On The Blessedness Of The Dawn

I started doing the solar prayers from “Liber Resh vel Helios” when I was 13 years old. I wasn’t very good about keeping the practice up back then, and I have just plain given up doing it and resumed the practice several times over the 35 years since, but starting in December, 2019, I have done solar prayers based upon Liber Resh (I use Greek deities instead of Egyptian) almost every dawn, noon, sunset, and midnight of my life. This practice has been both incredibly beneficial magickally and a fascinating personal journey.

See, one of the first things you learn when you really start organizing your life around the Sun is that solar time is constantly changing. Before I started doing Resh, I knew that the days got shorter and longer over the course of the year, of course, but I soon came to understand that time is literally breathing the universe through its cycles around us. The whole of our solar system and the surrounding system of constellations and “fixed” stars by which we have devised our systems of astrology pulses just as surely as our heartbeats. The cosmos moves in patterns as complex and (mostly) regular as any circulatory system. Planets move through their orbits, dawn and sunset get closer and further apart, the Moon waxes and wanes, the seasons move through their cycles…all of it cyclical, all of it constantly going out journeying and returning home to its origins, again and again. And there are larger cycles, immense and wondrous, where solar systems move, where galaxies twist and spin around their own centers, and the whole universe spirals outwards as it expands and—perhaps—someday contracts again.

This is the dance of creation. This is the family we are all born into. Stars in the company of stars.

In the midst of that wondrous dance sits the dawn, and the dawn is special. It is the moment after the night, which is often long, difficult, and filled with doubts, loses its grip, but before the day, which is often long, difficult, and filled with just as many doubts, has taken hold. It is a reprieve from both darkness and light, where we get to sigh and dream into that beautiful liminal space between spaces. Because of this, the air at dawn—both literal and elemental—has a special flavor all its own, a kind of expectant and pleasant shuddering that cries to the heavens “here I am!” as loudly as any prophet of old.

This time of year here on the Northern Hemisphere, the dawn is so late that the world has largely started its day without the Sun. As I do my prayers each morning, I can hear cars starting and the voices of parents carting their children off to school. But six months from now, at the Summer solstice, dawn will be so early that the world will still be asleep and I will be mostly greeting the Sun alone.

Each day these rhythms that define my life change just a bit. Just enough for it to matter. Each day the dawn is just a little later or a little earlier, and I adjust my alarm accordingly. I feel the slow inhale and exhale of time as our troubled planet falls through space, and I understand in my blood, bone, and breath a tiny bit of what it means to be a part of this immense living being that is our cosmos.

As my longtime readers know, I have a very complicated relationship with time. I have, in fact, both sung that time is a monster and spoken upon the blessedness of time. I treasure the patterns it creates, the routines by which I structure my life, and the way time links cause to effect in such a way that it is possible for us to be ethical and to pursue goals. But I also dread the finality of time. The way that we are trapped with our own experiences and the way that once something is done, it is done, forever and always. I have done things that I regret and I wish more than anything that I could somehow change them. But time looms over us, rendering every mistake I have ever made, every time I hurt someone, every time I made a promise that I failed to fulfill, permanent. I can regret it all forever, but I can never change one single moment. The past just won’t let go.

See? I told you that time is a monster.

But time is here with us, whether I like it or not. Every dawn moves us forward while also repeating itself endlessly, a paradox too profound to be anything but true. It is this spiraling riddle that gives birth to our lives, one sunrise at a time. We always live with this heartbeat of time, the regular rising and setting of the Sun, yet we seldom really notice how profound our relationship with the beating of that heart really is. Time easily becomes part of the background scenery of the world, even though it rules us all.

Those of you who have been following my recent work know that I have been evolving a set of metaphors, a mythology of the Long Night and The Road To Dawn. The Road To Dawn is the sworn goal of Magie Sans Frontiéres, a path through all of this darkness and suffering where as many people live, are free, and thrive as possible. A path where we get to see the Sun again, after so long in the dark. And I must confess, dear readers, that sometimes it is very, very hard for me to see this path. The Long Night has been dark and cold and full of monsters. We have suffered and waited and prayed to our gods. Sometimes it feels impossible. Sometimes it is hard, even for me, to believe in the Road To Dawn.

Sometimes even I am tempted into despair.

But I am a true believer in a naturalized theology. I devoutly believe that the Divine shows us Their face through the wonders and terrors of nature alike. And nature teaches me one lesson, over and over and over again. She tells me the same story, every morning as I pray. She tells me that no matter how long or dark or fearsome the night may be, no matter how absolute the darkness or how mighty the storm, that sooner or later the Sun will rise.

Sooner or later, the dawn will come.

Blessed Solstice, dear ones. Be hopeful and of good cheer. Gods willing, I will see you all in the morning.

In love,

Soror Alice

Art: Odilon Redon, “Reflection”, (1900-1905)