Yesterday was the Republican Roman festival of Lux Mundi. Friday is the feast day of Santa Lucia. This is a time for light.
Lux Mundi translates into “the light of the world”. This day honored Libertas, the bringer of light. Libertas was the personification of freedom, metaphorical light rather than actual light, and she is invoked in the struggle for sovereignty. Libertas was the torch that led France to overthrow the monarchy.
Friday’s feast day celebrates a saint and elder deity who is the embodiment of hope, Lucia, the dawn bringer. Lucia also means light, but she brought food to those hiding from oppression in the catacombs and those who were trapped by winter’s darkness. Her symbol is a crown of lit candles.
We equate light with goodness and dark with indifference if not evil. Light guides us. Darkness confuses and leads us astray. I think these metaphors only work where there is deep winter darkness. Short days of weak warmth and long cold nights make darkness a threat. In more tropical latitudes, darkness is sought out for the cool relief it brings. Darkness is sheltering and restful. Darkness is time for romance. But not in regions that brush the poles. Darkness is death in the high latitudes. It is sleep without awakening. It is terror.
Our metaphorical language is colored by the northern seasons, where winter is darkness and darkness is dangerous. I never fully appreciated why darkness was so wrong in English. I come from one of those places where you seek out the cool shade and are enlivened by the relief of sunset. Darkness is calming and restorative in New Mexico. Light is harsh and unforgiving. A summer’s day is more likely to deal death in the desert than a winter’s night. (Though it does get cold in New Mexico and you don’t want to be without shelter in January darkness.) But living here in Vermont, where winter’s sunset is a bit after 4pm, where the sun never fully heats the cold walls of the house, where the darkness is deadly and lasts for over fifteen hours a day many weeks around the solstice, this has made me understand the metaphors.
In my part of the world, the earliest sunsets of the year began a few days ago. Next Monday, the sun will set a minute later, though sunrise will continue to drift later into the morning until well after the solstice on December 29th. Day length does not change very much for the rest of the month, and each day feels fleeting. The sun is westering as I am taking my lunchtime walk. It’s good to remember that the solstice is in ten days and the light will begin to grow again.
At various points in history, the solstice would have fallen at around this date, and these bright deities used to bring an end to the growing darkness. For us, that midpoint in winter’s dormancy comes in ten days, but it’s close — and we really won’t see much change between now and then. The light is no longer dying. Soon it will begin to grow again. And that does feel both hopeful and a bit like freedom, though we still have quite a bit of winter’s incarceration left. Still… winter is half over.
Focus on that in these dark days… the darkness will lift.
Wednesday Word
for 11 December 2024
lux
What does lux mean to you? What is your light and by what do see your path in life? Is light good? Or is it sometimes baleful? How do you feel in the darkness? And is this colored by your culture? Some things to think on…
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 