A blessing, and a calendar younger than it sounds
Pick up almost any introduction to the modern Pagan festival year and you will meet a couple: a goddess of the growing season and a god born, crowned and cut down at harvest. Writing for this site in July 2017, Carol P. Christ described Lammas as the point at which “the young male God identified with the harvest … is sacrificed.” She closed the same post with a blessing that names no gender at all: “As we bless the Source of Life, so we are blessed.”
The eight-festival Wheel of the Year and its divine-couple story were assembled in the middle of the twentieth century by people whose names, meetings and dates are known. That recency is exactly why the wording has been open to revision, and revised it has been, in public and on the record. What follows traces that rewriting rather than judging it.
How the eight festivals came together
In a 2008 study in Folklore, the historian Ronald Hutton traces the eight festivals to two separate modern sources. The solstice and equinox feasts descend from Edward Williams, better known as Iolo Morganwg, who invented four Druidic solar festivals between 1792 and 1826. The quarter days come from Margaret Murray’s now rejected account of witch festivals.
Gerald Gardner’s 1940s manuscript “Ye Bok of ye Art Magical” scheduled sabbats on Murray’s four quarter days. By 1953 his group also kept the solstices, with invocations written by Doreen Valiente, and the equinoxes were added after Witchcraft Today went to press in 1954.
“This situation ended in early 1958, when Gardner’s main coven, based on the northern edge of London, objected collectively to it,” Hutton writes: the members, not the founder, pressed for equal observance of both sets. “Gardner gave way, and in this manner the modern Pagan calendar of eight festivals came into being.” Ross Nichols adopted “the new Wiccan pattern of eight festivals” in the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, founded in 1964.
The familiar names came later. As Heather Greene reported for Religion News Service in 2022, “in 1974, American witch Aidan Kelly claims to have given the holiday its name, along with two other sabbats: Litha and Ostara.” The plain “autumn equinox,” by Kelly’s own account, had “offended his sensibilities.”
Does the Wheel have deeper roots?
The Wheel of the Year as a set of eight is modern, but some ingredients are older, scattered through texts set down mostly by Christian writers.
Four festival names are Irish. A passage in The Wooing of Emer runs through Samuin, Oimolc, Beltaine and Brón Trogaill, glossing the last as Lammas-day. Hutton’s 2024 article in Folklore dates the passage probably to the eleventh or twelfth century, and Lebor na hUidre, written at Clonmacnoise around 1100, holds a copy. Cormac’s Glossary, attributed to Cormac Mac Cuileannáin (d. 908), calls the start of autumn Lugnasad, a festival of Lugh. For Belltaine it describes “two fires which Druids used to make with great incantations,” a medieval scholar’s picture of the past.
Hutton traces the idea of Samhain as a Celtic New Year and feast of the dead largely to “Sir John Rhys and Sir James Frazer.” He finds the New Year evidence “all indirect, speculative, and inconclusive,” and for the feast of the dead “pretty near non-existent.” In Wales, Calan Gaeaf “has no such importance in the medieval literature of that nation,” and May Day, Calan Mai, takes its place.
In Culhwch and Olwen, usually dated around 1100, two men must “fight for her every first of May.” Scottish records use Beltane as a date from 1424, and in 1771 Thomas Pennant wrote that the “herdsmen of every village hold their Bel-tein.” Far older, Newgrange, built around 3200 BC, admits the winter solstice sunrise through its “roof box” for 17 minutes. That is an alignment, not a festival calendar.
The English names come from Bede, who in 725 lists “June, Litha; July, also Litha,” two months, not a festival. April, he says, was named for “a goddess of theirs named Eostre.” She “is only known from one written reference,” notes the Library of Congress folklorist Stephen Winick. Jacob Grimm’s Ostara “was invented in 1835,” and the link to a hare “wasn’t made until 1874.” Mabon is a prisoner in Culhwch and Olwen, with no tie to the equinox. That pairing is Kelly’s.
Women appear here only in fragments. Cormac’s Glossary names three Brigits: “Brigit the goddess whom poets adored,” “Brigit the female physician” and “Brigit the female smith.” St Brigid’s Day, on 1 February, became in 2023 the “first Irish public holiday named after a woman.” The historian Niamh Wycherley cautions that “we don’t have historical evidence that they had an actual goddess Brigid in Ireland.” Bede’s “Modranecht,” “mother’s night,” was so called “because (we suspect) of the ceremonies they enacted all that night.” Modron is remembered only as the mother of a son “taken from his mother when three nights old.”
These figures survive separately, in a line or two of medieval writing, and none is half of a seasonal pair. The couple whose story turns the year belongs to the twentieth century.
Part 2 tomorrow follows that couple into the rites: how the Wheel’s god and goddess were gendered from the start, who was told no, and how practitioners have reworked the words they speak at each festival.
BIO: Myriapath publishes sourced, practical guides to seasonal and spiritual practice at myriapath.com, including a free Next Sabbat date finder for both hemispheres.
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