The Windmill of the Year

A vital role of the shaman is making a comeback. Its secret is found in what I’m calling the Windmill of the Year. In my book The Dragon Whisperer’s Son, each of the eight chapters is set in one of the eight periods marked by traditional Celtic festivals around this Windmill of the Year, as follows:

The ever-revolving Windmill of the Year on Earth below was aligned with the ever-revolving Windmill of the Stars in the heavens above. As Above, So Below, as it is inscribed on the Emerald Tablet. In other words, both wheels were yoked together by the prayers and offerings of the shamans and druids. This is why my Star Song Oracles astrology is based on the live sky sidereal system. Getting both “Saturnic mills” into perfect alignment is the magical key to bringing the heavens down to Earth, in other words, getting abundant harvests.

So let me explain how this Windmill works…

For those who have the eyes to see, Mother Nature reveals Herself as the perfect divinatory system because She knows what’s coming, and so she prepares the growth cycles of her flowers, plants, trees and herbs accordingly. So for example, if your roses are blooming into late autumn and early winter, you can expect a colder summer the following year.

In pre-Christian times, the druidic monks could predict the weather up to 180 days ahead just by observing the world around them. That’s a much longer long-term forecast than our Met Office can provide today despite all its whizzy technology.

By a combination of extensive record-keeping going back hundreds of years and observing the changings signs of Nature all around them, combined with moon cycles and eclipses, the druids could predict the weather a long way ahead, and thus know when the crops should be brought in earlier or when they would be able to get two harvests in a year.

For instance, if there was no sun on Christmas Day but the grass was growing on New Year’s Day and there was poor weather on Ash Wednesday, the druids could bet their shirts on a wet and miserable summer ahead.

Some call this method the Wheel of the Year, but I call it a Windmill because druidic calculations were strongly influenced by observing the direction of the winds on the Solstices and Equinoxes, as this largely determines whether there is rain, snow, late Spring frosts or clear skies.

In particular, the direction of the wind on the Winter Solstice sets the scene for whole of the year to follow. However, in addition, they fine-tuned and adjusted their forecasts by observing the state of play at the following Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice and the Autumn Equinox, on the cross-quarter days such as Beltane, Lammas, Samhain and Imbolc and also on what are now known as saints’ days.

Then their bards and minstrels would create rhymes as mnemonics so that everyone could remember and pass on this wisdom, generation to generation, such as “Ne’er cast a clout till May is out” … and hundreds more.

The only saint’s day connected to the weather remaining to us in the 21st century is St Swithins’s Day. You probably know the old weather saw: “If it rains on St Swithin’s Bridge in Winchester on St Swithin’s Day (July 15th), then it will rain for the next 40 days.” But there used to be many more of these saint days, such as St Hilary’s Day, St Benedict’s Day and St Michael’s Day, which all had weather divinatory rhymes connected to them. The Christians just placed their own saints over our own which were probably originally named after Celtic deities such as Govannon, Gwythyr and Gwyddion. We know Imbolc is associated with Brigit… and perhaps the Assumption of the Virgin was about Arianrhod or Rhiannon?

The point is, though, that all these festival days had a practical purpose – they were the markers on the Windmill of the Year when new observations would be made to fine-tune weather forecasts and thus with prayers, chants, sacred drama and alchemical offerings, strengthen the axle between the hubs of the Windmill of the Year below and the Windmill of the Stars above, so that the heavens could be brought down to the Earth, and bring with them a plentiful harvest, otherwise known as the Land of Milk and Honey.

In my book, you can follow the son of the Dragon Whisperer as he learns, along with bird magic, flower magic, tree magic and star magic, how to operate the Windmill of the Year to perform ‘weather magic’. We can call it weather magic because like all magic, it’s really just a more advanced science and technology which had been lost to us today, but which is making a comeback among more enlightened folk.

Buy The Dragon Whisperer’s Son on Amazon by clicking on the picture below.