Blog
Welcoming the Cailleach
Wednesday 4th November 2026
Mike Mullins
I sit on our steps wrapped in a warm dry robe. There's no golden summer beach, or sea now, just a cold northerly November wind and grey blue clouds scudding across the London sky. Was this the sky the German bomber crews knew in November 1940 during the blitz? (My wife Paula would say that's just a typical thought of mine. Obsessed as I am, like some overgrown adolescent, with the Second World War.)
Individual clouds are now tinged pink. I'm guessing that's brother sun saying goodnight. It's 4.13pm as he heads below the horizon at 4.29pm. It's 10°C but colder in the wind and my feet are chilly.
At this time of year, in the northern hemisphere, the sweep of the sun, the azimuth, a new word I've just learned, is low and narrow. I can honestly say I haven't really seen much of the November sun but he's giving me some flirtatious clues as to where he is.
Brother sun is born in the east and grows old in the West. Passing into a dark, mysterious chaotic world before rising renewed and whole again.
Isn’t that a little like our sleep, full of a mix of dreams nightmares, rest and renewal?
We're losing you brother sun ! Come back, all is forgiven for that sweltering horrendous climate breakdown summer you gave us.
I've been getting into the Greeks over the last few months having read the Odyssey and now the toxic, masculine, homo erotic brutality of the Iliad. The Greeks saw the sun as Helios, driving his fiery chariot across the heavens each day.
And then there’s the Inuit who saw the sun as a woman named Malina, being pursued by her brother moon across the sky night and day in an unending drama of pursuit and separation, separation and pursuit.
The ancients saw the setting sun entering an unseen world of darkness, of mystery, of chaos and renewal confronting the shadow, conflicts and questions and then rising, re emerging resolved, whole and new in the morning.
This idea reminded me of the forest night time pilgrimage, or “palsh” that I ran the other week on Tooting Common as part of Samhain celebrations. We used folklore, poetry and reflective questions whilst walking through darkened oak woods to explore an opportunity, challenge, or dilemma we faced in our lives. The dark the woods mirrored our unconscious, our uncertainty, the unknown, the confusion the fears and yet the potential, the beauty of our lives.
Around me now the once fresh lime green leaves at the back of our garden have turned a golden honey. Some of the bare leafless branches reach up to scratch the grey blue sky, as if trying to claw back bother sun. Stay brother... stay all is forgiven.
The once lush green and rampant wisteria that protected our and our neighbours’ flats from the ravages of the summer sun has now been brutally pruned back in anticipation of spring's purple flowers and a reawakening. It's trunk and sinuous branches laid bare like some ancient dinosaur skeleton left upon a beach
My six sapling oaks have now their golden leaves lost.
Samhain has passed and the queen of winter the Cailleach, hag queen of winter, has re emerged. We're into the dark half of the year. The Cailleach rules the land bringing forth storms, darkness, frost and the stillness of winter. She strips away the earth. The earth withdraws its energy. It's the time of the wisdom of ageing, the time of death, a time of renewal. The great mystics talk of the dark night of the soul, where we relinquish control, give up knowing, certainty and ego.
I notice the Cailleach is inviting me to let go of old friendships, of old work collaborations, of possibilities. I'm giving up my false hope in politics and economics (that they can ever bring permanent solutions to the many problems we face). I'm giving up the idea that one faith is ever completely true, or enough, I'm giving up my old values that honoured, power, influence and recognition. And perhaps most painfully I feel myself letting go of my frail and beautiful old mother as she also welcomes the Cailleach.