Cascadian Yule Gathering

Held annually on deepest Olympian soil, hosting endeavors whose roots reach back through the lineage of ritual performative arts to those ancestors who strove by drum and rattle to something starborne, Cascadian Yule gathers acts of sacral intent from along the west coast spanning the genres of folk, black metal, EDM, soundscape, dance, mythtelling, theater, and beyond—amidst feasting and the jovial reunions of distant tribes of artists, all in honor of the sun who gives all. On this longest of winter nights from dusk till dawn we hallow the Great Star and drink the honey of summer’s tears. 

For eons our antecedents and their kin met during the longest nights of the year, feasting together, holding high the solsticetide torches and chanting back the sun. Might it have been that by their praisings they summoned the very dawns by which we live out our days? For the past twenty solar cycles Cascadian Yule has continued to weave with their thread. These solsticial gatherings assemble our diaspora to raise our glasses and praise by our creativity the divine—a time when we concoct a sacrifice of beauty, don our finery, and find our way overland to the feasting table where we pour our joy over the table of the darkest night. Together we craft a basket, woven of breath and song and dance and summer’s lost dreams: a basket of dark for the sun. We come with our prized treasures soaked in solstitial dark. We come with jewels spilling from our tongues and sacrament in our hearts, to give our gifts upon the solar altar, that the resplendent sun might return. We make of ourselves a blaze to rouse the sun for another year. 

We invite you to join this timeless revelry, to wipe your slates clean and bathe with us in the tides of death’s renewal. At Yule performers and revelers alike reach down beneath the strata into the essence of our being to craft something extraordinary, some magnificent presence of which our ancestors might be proud, and which those same ancestors might recognize as propitiations to that same holy force to which they propitiated, that could again hatch that luminous egg which lies blanketed in Winter’s black. Come praise with us, and dare to imagine, as our ancients did, that our gathering might be laden with such a burden as the movements of the cosmos.

We are granted such a brief passage through consciousness. So few of these solstices during our lives with which to join our separate flares into a bonfire which might wake the sun from his slumbers. 

Come join us in creating the world.