Little Yule/St Lucy’s Day
The 13th of December is celebrated across Europe as Saint Lucy’s Day and associated with the promise of light and life in the depth of winter’s cold and darkness. In the Nordic nations, where she is known as Lucia, her feast day, also called “Little Yule,” is a very important holiday, one of the few saints’ festivals to have survived the Reformation. While part of the reason Saint Lucy’s Day is so popular with Danes, Norwegians and Swedes has to do with the brutality of winter, the season was celebrated long before the coming of the Christian faith itself.
Saint Lucy’s name is derived from the root word lux, meaning light in Latin, and her Feast Day fell, in the old Julian Calendar system, on the Winter Solstice, the longest night.
Esoterically, Saint Lucy represented the promise of the return of the Sun, light and life from out of the depths of winter darkness. And she was a union of opposites, darkness and light, to express the highest goals of Western Civilization, the quest to conquer ignorance and the lower self, and to rise to a state of knowledge, wisdom and freedom.
According to her legend, Saint Lucy’s eyes were gouged out by her persecutors, and hence she is the Patroness of the blind. Lucy being blinded represented, esoterically, the war of the lower, dark self against the higher calling we seek.
In the image here shown, painted by Renaissance artist Domenico Beccafumi in AD 1521, Saint Lucy’s right hand cradles a sword, pointed downwards, symbolic of peace. Lucy’s sacrificed eyes rest on the Host and Holy Grail, also representing renewal and life, as well as sacrifice, ideas shown in the gaze of the eyes miraculously restored in her legend, inviting viewers to share in her own victory over internal blindness, here in a specifically Christological context.
John Donne’s beautiful poem, A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day, touches on esoteric alchemical and Hermetic themes meant to convey the idea of life proceeding out of apparent death. John Donne (1572 to 1631), a close friend of Sir Francis Bacon and part of the Renaissance ideological ferment, was known for his “metaphysical conceit” poetic devices, meant to draw out esoteric concepts related to apparent opposites.
Saint Lucy and her associated message of light and warmth glowing in the midst of cold darkness, struck an especially strong chord with the Norse peoples. She, and what she stands for, was seen to be so precious that her Feast Day, when children are rewarded with sweets and music, was one of the very few saints’ days to survive the Reformation in the dark and frozen Nordic lands. The Lutheran church still honors Saint Lucy with special services on this national holiday, centered around singing women and girls, who parade into darkened churches carrying lit candles, or even wearing them as crowns.
The honor afforded to the principles Lucy came to embody long predates the coming of the Christian faith to Europe. The Germanic heathens, the Norse among them, recognized two aspects of the ideas that would become associated with Saint Lucy, what later came to be referred to as Lucia die dunkle (the dark Lucia), and her opposite, Lucia die helle (the fair Lucia). Both opposites were united in one body and purpose. Such symbolism was important to esoteric Protestant groups like the Rosicrucians, which may also explain why her veneration survived the otherwise iconoclastic changes wrought by the Reformation.
On Lussi Night, the 13th of December, all manner of chaotic forces were unleashed in the darkness, when the malevolent Lussiferda would snatch bad children. Horse riding wights would spread fear of catastrophe, war, plague and hunger through the sky. But Lussi Night bore the promise of the fair Saint Lucy, with her candles lighting the path to Yule, the coming of the Christ Child, and the advent of the coming Sun.
Ex tenebris lux, “out of darkness, light,” is the underlying message of Saint Lucy’s Day.
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