In the Bleak Midwinter

Advent is often a dark time. Of course, Michigan, where I live and where the days are brutally short and it is overcast for much of the late fall and winter, rendering sunlight at a premium, that is literally true. But it is also a dark time spiritually, psychologically, poetically. I have always noticed this, not so much in the way of introspection and anticipation for the birth of Christ, but as a world phenomenon, a metaphysical reality. Often world events attest to this, whether by way of natural disasters or the even more intransigent, and seemingly unavoidable, man-made disasters such as war or politics. In a way not unlike that of the classic television special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Kenneth Branagh captures this mood perfectly—and, surprisingly, comically—in his 1995 film In the Bleak Midwinter (known to American audiences as A Midwinter’s Tale).

At the very beginning of the film we meet Joe (played by Michael Maloney), a passionate yet tremendously underemployed actor who wants to put on a production of Hamlet during the yuletide. He explains his psychological state moving into this project.

“It was late November (I think), and I was thinking about the whole Christmas thing: the birth of Christ, The Wizard of Oz, family murders. And, quite frankly, I was depressed. You know, I always wanted to live my life, like, in an old movie, a sort of fairy tale, you know? Mind you, I suppose, a lot of fairy tales turn out to be nightmares, a lot of old movies are crap—well, that’s what I did. You see, the thing was, um…. Well, you know the way doctors say that nervous breakdowns can happen very fast and dramatically, sort of big bang? Or there are the other kind, which happen very slowly over a period of time. Well, I was thirty-three years old, and this one had started when I was seven months and it had just begun to get a grip.”

Advent is always such a time, and this year, for me at least, it’s been even darker. There are, of course, the geopolitical threats of an encroaching totalitarianism—which seems to be metastasizing in the Western “democracies” to a shocking degree. Justin Trudeau may be the most loathsome of this ilk with his authoritarian proclivities and penchant for “assisted” suicide (“coerced” is a better adjective), but he has many competitors in his quest for most Herodian of the Herodians.

This week in Canada: “I don’t want to go on the cart.”

But there are also the more personal infections of darkness. In one week this November, for example, my bank account was hacked, I found myself in a property line dispute with my only neighbor which included a visit from the sheriff, our two vehicles required necessary repairs to the tune of $3000, and my mother, who had lived with me for the past seven years, at last succumbed to the vascular dementia with which she had been afflicted for nearly a decade. This, of course, followed three years of societal insanity that has damaged the psyches of many of our loved ones, mine included, in ways that, I think, we are still not quite ready to admit.

Often when we experience these kinds of stressors, they can trigger dormant traumas and such was the case with me. Without going too far into it, I have revisited the suicide of a childhood friend and later girlfriend named Lisa from when I was eighteen and the suicide of my uncle Kevin, a sensitive artist and musician, more like an older brother, who taught me how to play guitar and who abandoned this veil of tears when he was forty-four during an Advent twenty-seven years ago. One never gets over these kinds of events. The wound never completely heals.

A song that often returns to me at this season is Dougie Maclean’s “Turning Away,” a tune about the incremental loss of Scottish indigeneity through globalization and modernity. Its refrain says it all:

In darkness we do what we can In daylight we’re oblivion Our hearts so raw and clear Are turning away, turning away from here

The comfort the song gives me is not one of resolution, but of recognition of the fallenness of Things; and perhaps this is one of the most important messages of Advent.

Here’s a beautiful version of the song by Dougie with Kathy Mattea and the wizardry of Jerry Douglas on dobro among the contributions of other great players.

The title of Branagh’s film, as many will have noticed, is taken from Christian Rossetti’s exquisite Christmas poem of the same name which was first published in 1872. In 1905, British composer Gustav Holst set the poem to music and it is in this form that it is most widely recognized. Rossetti’s lyric encapsulates both the melancholy of the Advent mood and the anticipation of a glory to come. It speaks particularly to our own times, as it does to all times.

A lovely version of the hymn by Angelo Kelly & Family

The traditional epistle reading for the fourth Sunday in Advent in the Roman Church, as in the Anglican, emphasizes our contention with darkness in anticipation of the birth of the Light:

“Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God.” (1 Corinthians 4)

This melancholia that has so infected me as of late has brought to mind another such period of sorrow and depression when I was twenty-one. Then, a young musician and songwriter, I felt directionless, out of hope. It was a time when I found, in the words of John Donne, “all coherence gone.” Nothing made sense. Somehow, though, I was able to write my one and only Christmas song, a mashup between Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major and The Rolling Stones’ “Get Off My Cloud”—and it is far from afflicted with melancholia. In fact, it’s downright chipper. And here it is in a version I recorded live with the Corktown Popes eight years ago:

So, I guess this is my Christmas greeting to all of you, friends known and unknown, from here in the wilderness. And we are all of us in the wilderness.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: Flesh & Spirit. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

Twelfth Night and the Death of the King

The Lord of Misrule

I spent much of the Holy Nights revisiting a brace of books I haven’t read for decades, Jessie L. Weston’s anthropological excavation of the Grail literature, From Ritual to Romance, and the book that inspired it, James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Toward the end of Advent I watched (most of) director David Lowery’s The Green Knight (it stinks), and I write about the Grail in my most recent book, Sophia in Exile. In addition, I’ve taught college courses on Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur and on the Holy Grail as a cultural icon (Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, The Pre-Raphaelite preoccupation with the Grail, John Boorman’s Excalibur, Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King, Monty Python and the Holy Grail—none of which stink—and so forth), so I have considerable personal experience and investment in this mythos and its intertwining with folklore, folk magic, literature, and religion. But why did it come back to haunt me now, like a literary Jacob Marley shaking its bookish chains at me in The Age of the Crown known as Corona?

Then it dawned on me: the last (first) time I read these works was during my first Saturn return (when Saturn finds its way back to the place where it was at one’s birth—about 29 years or so). Well, here I am at my second Saturn return (do the math). As any astrologer would tell you, a Saturn return is, in general, NOT FUN, and Covid aside, it still has not been a fun year. But it hasn’t been all bad. On the other hand, this all occurred to me during what used to be the ancient Roman time of the Saturnalia. I love coincidence.

I first started reading Frazer and Weston after my initial encounter with T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece The Wasteland. Eliot (who, incidentally died 27 years ago today—darned close to a Saturn cycle)drew on both works for his poem. He published the poem in 1922, having recently undergone both his first Saturn return (he was born in 1888) and lived through the horrors of World War I. We have also been moving through a sort of Wasteland, a time when, as Eliot describes in the poem:

He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience

At this time of the year, at least where I live, death is everywhere. Nothing grows. We exist between in-breath and out-breath at the still point. We require regeneration.

Regeneration, among other things, is precisely what happens at the celebration of Twelfth Night. My family celebrates it every year, complete with poetry and song, wassail and cake, the election of the King of the Bean, and chalking the door in anticipation of the arrival of the Three Kings (who arrive on Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, of course). William Shakespeare, at the request of Elizabeth I, wrote his play Twelfth Night, or What You Will, to be performed at the royal Twelfth Night festivities in 1601/02. The play is a subtle representation of figures and notions of the celebration of the festival—a veritable feast of fools, it features a cadre of motley fools, a butler who assumes himself elevated to royalty, and a brother who (seemingly) returns from the dead, not to mention a wealth of extraordinary (though often melancholy) songs Shakespeare wrote for his clown Robert Armin to sing (trivia: when I was a Waldorf teacher and directed the play, I wrote tunes for Shakespeare’s words—so I can officially say the two of us were collaborators. One example from my treatment, recorded with Corktown Popes, can be found below).

According to both Frazer and Weston, such rituals as the election of the King of the Bean, are remnants of earlier agricultural rituals which tied the vitality of a god or king (or god-king) to the fertility of plants, animals, and humans. As Frazer, connecting Twelfth Night to the Roman Saturnalia, writes,

“We have seen that in Italy, Spain, and France, that is, in the countries where the influence of Rome has been deepest and most lasting, a conspicuous feature of the Carnival is a burlesque figure personifying the festive season, which after a short career of glory and dissipation is publicly shot, burnt, or otherwise destroyed, to the feigned grief or genuine delight of the populace. If the view here suggested of the Carnival is correct, this grotesque personage is no other than a direct successor of the old King of the Saturnalia, the master of the revels, the real man who personated Saturn and, when the revels were over, suffered a real death in his assumed character. The King of the Bean on Twelfth Night and the medieval Bishop of Fools, Abbott of Unreason, or Lord of Misrule are figures of the same sort and may have had a similar origin.” [1]

Rene Girard’s theory of the scapegoat was deeply influenced by his reading of Frazer. I’m not exactly sure the symbolic sacrifice was really grounded in ritual murder—I think the ancients could handle metaphor—nevertheless, it makes for some fascinating speculation and forays into theory. This sacrifice motif is treated in the camp classic of British B-horror, 1973’s The Wicker Man, which ends with the immolation of a nosy and Puritanical police officer. But the film is an otherwise wonderful treasure chest of British folklore and folk-magic custom. My middle child (the middle of nine, poor boy) saw the film a while ago. When I asked him what he thought, he said, “It’s basically our house...but without the human sacrifice.” Progress!

Weston connects the death of the King to the death and resurrection of St. George in the Mummer’s Play, often performed at Twelfth Night—a theme also found in the medieval tale of Gawain and the Green Knight. I like the connection of the flourishing of the land to the vitality of the king, especially as a literary device, and I love the way this is illustrated through the Grail romances in the image of the Fisher King and in Boorman’s Excalibur (more profoundly influenced by Weston than even his alleged source, Malory), but I think Frazer and Weston both miss the significance of resurrection in this mythos. Coming back from the dead—and not a replacement by a substitute (rather a Robin, the Hooded Man or Doctor Who approach to things), as if contract negotiations didn’t work out—is the key that unlocks the magical door here. And this is what makes these stories so profoundly Christian and fit to be connected with the feast of Twelfth Night.

I love the combination of the holy, the mythic, the folkloric, and the atmosphere of conviviality and carnival that colors the Christmas season—but why twelve days? I’m not sure anybody really knows, lost as these traditions are in the mists of time and observation. Nevertheless, one would not need to dig too deeply to see the correlations between the Twelve Days, the months of the year, the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and the twelve Apostles—not to mention the twelve signs of the zodiac (and don’t even get me started on the mysterious connection between Jairus’s twelve-year-old daughter and the woman who had an issue of blood for twelve years). Number symbolism is very important in the Christian tradition.

So raise a glass this Twelfth Night; have a slice of cake. Maybe you’ll get the bean. Maybe the Green Knight will pay a visit. Enjoy your resurrection.

And so, in conclusion, I can think of no better envoi than that of Robert Herrick, my patron saint and Lord of Misrule Emeritus:

TWELFTH NIGHT: OR KING AND QUEEN

NOW, now the mirth comes

With the cake full of plums,

Where bean's the king of the sport here;

Beside we must know,

The pea also

Must revel, as queen, in the court here.

Begin then to choose,

This night as ye use,

Who shall for the present delight here,

Be a king by the lot,

And who shall not

Be Twelfth-day queen for the night here.

Which known, let us make

Joy-sops with the cake;

And let not a man then be seen here,

Who unurg'd will not drink

To the base from the brink

A health to the king and queen here.

Next crown a bowl full

With gentle lamb's wool:

Add sugar, nutmeg, and ginger,

With store of ale too;

And thus ye must do

To make the wassail a swinger.

Give then to the king

And queen wassailing:

And though with ale ye be whet here,

Yet part from hence

As free from offence

As when ye innocent met here.

An episode from great BBC documentary series Tudor Monastery Farm

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

1. James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged edition (New York, 1927), 586.