Between Lughnasadh and Mabon:A Journey Round A Circular Calendar.

In the modern world we tend to view life as a linear experience. Something that begins, happens, and then ends. Which is understandable because, in many ways, it's true. Many ancient cultures, however, viewed life as a cyclical thing and that's also understandable. We may grow old and eventually expire but seasons come and go each year with, until recently, fairly predictable regularity. Even in Britain.

While it's easy to get our heads around nature, blossoms, the changes in weather, and the changes in heat modern technology has led to us not being as beholden to these things as most people in history would have been. We have central heating, refrigeration, and, at least until this year, holidays abroad. The changing of the seasons is more about it being too hot, too cold, and enjoying sunsets and spring blooms than it is the very fundamentals of life itself as in the past.

I was back with SELFS (the South East London Folklore Society), online - as needs be right now and was possibly even beneficial bearing in mind the heatwave and my current bout of gout - using Zoom and YouTube, to hear curator and head honcho George's An Introduction To The Pagan Calendar, a Ronseal of a talk that very much did what it set out to/said on the tin.

The centre of the Wiccan religion is not a religious building or a specific person or elder. It's a wheel that maps out the year and divides it into eight different sections, each punctuated by a festival. The wheel was adopted by the Wiccans, and also the Druids, when the Wiccan revival gained pace in the 1950s and if there are beliefs that sound to me a bit phooey they are greatly outweighed by the Wiccan adoption of nature worship and connection to the planet we all share.

Ancient Egyptians and Celts believed that ingratitude was a gateway sin that could lead to bitterness, resentment, pride and self-pity and the Wiccans agreed with this and incorporated in their wheel, a cyclical calendar essentially, a festival every six weeks or so in which people said thankyou to nature, bonded emotionally with the environment, and struck a balance between what they call the male and female Earth energies.

Creating false binaries for energies aside, it's a great idea. We take so much for granted these days. We rush around too much. We don't have time for people and people don't have time for us. These recent months of Covid have given us time to reflect on that and I'm not the only one that's discovered that life is better when slowed down, shared, and reflected upon. It's a not a race to the end, a constant contest of accumulation that's only decided when we finally die. We need to be here, present, with each other, while we still can. We're not immortal. This is our one chance.

The eight Wiccan, or Pagan, festivals that make up the year are Samhain, Yule, Imbolc, Ostara, Beltane, Kitha, Lughnasadh (or Lammas), and Mabon and George took time out to talk us through the meaning of each one, the way it's celebrated in various regions, and how it's been adopted and adapted into our modern lives, often syncretically with the imported religion of Christianity.

Samhain takes places on October 31st, summer's end. The Celtic year is/was divided into a dark half and a light half and the year begins not at midnight or at sunrise but at sunset on the last light day of the year. To celebrate the start of the year, roughly half-four in the afternoon, people communed with the spirits of the dead for guidance in the coming year and, in Ireland, week long feasts were held.

With Irish migration these festivals arrived in the Scottish highlands and then Wales where Samhain took the name Calan Gaeaf. Elsewhere some called it Goblin Night and, you'll not be surprised to read, Hallowe'en grew out of Goblin Night (mixed with many other influences). The fires that were lit to celebrate Samhain, some opine, are a possible influence on bonfire night long before Guy Fawkes ever existed.

Brilliantly, for fans of a A Mighty Wind, nuts were named too. They were given the names of young lovers and placed on fires. Their behaviour in the flames was seen as an indicator as to whether or not the union of these lovers had a future or was doomed. In the north of England, Samhain became 'mischief night' and pranks were performed in attempt to create chaos that could, the next day, be restored by order. It was also held that spirits would cross the land during Samhain using the ancient Watling Street that demarcated the South Western border of the Danelaw.

Danelaw crops up again in the next festival of the season - Yule. Which you'll (see what I did there) surely recognise. The word Yule, however, predates Christmas and was predominantly used in parts of Britain that lived under the Danelaw. The Yule festival celebrates the winter solstice (solstice meaning 'sun stands still') which takes place on the shortest day and longest night of the year.

Prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge and Newgrange were built with winter solstice alignments and celebrations involved feasting and much drinking of ale - which hasn't changed much! Carols were sung, trees were decorated, aqnd Yule logs were chopped all long before Christmas was ever celebrated in Britain. Less celebrated now but a big deal for Wiccans was the victory of the oak king over his brother and rival, the holly king.

These warring siblings seemed to exchange control of the Pagan world in an eternal and endless battle. The Wiccan sun god, also - it is held, is reborn each Yule but has to wait until summer before he reaches his full power. For now, it is time for him to take sustenance.

Imbolc, on February 2nd, celebrates rebirth, purity, fertility, and hope. Ewes would commence lactation and be moved to higher pastures, daffodils and crocuses would start to appear, and woodland animals would come out of hibernation. In Ireland it is celebrated as St Brigid's Day and, before the 7c, Brigid was a more important and popular saint in Ireland than even Patrick. Imbolc is also celebrated in North America where they call it Groundhog Day.

The spring equinox (when day and night is of equal length) is celebrated between March 19th and the 23rd and is known by Wiccans as Ostara. Some believe a goddess figure called Aosta emerges from hibernation and is impregnated by the sun god (who's clearly got some 'sustenance' by this point) but those of less fanciful inclinations celebrate Ostara as the time where infancy moves towards maturity, where trees and shrubs bloom, the grass 'wakes up', and being outside starts to actually become pleasant again. Druids used to celebrate Ostara by painting eggs and this continued when early Christians converted Ostara into what we now call Easter.

The start of the light half of the year comes on May 1st with the festival of Beltane, or - if you prefer - Walpurgis Night. In Ireland and Scotland the emphasis of the celebrations are fire (it's seen as good luck to jump over a bonfire on Beltane) but in England and Wales where, perhaps, it's already warm enough the focus is on maypoles. Contradicting Lisa Knapp's talk for SELFS last May, the maypole was referred to as a phallic symbol.

Equally disputatious is the belief that fairies appeared on Beltane and though a minority of them were kind fairies, many set about causing mischief. To ward them off cleansing rituals were performed using rowan branches. More positively, Beltane is often the date for Wiccan wedding ceremonies and also when the May Queen is crowned with garlands.

To the summer solstice, the longest day and the shortest night, and the festival known as Litha that takes place between the 20th and the 22nd of June. A celebration of the light and the warmth of the sun and one you'd think might not require a bonfire. But of course fires are lit to celebrate. It's hard to escape the thought that many of these events are thinly veiled excuses for blatant pyromania.

When Litha celebrants are not setting fire to whatever's at hand they're engaging in more wholesome activity like gathering wild herbs for both medicine and 'magic'. In Wales Litha is often called Gathering Day. Supernatural entities that had been awakened at Beltane reach their full strength and the oak king is ceremonially burned alive (every single year, that's got to smart) as the holly king's shift begins.

On August 1st, Lughnasadh (or Lammas), the first of the 'harvest' festivals takes place and communities get together to reap and bake cereals into bread. Some of the more psychedelically minded of them may indulge in the mouldy rye of the bread and its rumoured lysergic properties. It was considered dangerous to hunt at this time of year as many animals were "in rut" so if you wanted to trip your nuts off on mouldy old dough you had plenty of spare time for it.

For those less inclined towards recreational drugs a kind of Pagan Olympics took place that included wrestling, fencing, boxing, archery, and horse racing but it wasn't all good times at Lammas. John Barleycorn, the folk personification of both barley and the booze made from it, suffered indignities and died each year at this time and even the power of the Gods began to wane.

In Mabon (September 21st - 24th), the autumn equinox, a chill in the evening air is taken as a sign that God is making his exit ready to die during Samhain in a few weeks time. The harvest is done by the moon (hence the term harvest moon) and there seems to be very little celebration actually going on. No mention of bonfires, maypoles, fairies, halluncinatory bread, or even feasting.

But not to worry because soon the cycle will repeat itself again and the fun times will be back. There's obviously an element of breaking up what would have been tough hardscrabble lives with regular celebrations and get togethers but there's also an element of taking stock of life and taking time out to appreciate nature and how it affects everything in our life and much of it, if you take the oak king, holly king, sun god, and fairies as allegories and stories to tell rather than literal truths, makes a lot of sense.

It made me think about the TADS walks me and my friends do. On a normal year (which this one most definitely isn't) we'd do nine of them (with one two-dayer) and I've started to see them as a chance to look differently at life and nature as well as a chance to spend quality time with friends and take stock of our surroundings and situations. I don't think I'm quite ready to start converting TADS into a religion or belief system but I totally get the value of these pre-arranged get togethers. It's easy to let friendships slide and life in later years can be long and lonely for many.

I feel hugely privileged that I've got the sort of friends that won't let that kind of thing happen and, hopefully, I'm managing to resist that gateway sin of ingratitude by being thankful, both in these blogs and in real life - same thing for me really, about that situation. I'm also thankful to groups like SELFS for putting together these always life affirming talks and this was up there with the very best of them.

The Q&A touched on Avebury, song collector Albert Lloyd, Robert Graves, The Ridgeway, the band Traffic, and (of course) Crossbones Burial Ground and there were asides in the main body of the talk about Ronald Hutton, wassailing, Celtic water worship rituals, rogation, the Morrigan, Persephone, and Bloomsbury's Pagan Pride parades that I couldn't easily fit into my account.

Next month's talk is specifically about harvest festivals and then, in October, there's one about wolves and werewolves and, already, I'm looking forward to them. Although not quite as much as I'm looking forward to getting together with my friends, walking in the countryside, bonding with nature and each other, and, of course, just a little bit of feasting and ale drinking. Happy Mabon for next month everybody.