Another Life: the magic of the winter solstice

Solstice is a fine soft word to slip off the tongue. It comes, the web tells me, via Old French from the Latin solstitium – sol for the sun and sistere, to stand still, which was one way of understanding Earth's significant tilt tomorrow and the consequent shortest day of the year.

The wilder corners of west Connacht abound in big rocks – standing, carved or aligned – with a role in Stone Age calendars and magic. The east coast’s great megalithic monuments, Knowth and Dowth, open their stony hearts to the rise of the sun at dawns around the winter solstice. The west has simple rows of rocks, lining up with the sun as it sets into some chosen mountain notch in Connemara or Mayo.

Around the corner of my coast, Croagh Patrick’s pyramidal sanctity has warranted several such marvels. They include a row of boulders on a mound in a saltmarsh (at Killadangan, five kilometres west of Westport) where, at 1.45pm tomorrow, they should align spot on with the sun as it dips into a niche in the shoulder of the Reek.

More spectacular is the happening on a clear evening on August 24th, when, from a carved rock at Boheh, on a hillside east of the Reek, the setting sun appears to roll down the edge of the mountain’s seaward scarp like a flaming Catherine wheel.

It will, however, be quite dark tomorrow by the time I join friends at their annual winter-solstice party, complete with bonfire to celebrate the true turning of the year. While its ruddy light may not quite reach Croagh Patrick, across the bay, the mountain’s looming presence and the roar of surf on the shore always give the evening a proper druidic spice.

Little is known about the druids of Ireland, considering their role as professional power brokers in dealings with Iron Age nature. What I find intriguing about them is how – or whether – they managed their magic without mistletoe.

Notable now as a predator’s wand at Christmas office parties, it was then the indispensable “golden bough” of druids throughout the Celtic continent.

This was the title of the monumental study of magic and religion by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer, first published in 1922. The Roman Pliny, in his natural history, was first to link druid rituals with the parasitic plant, but it was Frazer who traced its role in so much European myth and magic (none of which seems to have involved uninvited osculation).

In Pliny's version white-garbed druids invariably climbed "hard timbered" oaks (Quercus robur) to cut clumps of mistletoe with a golden sickle, then sacrificed two white bulls before a ceremonial feast. The white mistletoe berries, with juice as sticky as semen, was a cure for barrenness in livestock and a panacea for poison and illness.

"All-heal," reported Frazer, was "said to be still the name of the mistletoe in the modern Celtic speech of Brittany, Wales, Ireland and Scotland". Variations of "uile-íoc" do, indeed, appear among the many Irish names for mistletoe collected by the botanist Peter Wyse Jackson in Ireland's Generous Nature, his recent encyclopedia on the uses of wild plants. Relieving epilepsy and hysteria seems to have been among the virtues of Viscum album (although itself somewhat toxic).

On this island it is nowhere widespread in the wild, as Dr Wyse Jackson says, and rates no mention in the widely definitive Webb's Irish Flora. Indeed, it has been generally accepted as an alien plant, spread by berry-eating mistle thrushes from cultivated introductions, such as that in the National Botanic Gardens, at Glasnevin, in the 1800s. This now has Ireland's biggest colony of mistletoe growths, on several kinds of tree, and has been known to offer kissworthy sprigs to visitors to Santa's grotto.

The late decades of the last century brought such an apparent expansion in Irish locations for mistletoe that Dr Charles Nelson (once of Glasnevin, now in Cambridgeshire) invited records from the public. This brought 75 individual reports from 15 counties, north and south.

None of the plants was growing on oaks; instead they were on apple, hawthorn, poplar, willow, sycamore and lime. Their density around Dublin, Nelson suggests, might point to a warming of climate that is allowing mistletoe, flowering from February to April, to be pollinated by the wind and spread by seed, as a naturalised Irish plant.

There is no fossil pollen of Viscus album from Ireland's postglacial deposits or the centuries of the druids. So, unlike the wizards of Britain, they must have made their magic without the "golden bough".

Today, in a commercial pre-Christmas ritual, white vans from Ireland gather at Tenbury Wells, in northwest Worcestershire, where a procession of modern druids launch the auctions of the town’s mistletoe festival. The boughs are gathered abundantly from weathered cider-apple trees perhaps half a century old.

There’s nothing like keeping up tradition – Happy Christmas!