Farewell Darkness, Welcome Light!

"We don't believe; we fear." Inuit spiritual healer Aua to explorer Knud Rasmussen (some time between 1921-1924).

"In the distance the dark outlines of the little hut emerge. Here, always on the same spot, I have for some time been startled by a remarkable fantasy. I imagine that something has risen out of the unquiet water in the last inlet before the hut, a dark form which is making its way towards me, bent, noiseless, and ineluctable. Again and again I try to banish this phantom, clear and sharp though its outlines may be in my imagination. How astonished I am then in the winter night, to find in an old case of books left behind by the hunter Nois an old number of Allers Familienjournal, containing an article on spectres which reproduces a faithful likeness of my own phantom. There is the hobgoblin and the legendary sea-serpent, and there also is the black figure as it rises out of the water and, stooping, slowly and inexorably approaches its victim. The caption reads: ‘A spectre of the shore which appears to fishermen.'"
— A Woman in the Polar Night (1938), by Christiane Ritter, translated by Jane Degras, p. 98.*

"Winter’s a dangerous thing to love. It’s pure and it’s gorgeous and it owns this land. It owns us. We sit in our houses with the heat turned up and think what a pretty day it is out there, with the sun gleaming on the snow or the snow dancing in the air. But a tree falls in the ice, and the power goes out and we’re ice men again. We’re out on the road and we’re full of the power of our automobiles and at the same time we know one little slip, one little mistake in judgment or speed or just the chance encounter with a pebble or a bird or a deer and there we are, with winter laughing all around us. You live up here, and it doesn’t take long to understand why crime rates drop like a stone come November. Winter takes the place of crime; winter takes the place of night; winter takes the place of the bogey-man and the mothman and the raptors and everything you’ve ever been afraid of. Winter rules everything, and if you don’t know that, you don’t know anything. And you will die."
— Eve Fisher, Drifts, AHMM (Jan/Feb 2006)

***

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!
   - Traditional Scots Prayer

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Savior's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallowed and so gracious is the time.
--Marcellus.

So have I heard and do in part believe it.
--Horatio.

"So says the immortal Shakespeare [Hamlet, act 1, scene 1]; and the truth thereof few nowadays, I hope, will call in question. Grose observes, too, that those born on Christmas Day cannot see spirits; which is another incontrovertible fact.

"What a happiness this must have been seventy or eighty years ago and upwards, to those chosen few who had the good luck to be born on the eve of this festival of all festivals; when the whole earth was so overrun with ghosts, boggles, bloody-bones, spirits, demons, ignis fatui, brownies, bugbears, black dogs, specters, shellycoats, scarecrows, witches, wizards, barguests, Robin-Goodfellows, hags, night-bats, scrags, breaknecks, fantasms, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, boggy-boes, dobbies, hob-thrusts, fetches, kelpies, warlocks, mock-beggars, mum-pokers, Jemmy-burties, urchins, satyrs, pans, fauns, sirens, tritons, centaurs, calcars, nymphs, imps, incubuses, spoorns, men-in-the-oak, hell-wains, fire-drakes, kit-a-can-sticks, Tom-tumblers, melch-dicks, larrs, kitty-witches, hobby-lanthorns, Dick-a-Tuesdays, Elf-fires, Gyl-burnt-tales, knockers, elves, rawheads, Meg-with-the-wads, old-shocks, ouphs, pad-foots, pixies, pictrees, giants, dwarfs, Tom-pokers, tutgots, snapdragons, sprets, spunks, conjurers, thurses, spurns, tantarrabobs, swaithes, tints, tod-lowries, Jack-in-the-Wads, mormos, changelings, redcaps, yeth-hounds, colt-pixies, Tom-thumbs, black-bugs, boggarts, scar-bugs, shag-foals, hodge-pochers, hob-thrushes, bugs, bull-beggars, bygorns, bolls, caddies, bomen, brags, wraiths, waffs, flay-boggarts, fiends, gallytrots, imps, gytrashes, patches, hob-and-lanthorns, gringes, boguests, bonelesses, Peg-powlers, pucks, fays, kidnappers, gallybeggars, hudskins, nickers, madcaps, trolls, robinets, friars' lanthorns, silkies, cauld-lads, death-hearses, goblins, hob-headlesses, bugaboos, kows, or cowes, nickies, nacks [necks], waiths, miffies, buckies, ghouls, sylphs, guests, swarths, freiths, freits, gy-carlins [Gyre-carling], pigmies, chittifaces, nixies, Jinny-burnt-tails, dudmen, hell-hounds, dopple-gangers, boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, hobbits, hobgoblins, brown-men, cowies, dunnies, wirrikows, alholdes, mannikins, follets, korreds, lubberkins, cluricauns, kobolds, leprechauns, kors, mares, korreds, puckles korigans, sylvans, succubuses, blackmen, shadows, banshees, lian-hanshees, clabbernappers, Gabriel-hounds, mawkins, doubles, corpse lights or candles, scrats, mahounds, trows, gnomes, sprites, fates, fiends, sibyls, nicknevins, whitewomen, fairies, thrummy-caps, cutties, and nisses, and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description, that there was not a village in England that had not its own peculiar ghost.

"Nay, every lone tenement, castle, or mansion-house, which could boast of any antiquity had its bogle, its specter, or its knocker. The churches, churchyards, and crossroads were all haunted. Every green lane had its boulder-stone on which an apparition kept watch at night. Every common had its circle of fairies belonging to it. And there was scarcely a shepherd to be met with who had not seen a spirit!"

The Denham Tracts, edited by James Hardy  (SOURCE)**

Whew.  

***

Anyway, there's a reason why Christmas comes in the darkest time of the year (in ancient Rome, the winter solstice was on December 25... calendar time has changed with the centuries).  Four days after the winter solstice, when the 4-7 minutes you gain are barely noticeable, you need light, torches, songs, feasting, and and a Yule log that will burn all the way to Twelfth Night, to beat back everything and anything of monsters and death and endless darkness.  Even now, on January 8th, we've only gained 15 minutes of light.  And it's worse the further north you live in December, and in the Southern Hemisphere, the further south you live in June.  In each case, the polar night lasts around 4 months.  That's a long time to live in the dark.  

Except, of course, for the aurora borealis / aurora australis.  Light in absolute darkness...  (From Wikipedia):

The earliest depiction of the aurora may have been in Cro-Magnon cave paintings of northern Spain dating to 30,000 BC:

The oldest known written record of the wintertime aurora was in a Chinese legend written around 2600 BC; an autumnal aurora is recorded centuries later, around 2000 BC.  

The Aboriginal Australians say the aurora australis is bushfires, or a kootchee (an evil spirit creating a large fire), or the campfires of spirits in the Land of the Dead.  The Maori of New Zealand, the Dene and other northern Native Americans, all see their departed friends dancing the sky around the campfires.  Way up north, the Sami and the Inuit share similar beliefs of northern lights being the blood of the deceased, 'some believing they are caused by dead warriors' blood spraying on the sky as they engage in playing games, riding horses, or having fun in some other way.'

John W. Thompson, Jr., a Civil War survivor of the Battle of Fredericksburg, wrote "Louisiana sent those famous cosmopolitan Zouaves called the Louisiana Tigers, and there were Florida troops who, undismayed in fire, stampeded the night after Fredericksburg, when the Aurora Borealis snapped and crackled over that field of the frozen dead hard by the Rappahannock ..."

Speaking of the Lights making sound - they do. They really do.  

  

So light candles! Keep the hot drinks flowing, the sweet treats coming, and late at night, cuddle under the covers, and listen to the light crackling in the sky...  

The darkness is vanquished!  

The light is finally returning!    

*Back in 1933, Viennese Christiane Ritter spent a year on the remote archipelago of Svalbard, far above the Arctic Circle, with her husband and another hunter.  It's an amazing record, and I highly recommend it.  

**From "Folklord and Mythology Electronic Texts", edited and/or translated by D. L. Ashliman, University of Pittsburgh.  (HERE)  A wonderful source for just about any folklore you would want to know about.  Enjoy!