ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
September 29
Michaelmas: The Feast of the Holy Dragonslayer
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Michaelmas has a long and fascinating
history. Unlike several of the September dates this blog has spent the month
untangling, the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels on September 29th is a
genuine, continuously observed Christian holy day, older than the printing
press, still marked on university calendars and legal terms across Britain and
Ireland today. The folklore that's grown up around it over the centuries,
however, is a slightly different matter, and worth separating from the
liturgical fact underneath it…
The date itself has a documented, and
rather unglamorous, origin story. In the fifth century, a basilica near Rome
was dedicated in Michael's honor, with celebrations beginning on the evening of
the 29th ahead of the formal dedication the following day. That single
building's dedication anniversary is the actual reason the Western church
settled on September 29th, not any biblical account of when Michael's war in heaven took place.
Revelation 12:7-9, the passage describing Michael and his angels casting the
dragon out of heaven, gives no date at all. The popular folk belief that
September 29th marks the literal day of Lucifer's fall is a later overlay onto
an already-fixed liturgical calendar, not the reason the date was chosen in the
first place. It's a small distinction, but a real one: the feast came first,
and the folklore about what supposedly happened on it arrived afterward, the
reverse order of how these things usually get told.
The blackberry legend
is the most enduring piece of that later folklore, and it exists in several
competing versions across the English and Irish countryside, which is itself a
sign of genuine oral tradition rather than a single invented source. In most
tellings, the Devil, cast down by Michael, lands squarely in a bramble bush,
and depending on which version a given village told, he then cursed the fruit
outright, scorched it with his fiery breath, spat on it, or stamped it
underfoot in fury, any and all of which were offered as the reason it's
considered unlucky, or simply unpalatable, to pick blackberries after
Michaelmas has passed. (There's an interesting wrinkle worth knowing here: in
parts of England the relevant cutoff wasn't September 29th at all but October
10th, remembered as Old Michaelmas Day, the original date before
Britain's 1752 switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar shifted the
civil calendar by eleven days. Some communities simply kept observing the older
date for their blackberry taboo even after the church's official feast day
moved, a small but telling reminder that folk calendars and liturgical
calendars don't always travel together even when they start from the same
point.)
Michaelmas's civic weight in England and Ireland has nothing folkloric about it at all. It stands as one of the four traditional quarter days, alongside Lady Day in March, Midsummer in June, and Christmas in December, spaced roughly three months apart and historically the dates on which rents came due, servants' contracts began and ended, and manorial accounts were settled for the year. Falling as it does near the harvest and the autumn equinox, Michaelmas marked the practical end of the agricultural year in medieval England, the point at which a manor's bailiff would close out that year's books. The custom of eating a stubble-goose, a bird fattened specifically on the stalks left in the fields after harvest, traces back to at least the fifteenth century, and tenant farmers reportedly presented their landlords with a fat goose in the hope of softening the terms of the coming year's rent, giving rise to the old saying that eating goose at Michaelmas ensured a household would never want for money the rest of the year. In Scotland, the day carried its own baked-good tradition in St Michael's Bannock, or Struan Micheil, a large cake made from grain grown on the family's own land that year and moistened with sheep's milk, offered as a tangible thanksgiving for the harvest just completed.
Michaelmas's angelic dimension runs deeper than a single archangel's feast, too, though the holiday's full name makes that easy to miss. Officially the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, it has also circulated under the fuller title Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, honoring the three archangels named directly in canonical or near-canonical scripture, Michael and Gabriel both appearing in the Book of Daniel and the New Testament, Raphael identified by name in the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit. A fourth figure, Uriel, appears prominently in the older Book of Enoch and in later Jewish and Orthodox tradition, and is recognized by the Anglican Church as a fourth archangel, though he's absent from the Catholic canon that anchors the feast's original three. That quartet maps directly onto a working structure familiar to any reader of this magazine who has ever cast a ceremonial circle: in the Golden Dawn's elemental attributions, still standard practice in most Western ceremonial magic descended from that tradition, Raphael governs Air in the East, Michael governs Fire in the South, Gabriel governs Water in the West, and Uriel governs Earth in the North, the same four figures folk custom sends out to guard a household against the coming dark half of the year now doing identical duty at the four quarters of a magical working.
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily
Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult
Reads... Today, in honor of the archangel at the heart of this feast
day, and the three who share his more formal title, we're recommending a modern
working guide to all four.
By
Richard Webster | Llewellyn Publications
Richard Webster's Archangels,
published by Llewellyn in 2022, takes the four figures this post has just
walked through, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel, and builds a genuinely
practical, contemporary guide to working with each of them directly. Webster, a
prolific and bestselling Llewellyn author with a long backlist of angel-focused
titles, draws correspondences across multiple religious traditions rather than
staying narrowly within Christian angelology, giving each archangel a full
profile: governing element, associated zodiac signs, crystals, essential oils,
and the kind of simple, accessible meditation and ritual work a reader could
realistically start using the same evening they finish the book. The book also
covers a number of lesser-known angels rarely given real space elsewhere,
extending well past the core quartet once the reader has the fundamentals in
hand.
What makes the book worth mentioning
alongside today's post specifically is how naturally it maps onto the
ceremonial quartering this essay covered above. Readers who already work the
four quarters in banishing or invoking rituals, Raphael in the east, Michael in
the south, Gabriel in the west, Uriel in the north, will find Webster's
individual chapters a useful way to deepen a relationship with figures that
often get reduced to little more than directional placeholders in a quick
ritual formula. Webster pushes past that, treating each archangel as a distinct
personality worth actually getting to know, complete with its own halo color,
planetary association, and specific area of aid, rather than a fixed point on a
compass.
This is a beginner-friendly, broadly
accessible guide rather than a deep dive into the scriptural or Enochian
sources behind these figures, and readers wanting the fuller textual history of
Uriel's contested status, or the Hebrew and Greek etymology behind each
archangel's name, will want to pair it with more academic angelological
scholarship. But for readers of this magazine looking to actually work with the
figures behind today's feast day, rather than simply mark the date on a
calendar, Webster's guide is an approachable, well-organized place to start.
(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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