women to honor the goddess and to celebrate their menstrual cycles. However, the time period generally considered "before patriarchy" was the stone age in Europe when goddess figurines like the Venus of Willendorf were made, that is, 7,000 BCE to 9,000 BCE, and / or pre-Minoan Crete, before approprixately 3,000 BCE, which was also the stone age. Friday the 13th didn't exist before the application of Germanic derived week names to a Roman-derived calendar system, which did not happen before approximately AD 200.
The "fri" in Friday is from the names of heathen goddesses Freya or Frigga, and the artwork illustrating your article is Freya. These are two of the major goddesses of heathenry, commonly called Norse mythology. The Old Norse calendar had every month starting on Sunday, and every month had 30 days (with some extra days added in the middle of summer) so days of the week didn't change number every month like our calendar does.
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