These Times: Magical Snowfall
Early morning snowfall through my bedroom window.
For many years in these parts our winters have seen no snow. Instead of the soft shock of the fall, the fluttering whiteness, the transformations, we had grey skies and louring stasis every winter.
This morning, on the day Pluto moves into that wintry sign Aquarius for good (at least for 20 years), it snowed.
It did not just snow a little, but plentifully. Snow whirled down in great flakes, the garden was covered in a soft blanket, the cats gambolled ecstatically, the yellow birch tree, which still has its leaves was frosted. Not only is it extraordinary to see snow in Oxford at all these days; this is very early. I can’t remember an earlier snow here in my lifetime. In fact, I have just looked it up and apparently the last time it snowed so early was 1934.
If only for a few hours, the world takes on a different shape under snow. Ugliness is hidden, smoothed over, smothered by whiteness. Sounds are muffled. It is magical.
Said to be C S Lewis’ inspiration for Mr Tumnus, this is one of a pair of fauns on either side of a door to Brasenose College in St Mary’s Passage. I took the picture this morning because of the snowfall. That’s the Bodleian in the background and St Mary’s Church on the right.
And one reason for that feeling of magic, of the mystic even, is that this is fleeting, ephemeral. The snow never lasts long here. It is a visitation of brightness, a glimpse into another world, a place transformed. The writer CS Lewis was said to have been inspired to write The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by just such a snowfall here in Oxford more than 80 years ago. The first extraordinary image he saw of Narnia in his mind’s eye was a faun, with an umbrella beneath a lamppost in a snowy wood. At that time in Narnia, it is “always winter but never Christmas” because of the terrible rule of the White Witch. One of the first signs that her grip is waning is the arrival of Father Christmas himself.
It’s hard not to see such a change in our mundane weather as a symbol of the cosmic change. Pluto moves at twenty to nine this evening. So here we are in the last few hours before he shakes the mud of Capricorn from his feet and steps into the crisp, cool snow of Aquarius. And here we are offered a glimpse into something new.
The Lord of the Underworld has emerged on to the windy Aquarian mountain top, with a view in all directions — far into the future, far into the distance, over cities and farms, forests and oceans, through time.
This moment, right now, this moment of change is historic. Note it well for yourself. Note the portents. Pay attention to these over the next weeks. And what of today and yesterday and this week. What was Pluto’s parting like?
The landscape is new. The landscape has been transformed like it is by a snowfall.
Already the snow has melted away this afternoon. But there it was, a harbinger of the new world being made.
You can read what I wrote in January about Pluto’s arrival into Aquarius. Much of what was speculated has already started to take shape now.
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