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My friend Sirius is Kemetic. I call him my “effete shaveling.” He calls me his “vile Asiatic.” We get along just fine.

Sirius works at a hospital. He's completely out to his co-workers there.

The hospital chaplain began to tease him.

“How's Ra workin' for you?” he'd say.

Me, I was furious when I heard about this. Issues of professionalism aside: well, just consider.

Ra: the Sun, that massive and ineffable star of heartbreaking beauty and profundity around which our lives literally revolve, without which we would not, and could not, even exist.

Then there's the chaplain's god: some dead Jewish guy who's basically (let's be frank) a fictional character.

Really, I ask you: just who should be making fun of whom here?

The great god of the Northern Bronze Age was the Sun, and His sign was the Wheel.

Happy were they who saw His sign standing in the sky.

Today, in the winter skies of the North, we see it there still.

“Parahelia,” they say, or “Sun dogs.”

Now these are the Three Births of Yule.

The First Birth of Yule is the Primal Birth.

Long ago, in ages of ages, the fires of the Sun first kindled, since when He has royally burned in self-giving, sacrificial light.

The Second Birth of Yule is the Eternal Birth.

This is the annual birth of the Sun, Who daily and yearly goes down in darkness and rises up again: and unto ages of ages.

The Third Birth of Yule is the Earthly Birth.

Whose warm love flows across the land each day

Stirring Life, the world’s magic, arms yearning up,

In other years I’ve been sunburned at Beltain. I’ve been overwhelmed by the heat and had to hide in the shade of the trees. I’ve had to worry about not de-hydrating during rituals. It’s a festival whose traditions include young couples going off into the woods at night.

I’m writing this blog post while wearing a winter jumper, the windows are shut because it’s too cold to have them open. Right now, there is sun outside, but most of the day has been cold and wet. May the first was cold and wet, at the end of a cold, late spring and a winter that seemed to go on forever. It’s years like this when you can start to see why our ancestors might have felt the need to do dramatic things to persuade the sun to come back.

On Equinox morning, the light of the rising Sun streams in a golden torrent down the hall.

I stand in worship, bathed in light.

Before such savage beauty, I bow and kiss the ground.

I rise and kiss my hand, adoring.

Will scientists soon learn the nature of dark matter? How did one of Saturn's moons come to be? And is a future of cybernetic limbs ahead for us or not? It's Earthy Thursday, our segment about news relating to science and the Earth. All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!