Distaff Day - Jan 8th

For a couple of years, I have been attending Cherry Hill Seminary's Spiritual Potluck via Zoom. It is a great opportunity to come together in community. We have a theme for the date and do some ritual. On January 8th, I will be doing the reflection on Distaff Day.

"Distaff Day and it is the feast day of the German Goddess Holda. She has, among other attributes, that of spinning and is the patron of housewives. She is also a Goddess of Winter. She is said to knit the blanket of snow. I love finding deities that elevate traditional women’s work. While feminism has helped us to see that housework is not just women’s work, most of us do have to perform household chores of some type. The Goddess Holda was seen as helping women be industrustrious and it is said she punished the lazy ones. This idea associated with a Goddess is suspect to me as not many of the Goddess I am familiar with punish. Still, there are plenty of Goddesses associate with the fiber arts such as Arachne, Athena, and the Fates.

Here is a folktale about Holda: Her preference for hard workers is reflected in the German folktale of “Frau Holle”, where a young girl falls down the well into a strange underworld. She helps every creature she meets, and willingly cleans for the old woman in her cottage, after which the old woman sends her back with a gift – a gold piece falls from her lips every time she speaks. Her mother, amazed, forces her lazy sister down the well; the sister refuses to help anyone and the old woman sends her back with a different gift – instead of gold, toads drop from her lips when she says anything. This folktale helps me understand her punishing quality which is really about teaching values as many folktales do.

Prior to the mass production of clothing, most women would have known how to spin wool in to yarn, knit that yarn into clothes or weave it into cloth and sew garments from the cloth. I inherit from two grandmothers, one who knitted and one who sewed and from my mother who did both, a love of fiber arts. As I became interested in Paganism, the notion of spinning and weaving became infused with my new spirituality. While I do not spin or weave, I do knit and sew the products of spinning and weaving.

The image of a net or a web as a metaphor of the connection of all beings, as in Indra’s net, makes so much sense, especially with our understandings of the Universe. Even though there are vast spaces between celestial bodies, we know that quantum theory posits that quanta can communicate instantaneously at great distances and astrology posits that the planets in our own solar system have influence on us on Earth. The blood cursing through our bodies is a web of communication bringing nourishment to our cells. Our relationships at home, in our families, at work, at play or in associations can create webs of influence. The internet is a significant web of our times. Any study of ecology will reveal the incredible interconnected ness of the entire planet. In ritual, we pass a ball of yarn across the circle to create our own web to affirm our profound connection to each other and mirror how all things relate to one another. "

If you would like to hear the rest of this, come join us on January 8th. Email me at sococommin@gmail.com to get the Zoom link.