Mōdraniht & the winter solstice (ENG)

Tamalynne Grant
Dec 21, 2025
6 min read

Text by Tamalynne Grant December 2025

Choosing to Celebrate Mōdraniht on the Winter Solstice

Until recently, I did not know the name Mōdraniht.

What I knew was the Winter Solstice: the longest night, the descent into darkness, the stillness where something ancient gathers itself. I knew the deer, long before I knew the scholarship: antlers like branches and stars, reindeer moving between worlds, carrying something luminous through the dark. These things arrived through vision and embodied experience, not through books.

The name Mother Night came later.

I encountered Mōdraniht only recently, through my initiation into Northern priestesship, which I began in October 2025, and through my completed Seiðr training with Xiomara Crystal. When the name arrived, it did not overwrite what I already knew, it revealed the shape of it. It was the missing key that allowed intuition, vision, and ancestral memory to settle into context.

This year is the first time I am consciously celebrating Mōdraniht at all. And it is the first time I am choosing to honour it on the night of the Winter Solstice.

Modraniht in the Historical Record

The earliest written reference to Mōdraniht comes from the 8th-century monk Bede, who recorded pre-Christian practices of the Saxons after their migration to Britain.

Bede tells us that the heathen Saxons began their year with a night called Mōdraniht "Mother Night" , a sacred observance connected to the Mothers and the turning of time. Importantly, he writes this as an observation, not an explanation. He does not describe the ritual itself, nor does he assign it a precise calendar date as we understand time now.

Later interpretations place Mōdraniht:

on the night before the Winter Solstice
on the Solstice itself
or on what later became Christmas Eve

This ambiguity is not accidental. It tells us that Mōdraniht was a liminal rite, not a fixed feast day, a threshold moment where night, ancestry, and origin became one.

It is also important to name this correctly: Mōdraniht is rooted in Old Saxon tradition, carried by the Saxons into Britain, not a later “Old English” invention, but a transplanted continental practice.

Why I Choose the Winter Solstice

I choose to honour Mōdraniht on the Winter Solstice because it is the longest night of the year, the point where darkness is complete.

Symbolically and ritually, this is the womb.

Across Paleolithic cultures of the tundra and steppe, winter was understood not as death, but as suspension. Life withdrew, gathered, and waited. Archaeological and anthropological research shows that Ice Age societies organised their cosmologies around descent and return, often mediated through animals, especially deer and reindeer.

Reindeer were not merely livestock. They were seen as threshold walkers. Their antlers mirrored trees, neural pathways, and star maps. They moved between worlds: earth and sky, life and death, visible and unseen.

By honouring Mother Night on the Solstice, I'm not trying to force history into alignment. It is to recognise a shared cosmological logic that spans cultures and millennia:

Life rests in darkness before it moves again.

The Disir — Mothers, Ancestors, Goddesses

In Germanic cosmology, the Disir were ancestral female spirits: protectors of kin, guardians of fate, and keepers of frith (sacred peace). They were honoured collectively, not as individuals.

The Disir encompass:

ancestral women
lineage Mothers
protective female spirits
and, in many interpretations, female deities themselves

They are not limited to passed loved ones. They move across the boundary between ancestor and goddess.

This collective reverence for the feminine is echoed in the Matronae cults, found across Germanic and Roman-influenced regions. Stone reliefs depict the Matronae as triple Mothers: seated, powerful, bearing symbols of fertility, protection, and continuity. Different names, different regions.

And yet the message remains the same: the Mother line sustains the world.

Evergreens and the Living World

Among Celtic peoples, evergreen trees were brought into homes during winter not as decoration, but as living symbols of continuity. Life endured beneath the frost. Green remained when all else slept.

This was not denial of death, but trust in return.

Across Germanic, Nordic, and Celtic cultures, honouring the Mother meant honouring the Earth itself, not metaphorically, but materially.

The Sun Standing Still — Twelve Nights in the Dark

Among Celtic traditions, the Winter Solstice was not understood as a single moment, but as a pause in time.

There is a widespread belief that during the Solstice, the sun was thought to stand still for twelve days , neither rising higher nor falling lower on the horizon. This transitional period was not seen as absence or stagnation, but as suspension: a sacred holding between what had died and what had not yet returned.

It is within this understanding that practices such as: bringing evergreens into the home and burning a log continuously over twelve days begin to make sense.

The evergreen represented eternal life in a world of darkness. The burning of the log mirrored the sun itself, held in ritual flame while its power gathered strength beneath the horizon.

What I find especially striking is how closely this mirrors later traditions known as the Rauhnächte: the “rough” or “smoky” nights, a twelve-night liminal period stretching across midwinter, associated with ancestral spirits, prophecy, and the thinning of worlds.

I do not claim these traditions are the same, nor that one directly descends from the other. But the resonance is difficult to ignore.

Across cultures, across centuries, we see the same pattern repeating:

twelve nights outside ordinary time
ancestral presence
ritual fire and smoke
the sense that the world is being held rather than moved

Whether this is coincidence, shared cosmology, or the echo of much older seasonal memory, I cannot say. But it suggests that the Winter Solstice was never meant to be rushed.

It was meant to be kept.

Reindeer, Shamans, AManita muscaria and the Origins of Santa Claus

Many elements now associated with Christmas are not Christian at all.

In northern shamanic cultures, practitioners were often described as wearing red and white, colours associated with the sacred mushroom Amanita muscaria. This mushroom was used ritually for its psychoactive properties, which were believed to facilitate trance, spirit travel, and experiences of flight, hence the name fly agaric.

The ingestion of Amanita muscaria could be physically demanding. Experienced shamans sometimes consumed the mushroom directly, enduring effects such as nausea as part of the ritual ordeal. Those less accustomed to its potency would instead consume the urine of the shaman, through which the psychoactive compounds passed in a less toxic and more manageable form. In some regions, reindeer, known to eat Amanita muscaria naturally, also became part of this cycle, with their urine collected and used in ritual contexts.

Within these traditions, reindeer were not merely animals but vital spiritual intermediaries: moving between worlds, carrying vision, and guiding journeys beyond the ordinary state of consciousness.

In winter, heavy snowfall meant entrances were blocked; shamans entered dwellings through roof openings or smoke holes, what we would later call chimneys.

They travelled by sled, guided by reindeer.

Reindeer, crucially, are led by females, a detail often lost in modern retellings, but deeply relevant in a cosmology centred on Mothers and matrilineal continuity.

In trance and myth, these reindeer were said to fly through the sky, carrying spirits and blessings between worlds.

Over time, these elements were stripped of their spiritual context and repackaged into something marketable:

the red-and-white figure
the chimney descent
the flying reindeer
the winter gift-bringer

Santa Claus/Father Christmas is not a Christian invention. He is a softened echo of shamanic and ancestral traditions, sold without roots.

Vision, Ancestry, and Recognition

Long before I had language for it, my journeys showed me reindeer carrying a star between their antlers, crossing the dark sky. At the time, I did not know about Paleolithic deer cults or tundra shamanism.

Later, through study, I recognised them.

Carrying Scottish and Uzbek ancestry, I stand at a meeting point of Western European and Central Asian lineages, both shaped by ancient shamanic cosmologies. Learning about these traditions did not feel like acquiring information. It felt like remembering.

This is why Mōdraniht and the Winter Solstice now meet in my practice.

Not because I always knew. But because I know now, with context, training, and responsibility.

Living Tradition

This is not historical reenactment. It is relationship.

This year, I step into Mōdraniht consciously for the first time. I honour it on the longest night, where darkness is whole, the Mothers are near, and something waits in the womb of the Earth to be born.

I do not claim this as the only way. I claim it as my way as I continue to practice with integrity.