"Happy Lughnasadh from Modern Occultist!" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Modern Wicca: A History from Gerald Gardner to the Present"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
August 1
Happy Lughnasadh from Modern Occultist!
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Yesterday this column walked through
centuries of English folk custom attached to Lammas Eve: Old Boggy at the door,
tenant farmers presenting their landlords with the first cut of wheat,
Shakespeare using the date as calendar shorthand his audience needed no
footnote to understand. Today, on Lughnasadh itself, we're telling a much
younger story. The eightfold Wheel of the Year, the structure nearly every
modern Wiccan and Pagan calendar is built on, the one that gives Lughnasadh its
official place alongside Samhain, Imbolc, and Beltane as a “Greater Sabbat,” did not exist in
anything like its current form before the 1950s. Two men built it, largely by
negotiating a compromise between their own competing traditions, and some of
its most familiar names weren't even invented until Richard Nixon was in
office.
The Two Calendars
Legendary Gerald Gardner, the retired civil servant and customs official who had just gone public with the modern religion of Wicca, and Ross Nichols, a friend of Gardner's within the same circle who would go on to found the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids. Their traditions pulled in different directions. Gardner, drawing on Germanic and Anglo-Saxon sources, wanted the ritual year anchored to the four solar turning points: the two solstices and two equinoxes. Nichols, working in a druidic idiom, was drawn instead to the four Celtic “cross-quarter” festivals that fell roughly halfway between those solar points: Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane, and Lughnasadh, the older agricultural markers of the Gaelic year.
Popular tradition within Wiccan circles holds that the two men worked out their compromise during a naturist retreat sometime in the 1950s, a detail that's repeated often enough to be worth mentioning and unverifiable enough to be worth flagging as legend rather than settled fact. What's not in dispute is the outcome: rather than choosing one system, Gardner and Nichols simply combined both, and the eight-spoked Wheel of the Year still practiced today was the result.
That combination produced a genuine
hierarchy that survives in Wiccan practice to this day. The four festivals
Nichols championed, the older Celtic cross-quarter days, became known as the
Greater Sabbats, generally regarded as the more significant of the eight. The
four solar points Gardner favored, the solstices and equinoxes, became the
Lesser Sabbats. Lughnasadh, observed today, sits among genuine royalty within
that structure: it's one of the four festivals with the deepest and most
continuously attested roots in actual pre-Christian Gaelic tradition, alongside
Samhain, Imbolc, and Beltane, rather than one of the four solar markers whose
place in the wheel is a comparatively recent addition, however ancient solstice
observance itself may be in other contexts.
Origins of the Names
Surprisingly, three of the eight
sabbats didn't have their now-familiar names at all until 1974. The four Celtic
festivals had always carried their own established Gaelic and Old Irish names.
The solar quarter days, in Gardner's own lifetime, mostly didn't. It was Aidan A. Kelly, an American Neopagan
writer and a founding figure of the Bay Area witchcraft scene, who sat down
that year to put together what he later described as the first Pagan-Craft
calendar of its kind, and found it aesthetically unacceptable that the
solstices and equinoxes had no proper names to match Yule or Beltane. So he
supplied them himself: Ostara for the spring equinox, Litha for
the summer solstice, and Mabon for the autumn equinox, the last borrowed
from Mabon ap Modron,
a minor figure in Welsh mythology whose actual myth, as the historian Ronald
Hutton has since pointed out, has essentially nothing to do with autumn at all.
Kelly published the names in Green Egg, the Church of All Worlds'
magazine this column has already spent time with in our own history of occult
periodicals, and Timothy Zell's readership did the rest, carrying the invented
names into wide enough use that most Pagans today assume they're considerably
older than fifty years.
Of course, none of this makes Lughnasadh any less worth observing, and if anything, it clarifies exactly what's being celebrated. Today's festival carries a continuous, if imperfectly documented, thread back through actual Gaelic harvest custom, the god Lugh, and the funeral games for his foster mother Tailtiu, material this column covered in depth yesterday and the day before. It didn't need Gardner, Nichols, or Kelly to invent it; it needed them only to give it a fixed place inside a larger structure that hadn't existed before. Gardner himself, in Witchcraft Today and The Meaning of Witchcraft, never actually claimed the eightfold wheel was an unbroken ancient inheritance handed down intact; later writers and later decades did far more of that claiming on his behalf than he ever did himself. That's a smaller claim than “ancient unbroken tradition,” and a more honest one. The Wheel of the Year is barely seventy years old as a complete system. Lughnasadh, the festival turning inside it today, is considerably older than that, and it's worth knowing which parts of what you're celebrating belong to which century.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today’s “Daily
Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult
Reads... In honor of Gardner, Nichols, and every tradition that turned
out to be younger than it looked...
Modern Wicca: A History from
Gerald Gardner to the Present
By
Michael Howard | Llewellyn Worldwide
For readers who want the full story
behind today's piece rather than the condensed version, this is the place to
go. Howard draws on his own decades inside the Wiccan movement to trace its
development from Gardner's Isle of Man museum through the controversies,
rivalries, and quietly guarded secrets that shaped the religion as it spread
from Britain to the world, including the Book of Shadows' own mysterious
origins. Ronald Hutton himself, the scholar whose work grounds most of what's
known about the Wheel of the Year's real construction, called it an extremely
important account precisely because Howard was there for so much of it.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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