Imbolc – Let’s Bring The Light Back!

Imbolc is a festival of light in many – if not all – regions of the Celtic lands. In the Alps, whence these ancient peoples came, and in the German speaking lands in general, the concept of light is even in the name of the festival, Lichtmess (“Light measure”). Candlemas, as it is called in the Christian English speaking world, is also a reference to it.

All this is probably based on what our forebears observed at the beginning of February: The Sun is out longer – for about an hour – than He was at the darkest days of the year, at the Winter Solstice. The farming year now began in earnest, and in the areas where Germans and Celts lived in close proximity, people erected a specific pole in the village centers. The Germans called it TINPAL, which means ‘time pole’ or ‘light measure pole’. There is evidence that…