Honoring Ancestral Divine on Imbolc and Candlemas
Every year at the beginning of February, I honor both ancestral lines of my family.
On my maternal side, February 1 and 2 marks the celebration of Brigid’s day or Imbolc or Candlmas to Catholics, who took Celtic goddess, Brigid, and syncretized her onto St. Brigid of Ireland as they historically are want to do. My maternal great great great grandmother, Bridget Varley, was born in County Mayo, Ireland near the very mountain that St. Patrick climbed in his pursuit to “cast out the snakes” from Ireland, which simply meant to rid the isle of the Celts and their pagan belief systems to make way for Catholicism.
I honor Brigid as the goddess and as the saint, who kept alive the ancient stories as they allow us to trace where we came from before one culture and religion attempted to stamp out another, which can never fully be done. Threads always remain that may be rewoven.
On my paternal side, on February 2nd, we celebrate Our Lady of Candelaria, the patron saint of my family’s homeland of the Canary Islands. Her history is similar to my maternal side as the native inhabitants of the Canaries were the Guanche people who honored a mother deity they called ChaxiRaxi, whose likeness was found in a cave in the early 14th century and worshiped for generations, prior to Spanish invasion, conquest, and conversion to Catholicism in the mid 15th century. The Canaries conquest was a precursor to the Caribbean conquest.
The statue of ChaxiRaxi is believed to have washed up on the island from an ancient Phoenician shipwreck and is said to be the likeness of the Punic Carthaginian goddess Tanit whose worship stretched from the Mediterranean shores of the Near East across North Africa, Southern Europe, and all the islands in between all the way out to the Atlantic isles of the Canaries.
Another possible consideration for Tanit being worshiped on the Canaries could be that the Guanches, my indigenous ancestors, are of the modern day Amazigh (colloquially known as Berbers) who were influenced by their neighbors, the ancient Phoenicians and brought Tanit to the Canaries during migration.
So Tanit became ChaxiRaxi. When the Spanish arrived and conquered the Guanches over the course of the early to mid 1400s they recognized that ChaxiRaxi holding a baby and a candle could easily be syncretized into the Virgin Mary and so they built a basilica for this statue and told the indigenous people they could keep their deity only that her name is now Our Lady of Candelaria as they forced those who they hadn’t killed or sold into slavery to become Catholic.
It is not lost on me that Brigid -ancient Celtic goddess turned saint- and Tanit -ancient Punic Carthagian goddess turned sacred virgin mother Mary, Our Lady of Candelaria- are honored in my two native lands at the same time! These deities, in all their depictions and transformations still carry the energy of remembering my ancestors at the beginning of documented time. In connecting to them through the threads of time, I can recall a world before one energy overthrew the other and named itself man. There was a time when the balance was held by all humans because they knew divine feminine and masculine are in us all. That is my work the remember and tell the stories and imagine a future where we call in the truth before the fall to patriarchy and supremacy to shape a balanced future where we care of the land as we honor the divine. It is possible. It has been done before.
And so I will honor these powerful divinities of my lineages whose stories are still available and who stand for all the women, like my ancestors who were to devoted to them, whose stories I only have written in my bones and my DNA, and tell of a lineage to hold to for the knowing that stretches beyond what the unhinged masculine attempted to wipe off the face of the earth by creating a binary in order for men to own God and power. We will honor these ancient women and pass the stories down to our descendants. The binary is crumbling at last in our collective remembering and I stand with my lineage of ancient ancestral Divine as I support the generations to come in reclaiming the balance for us all.
#rootdown #riseup #totherevolutions #alldefintionsapply