Goddessing: A Goddess / Pagan Blog

Most mornings, like this one, I don't get up early enough to see the Morning Star, but lying awake in my bed, in the Hour Blue, I know she's there.

The Hour Blue, a direct translation from the French "l'heure bleue," is that time of morning (and evening) when the sky takes on a particular quality of light. I think of it as e.e. cumming's "the magical hour when is becomes if."

Many indigenous people know the magic of this hour and use it as prayer time. I was told years ago by a native woman of South America that in her culture their concept of time is radically different from ours, that they measure time by dawn and by dusk, hours when the veils between the worlds thin, a time for calmness and tranquility, for sitting outdoors and reflecting, observing, absorbing, communing.

When my friend J.. "lived with the Native Americans," as she says, they called it the Star Hour. She was taught to be up and out in the Star Hour, saying prayers. "It's especially powerful for healing prayers," she tells me. Since her healing sojourn with the Native Americans, nearly two decades ago, she's been walking her dogs every morning at this hour, and praying in her Native/Christian way.

This summer, the quality of the matinal hour blue was particularly vivid. It reminded me of Folon and the intense blue of his skies, and of those exquisite scenes in Howard's End when first Ruth Wilcox and later Leonard Bast walk through fields of violet-blue wildflowers at dawn, or dusk, when the color of sky and flower is the same and, as with the early spring Virginia bluebells here, there's an excitement in the auric field, an otherworldliness, caused by the colors themselves.

I didn't know if my perceptions of this past summer's vivid blue were influenced by the acuteness of my grief, or by the presence of Venus, lending her light, or both.

Yes, Venus has been our Morning Star since about the time of the Summer Solstice, rising before the sun and therefore visible in the pre-dawn sky. Scientists say she lends two-thirds of her light to earth, and there are ancient mounds in England whose purpose has been determined to be the observation of the Venus cycle, when, at certain times brilliant crystals are lit deep within, not by sunlight, or moonlight, but by the light of Venus.

Though I wasn't out to see her this morning, she rose two and a-half hours before sunrise, according to The Old Farmer's Almanac, but her time as Morning Star is waning, and already you need a low eastern horizon to see her. By about mid February, 2005, she'll be rising so close to sunrise that she'll no longer be visible, no matter the topography. Goodbye Morning Star! I wonder if I'll miss her then, knowing she's not lending her light to morning's Hour Blue?

While she'll be gone for quite some time in her Morning Star aspect, she'll be back among us as the Evening Star by Beltane, if not a bit earlier, setting after the sun and visible in the night sky. Then, we'll call the blue hour crepuscule, twilight, dusk, evenfall, the gloaming -- the time after sunset when there is still light in the sky. In a song from the 40s, a part of my mother's sheet music collection, they called this time of daynight "the deep purple" (a song of lover's regret: When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls and the stars begin to twinkle in the night, through the mist of a memory you wander back to me breathing my name with a sigh.)


Heinz Prammer of the European Society of Arts and Culture has called it "the forgotten hour ... that 'middle kingdom' between day and night which seduces one to relax and be carefree, to dream and let go."

He says we need to reclaim this forgotten hour. I think he's right. We don't have to wait for Beltane or Samhain to experience the thinning of the veils, and we don't have to be in forest or field. That magic is available to us wherever the sky is visible, twice a day, every day of the year, if only we'll slow down enough to perceive it and experience it. A time of beauty, soul-time.

Permalink posted by Sage -- 7:37 AM.

Haloscan: . Blogger: .