Imbolc: The Feast of Fire

Imbolc is the festival of fire. The Temple's own record of how that was learned is kept on this page as it was first written: in researching the origins of the feast there were many dead ends and modern inventions that made no sense, and the clergy asked the Gods for help. Father Zeus appeared for a few seconds and said “Think Fire.” The whole festival follows from those 2 words.

Imbolc is the Feast of Fire, the celebration of the element that creates, purifies and begins. Everything done on the night, from the putting out of the lamps to the dance until dawn, is a work of fire.

The feast falls midway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox, when the Sun stands at the 15th degree of Aquarius. In the civil calendar that is the 2nd of February, and the Temple keeps it on that date for the whole world, in both hemispheres, because the Sun's degree is universal and the local weather isn't.

The Sun at 15° of a fixed sign is a point of special power: the fixed signs are the 4 pillars of the year, the Bull, the Lion, the Scorpion and the Water-Bearer, which the ancients carved as the 4 living creatures and set at the 4 corners of the heavens (Ezekiel 1.10 copies them from Babylon; the Egyptian Sphinx compounds them). The 4 Mystery Holidays of the Zevist year fall at the middle of those 4 signs. Imbolc is the first.

The Irish, who gave the feast its name, kept it as the day the ewes gave milk again. Oimelc, Cormac's Glossary explains, is “ewe's milk” (Sanas Cormaic s.v.); the other reading, i mbolg, “in the belly,” names the same thing from the other side: the lamb in the womb, the spring in the belly of the year, the first life stirring where nothing can yet be seen.

The feast is about what is hidden and about to be born, and fire is the agent that brings it out. The warmth of the Sun, which has been returning since the solstice, now becomes real; the days have gained more than an hour; the ground thaws; the first green shows. The fire of the hearth and the fire of the heavens are relit together.

Think Fire. The feast of February is the feast of the element that creates, purifies and begins.

Estia, First and Last in Every Offering

Estia (Ἑστία, Hestia) is the hearth, and the hearth is the centre. She's the first-born of Kronos and Rhea (Hesiod, Theogony 454; Pindar, Nemean 11.1 to 2), and by the decree of Zeus she receives the first offering and the last in every house and every temple: “without you mortals hold no feast, where one doesn't pour the honey-sweet wine to Hestia first and last” (Homeric Hymn 29.4 to 6).

She refused marriage, swore her oath on the head of Zeus, and chose the middle of the house over the summit of Olympus; Zeus gave her “a fine privilege instead of marriage,” to sit in the midst of the house receiving the fat of the feast and to be honoured in every temple of the Gods (Homeric Hymn 5.21 to 32). In choosing the centre she became the most necessary of all. Without the hearth there's no family, without the family no people, without the people no Temple.

Rome knew her as Vesta, whose round temple held the fire the Vestals guarded with their lives, and who was understood by the Romans as nothing but living flame: “understand Vesta as nothing other than living fire, and you see that no bodies are born from flame” (Ovid, Fasti 6.291 to 292).

The Celts knew her as Brigid, daughter of the Dagda, the triple Goddess of poetry, healing and smithcraft (Sanas Cormaic s.v. Brigit), whose fire at Kildare burned for centuries inside a hedge no man might cross, tended by 19 priestesses in turn, and on the 20th night by the Goddess herself (Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hibernica 2.34 to 36). Her feast is the 1st of February, and that is why Imbolc is hers. 3 peoples, 3 names, 1 fire that was never allowed to go out.

The Pythagoreans put her fire at the centre of the cosmos. Philolaus taught that the middle of the universe is a fire, and the school called it the Hearth of the All, the Watch-tower of Zeus; the Earth and the stars move around it as a household moves around its hearth (Philolaus fr. 7 DK; Aristotle, De caelo 293a to b; Aëtius 2.7.7). The fire of the home is an image of that fire. The Zevist who relights the hearth on this night relights, in little, the centre of the world.

Artemis, the Light-Bearer and the Pure

Artemis (Ἄρτεμις) is the daughter of Zeus and Leto, twin of Apollo, born on Delos a day before her brother and present at his birth as midwife (Homeric Hymn 3.14 to 18; Callimachus, Hymn 3). She's the Moon as Apollo is the Sun, the Light-Bearer (Phosphoros) and Torch-Bearer (Selasphoros) who runs the mountains by night with a torch in each hand (Aristophanes, Lysistrata 443; Pausanias 1.31.4).

She's the Pure One, Hagne, who never bowed to marriage, and she's the Mistress of Beasts, Potnia Theron (Homer, Iliad 21.470), before whom the lion halts. She is Kourotrophos, nurse of the young, and Locheia, protector of birth. Her purity isn't an absence; it's wholeness, the state of what is unbroken.

She rules Imbolc with Estia because the feast is a purification, and purification is hers, and because the feast is a feast of torches, and the torch is hers.

At Athens the Mounichia brought her the amphiphontes, round cakes ringed with little lit torches, “shining on both sides” like the full moon (Athenaeus 14.645a; Philochorus FGrH 328 F 86), and the Thracian Bendis, whom the Greeks took for Artemis, was honoured in the Piraeus with a torch-race on horseback in which the riders passed the flame hand to hand; Socrates went down to see it (Plato, Republic 327a to 328a). The lambing season is hers too: she's the protector of all that is newly born, in the fold and in the soul.

The 2 Goddesses divide the night between them. Estia kindles the fire at the centre; Artemis carries it out into the dark.

Estia is the centre and Artemis the circle, and between the hearth and the torch there's no gap for the enemy.

The Celtic Imbolc and the Feast of Brigid

The Irish year turned on 4 quarter days: Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh. The medieval tale Tochmarc Emire names all 4 in sequence, and Imbolc is the feast “when the ewes are milked at spring's beginning” (Van Hamel, Compért Con Culainn, 1933, 43). The Coligny calendar, a bronze Gaulish calendar of the 2nd century, confirms that the Celts reckoned a year of 2 halves divided at the cross-quarters.

Imbolc was absorbed, when Ireland became Christian, into the feast of Saint Brigid on the 1st of February, and the saint inherited the Goddess's fire, her sacred wells, her oak at Kildare and her perpetual flame.

The customs of the day survived in the countryside until the 20th century: the Brigid's cross woven from rushes and hung over the door, the brídeog (an effigy of Brigid carried from house to house), the bed made for Brigid with food and drink left out, the strip of cloth left on the windowsill overnight to be blessed by her passing and kept for healing (Danaher, The Year in Ireland, 1972, 13 to 37; Ó Catháin, The Festival of Brigit, 1995).

The cloth on the windowsill and the candle in the window are the same gesture: the house opens itself to the Goddess who passes in the night.

Rome: Februa, Lupercalia and the Fire of Vesta

The whole Roman month of February was a purification. Its name comes from the februa, the instruments of cleansing: the woollen thongs, the roasted grain, the laurel branches, the water, by which a thing is made purus (Ovid, Fasti 2.19 to 46; Varro, De lingua Latina 6.13, 6.34).

On the 15th came the Lupercalia: the Luperci ran naked around the Palatine striking whomever they met with thongs of goatskin, and the women who were struck were held to be purified and made fertile (Ovid, Fasti 2.267 to 452; Plutarch, Romulus 21; Caesar received the diadem from Antony as a Lupercus, Plutarch, Caesar 61). The festival was so stubborn that Pope Gelasius was still fighting it in 494, and his letter against it survives (Adversum Andromachum).

The Romans kept the dead of the family in the same month, the Parentalia of 13 to 21 February and the Feralia, and swept the house of its ghosts at the Lemuria in May: purification of the living and the dead went together.

The fire of Vesta was renewed each year on the 1st of March, the old New Year: the flame relit, fresh laurel hung on the hearth and in the Regia (Ovid, Fasti 3.135 to 144; Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.12.6). If the fire ever went out by the negligence of a Vestal, it was kindled afresh by friction of wood or by a concave mirror from the Sun (Plutarch, Numa 9; Festus s.v. ignis Vestae).

The Temple's custom of putting out every flame in the house on this night and striking the new fire from flint or from the Sun is the Roman custom at the Roman season, moved to the Celtic day.

Athens: Anthesteria and the Lesser Mysteries

The Athenian month Anthesterion, which overlaps February, held 2 festivals that belong to Imbolc. The Anthesteria, “the older Dionysia” (Thucydides 2.15.4), ran 3 days from the 11th: the Pithoigia, when the jars of the new wine were opened; the Choes, the day of the wine-jugs, when every man drank in silence at his own table and the Basilinna, wife of the Archon Basileus, was given in sacred marriage to Dionysos in the Boukoleion ([Demosthenes] 59.73 to 78).

The 3rd day was the Chytroi, the day of the pots, when a porridge of all seeds was cooked for Hermes Chthonios and the dead, the doors were smeared with pitch, and the spirits who had walked the city for 3 days were sent away with the cry “Out, Keres, the Anthesteria are over” (Zenobius 4.33; Photius s.v. θύραζε Κᾶρες; Burkert, Homo Necans, 1983, 213 to 247). The wine, the marriage and the dead belong to the same 3 days: the new life and the old are both honoured when the year turns.

In the same month the Lesser Mysteries were celebrated at Agrai on the Ilissos, in honour of Persephone. They were the necessary preparation for the Greater Mysteries of September: a purification, a washing in the river, an instruction. No one was admitted to Eleusis who hadn't first been initiated at Agrai (Plato, Gorgias 497c; Plutarch, Demetrius 26; Stephanus of Byzantium s.v. Ἄγρα; Clement, Stromateis 5.11.70 to 71).

The Temple reads its own calendar on this model. Imbolc is the Lesser Mystery of the Zevist year: what is cleaned here in February is shown there at the Autumn Equinox. The fire prepares the eye for the light.

The Christian Overlay: Candlemas

The Church placed on the 2nd of February the feast of the Purification of its virgin and the blessing of candles, which it called Candlemas. Bede, writing in the 8th century, admitted that the custom of carrying lit candles through the city on that day was taken over from the Roman rite of the Februa, and that the Church had turned the pagan procession into its own (De temporum ratione 12).

The procession, the candles, the purification, the virgin of the torches: every element was already here, and belonged to Artemis and to Estia. The Temple restores the day to them.

What is cleaned in February is shown in September. Imbolc is the Lesser Mystery of the Zevist year.

The outer festival is the relighting of the fire. The inner festival is the recognition that the fire never went out.

Every flame in the house is extinguished, and the celebrant stands for 1 moment in the dark. That moment is the whole teaching. The dark is known, and it's found to be empty: the fire is gone from the wick, but it isn't gone from the world, because fire isn't the wood. When the new flame is struck from the flint it's the same flame, and the Zevist sees that what ages is the fuel and what dies is the ash, and that the soul is the flame and the body the wood.

Heraclitus called the cosmos “an everliving fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures” (B 30), and the Pythagoreans put that fire at the centre and called it the Hearth. The hearth of the house is the point where the cosmic fire touches the family, and the relighting is a theurgic act: the celebrant takes the role of the Goddess who keeps the fire of the All.

The second teaching is purification. Fire cleans by burning what won't survive it; the stale habit, the fear kept warm through the winter, the thought that went nowhere, are written down and given to Estia's flame, and the paper that burns is the month of februa condensed into 1 minute. The Lupercalia ran around the city; the Zevist's purification runs around the soul.

Then the second paper is written, the resolution of 6 months, from this fire to the fire of Lammas, where it'll be read again and weighed. Imbolc and Lammas are the 2 ends of 1 working. The Feast of Fire is where the forge is lit; the first harvest is where the metal is tested.

The third teaching is Artemis's: the fire within. The Temple teaches the Serpent of Fire, the Kundalini, the force coiled at the base of the spine that rises through the channels of the soul and is the inner form of every outer flame. The dance around the fire until dawn, which the ancients kept at this feast, is the body's way of calling to that force.

The torch of Artemis is its image: the fire that walks through the dark without fear, that reveals what sunlight can't, that sees through the mask. Divination by fire, pyromancy, belongs to the night for the same reason: the flame that is read is the flame within projected outward, and the shapes it makes are the shapes of what is coming to be born.

The 4th teaching is the Lesser Mystery itself. The ancients purified at Agrai before they saw at Eleusis. The Temple purifies at Imbolc before it shows at the Autumn Equinox. The one who keeps this feast rightly has stood at Agrai; the road to Eleusis is 7 months long and begins here.

The names in this table are the same essence under the tongues of different peoples. A Zevist of any nation may address Estia and Artemis under the name that the ancestors of that nation used, provided the essence of the God is understood as one. The Temple sets the Greek name first because the Greek sources preserve the fullest theology; it doesn't set it as the only name.

The ancients themselves did the same: Herodotus wrote Greek names for Egyptian Gods without hesitation, and the Romans wrote Jupiter over every altar of Zeus they found (Herodotus 2.42 to 2.50; Caesar, Gallic War 6.17; Tacitus, Germania 9, 43).

The Brigid, Hestia, Vesta Power Ritual of the Temple invokes the Goddess under all 3 names as “Three Names, One Fire, One Goddess,” and the Artemis Power Ritual names her Diana, Bendis, Devana, Arduinna and Anat in a single breath. Those are the Rituals of the Goddesses for this night.

The Feast of Fire is the easiest of the 8 to keep alone and the hardest to keep carelessly, because its whole substance is in the house and in the hands. Spend the daylight of the 1st of February cleaning. Not tidying: cleaning, as for a guest who sees everything. Wash the floors, the windows, the hearth if there's one.

Open the house to the cold air for an hour. Change the linen. The ancients purified the city with laurel and water and the smoke of the februa; the Zevist purifies the house with the same means and the same intent, and the work of the hands is the first half of the Rite.

At dusk bathe, and pass the hands through laurel smoke. Set the altar: the white candle of Estia unlit, the flint, the cup of milk, the 2 papers, the bowl, the cakes. Then go through the house and put out every light. Stand in the dark and count 12 breaths. Strike the fire.

From that one flame, in the order of the Rite, light the house room by room, and let the candle in the window burn until morning. The Hestia Ritual and the Artemis Ritual together take about 50 minutes; with the Psalm, the burning and the fire reading the night fills itself.

The 2 papers deserve the day's thought, not the night's. Write the first in the afternoon: what is to be burned, named plainly, 1 item a line. Write the second after it: what the 6 months from now to Lammas are to hold, 3 things at most, each a decision. The first is burned at the Rite; the second is sealed with wax from Estia's candle and kept on the altar or in the Black Book.

On the 1st of August it's opened and read, and the Zevist weighs himself against it. The honest weighing at Lammas is what gives the February resolution its force.

The feast of the 2nd is quiet: the cakes, the milk, a walk in whatever daylight there is, the first green looked for and found. Those who dedicate their souls to Zeus choose this night for it by preference; the Rite of Dedication is performed by the new fire, and Estia, who receives every beginning, receives the beginner. Covens have always held Imbolc the right time for the admission of new members, and the Temple keeps that custom.

A gathering for the Feast of Fire centres on 1 flame. The hall is lit at the start only by the lamps that are to be put out; the striking of the new fire is the height of the night; and the passing of that fire from hand to hand through the whole assembly is the act that makes the gathering 1 body.

The ancient models are the torch-race of the Bendideia, in which the flame passed from rider to rider and never fell, and the circuit of the Luperci around the boundary of the city, which cleansed what it enclosed.

The Offices of the Night

The Order of the Gathering

1. The Cleansing of the Hall. The gathering itself cleans the place of the Rite on the day of the 1st. No one who didn't help clean leads the Rite.
2. The Public Call, at the threshold, by the Herald: the Feast of Fire is open to every person of clean hands and good will who comes to be made clean.
3. The Extinguishing. Every light in the hall is put out, the Torch-Bearer putting out the last. The Herald counts 12 breaths in the dark. Silence.
4. The Striking. The Torch-Bearer strikes the new fire from flint, lights the candle of Estia, and the Presiding Priestess speaks the Fire Formula. From it the first torch is lit.
5. The Rite, in the order above, led by the Presiding Priestess, with the Chorus carrying the Psalm. At the Burning of the Winter the celebrants come to the fire one by one.
6. The Passing of the Flame. At the Lighting of the House, each celebrant holds an unlit candle; the Torch-Bearer lights the first, and the flame passes from hand to hand around the whole circle until every candle burns. The 19 Keepers receive theirs first. No candle is lit from anything but a neighbour's. When the circle is complete the hall's lamps are relit from the circle, not the other way.
7. The Circuit of the Boundary. The Torch-Bearer leads the assembly with their candles in a procession once around the boundary of the place, outdoors where possible, clockwise, enclosing it in fire as the Luperci enclosed the city. Those who can't walk hold the centre.
8. The Ritual of Artemis and the Psalm's second half, on return.
9. The Dedication and Admission. The new members come forward together to the fire. The public part of their dedication is performed before the assembly; what is private is private.
10. The Closing, and the last libation to Estia.
11. The Feast of the Round Cakes. Pancakes, crêpes, honey, milk, cheese of the first milk, and wine for those who drink it. The cake with the candle is cut and shared.
12. The Fire Dance, around the central fire, outdoors around a bonfire where the place allows, until dawn. The 19 candles of the Keepers burn until the Sun rises.

The inner rite of the hearth, where it is held, is held by those who hold it, apart from the hall, and the assembly isn't told its hour.

One flame, passed from hand to hand until every hand holds it: that is the whole of the gathering.

The Psalm is sung in 2 halves at the 2 points marked in the Rite: Movements I to III to Estia after her Ritual, Movements IV to VI to Artemis after hers. Each passage stands in 3 columns, Ancient Greek, transliteration and English. 72 passages: 36 to the hearth, 36 to the torch.

The full Psalm stands on its own page: Psalm II: The Psalm of Imbolc, the Feast of Fire. The first 24 of its 72 passages are shown here; the drawdown below unfolds the remaining 48.

1. Homeric Hymns 5 (to Aphrodite) 21 to 32, 24 and 29 (to Hestia), 27 (to Artemis); Hesiod, Theogony 453 to 454; Pindar, Nemean 11.1 to 7; Orphic Hymns 36 and 84; Callimachus, Hymn 3; Aristonous, Hymn to Hestia (Delphi, 4th c.).
2. Philolaus fr. 7 Diels-Kranz; Aristotle, De caelo 293a to b; Aëtius 2.7.7; Heraclitus B 30.
3. Ovid, Fasti 2.19 to 46, 2.267 to 452, 3.135 to 144, 6.249 to 318, 6.291 to 298, 6.421 to 460; Varro, De lingua Latina 6.13, 6.34; Plutarch, Numa 9 to 11, Romulus 21, Caesar 61; Dionysius of Halicarnassus 2.64 to 67; Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.12.6; Festus s.v. ignis Vestae; Gelasius, Adversum Andromachum (ed. Pomarès, 1959).
4. Sanas Cormaic (Cormac's Glossary), s.vv. Brigit, Oimelc; Tochmarc Emire (ed. van Hamel, 1933); Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hibernica 2.34 to 36; the Coligny calendar (Duval and Pinault, RIG III, 1986); K. Danaher, The Year in Ireland (1972) 13 to 37; S. Ó Catháin, The Festival of Brigit (1995).
5. Thucydides 2.15.4; [Demosthenes] 59.73 to 78; Aristophanes, Acharnians 1000 to 1234, Frogs 218; Zenobius 4.33; Photius s.v. θύραζε Κᾶρες; W. Burkert, Homo Necans (1983) 213 to 247; H. W. Parke, Festivals of the Athenians (1977) 107 to 124; L. Deubner, Attische Feste (1932) 93 to 123.
6. Plato, Gorgias 497c, Republic 327a to 328a; Plutarch, Demetrius 26; Stephanus of Byzantium s.v. Ἄγρα; Polyaenus 5.17.1; Clement, Stromateis 5.11.70 to 71; Hesychius s.v. ὑδρανός; K. Clinton, “Stages of Initiation in the Eleusinian and Samothracian Mysteries,” in Cosmopoulos (ed.), Greek Mysteries (2003) 50 to 78.
7. Athenaeus 14.645a, 14.646e; Philochorus FGrH 328 F 86; Pausanias 1.31.4, 1.36.1, 3.16.7 to 11; Aristophanes, Lysistrata 443, 641 to 647 with scholia; Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris 1462 to 1467; Xenophon, Hellenica 4.2.20, Anabasis 3.2.12; Homer, Iliad 21.470, 24.602 to 609.
8. Bede, De temporum ratione 12; Liber Pontificalis, Sergius I; Herodotus 1.146, 5.7; Strabo 5.3.12; Caesar, Gallic War 6.17; Tacitus, Germania 9, 43.
9. W. Burkert, Greek Religion (1985) 149 to 152, 170 to 171; M. P. Nilsson, Griechische Feste (1906) 205 to 215; L. Kahil, “L'Artémis de Brauron,” Antike Kunst 20 (1977) 86 to 98; J.-P. Vernant, “Hestia-Hermès,” in Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs (1965).
10. The Temple's pages on Imbolc, the Standard Ritual and the Advanced Ritual, and the Brigid, Hestia, Vesta and Artemis Power Rituals on the ritual site of the Temple.