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Dea Gravida

I bought the little goddess in, of all places, Jerusalem.

“How many people come to Jerusalem to buy idols?” I laughingly asked the dealer in the little antiquities shop where I bought—say, maybe, redeemed—her. In Hebrew, the question has a certain pungency that it lacks in English.

(In an even deeper irony, the real answer is: millions do. Books like the Torah, the Bible, and the Qur'an are the most dangerous idols of all; they've caused more human suffering than any statue ever did.)

She's maybe 2500 years old, of a Phoenician iconographic type known as the dea gravida, the “pregnant goddess.” (In English, to be “gravid” is not just to be pregnant, but to be really pregnant.) Nearing the end of her term, with her elaborate hairdo and veil, she sits in a chair with her right hand held protectively, reflectively, over her belly. There's a stillness to her. She's waiting.

Mold-made, an affordable best-seller of her day, tens of thousands like her survive. That explains how someone on a student budget like me could afford to buy one, and why the Israeli government would let her out of the country. (Nation-states are usually jealous of artifacts found within their borders: in this case, up north in “Galilee of the gentiles,” where Phoenician influence was strong.)

The little goddess sits on an altar in my bedroom, where I see her every day. In a house filled with Green Men and Astartes, somehow this is the time of year, this pregnant time before Yule, when I find myself noticing her most.

Time Between

Remember, it's not Yule yet.

When the orange lights come down and the remnants of the jack o' lantern, flesh melted away like some collapsed, leathery bog body, shoveled off to the compost pile, it's tempting to dive right away into Yule.

Don't.

No: Yule is coming, but it's not yet here.

Now we're in the Fallows, that poignant Time Between, when the old is ended and the new not yet begun: a dead time, but paradoxically, a pregnant time as well, the synapse awaiting the spark.

'Ware premature celebration. All through the lead-up, we party, we sing, we feast. By the time Yule gets here, we've already done it all; we're actually a little bored with it.

No, let us heed the ancestral wisdom of the lean before the fat, the fast before the feast.

Let us string up the lights, but not yet light them.

Let us meditate on the carols, but not yet sing them.

Let us bake the cookies, but not yet eat them.

Ever since planting day, she's been there, back in the corner of the garden, up to her knees in the good, rich soil.

For the last seven months, every time I looked out, she's stood there looking back.

And now she's gone.

It was an amazing growing season, the longest on record.

But now it's over.

I cleared out the garden this weekend, and the little clay goddess came indoors to sleep on her bed of sweet sage in the storage cupboards, among the herbs, the dried beans, and the many-colored jars of summer goodness.

It's the Fallows, the Time Between: the no-more of Samhain and the not-yet of Yule. Fred Adams of Feraferia called this time Repose:

Well, I saw it last night, right on cue.

The season's first domestic Yule tree.

It was November 7.

Oh, I understand Christmas creep. I understand the thirst for magic. I understand the craving for celebration by those who really only have one holiday.

By my reckoning, we're a little past the midpoint of the Samhain thirtnight. We're still in the season of the ancestors. The big, public rituals and gatherings are over now. This is the quiet part of Samhain, the interiority, the tag-end, the tail: the time to reflect and look within.

And then comes Time Between: what my friend and colleague Magenta Griffith calls “The Fallows.”