Discussion of High Days

Samhain:  Samhain seems to come from the Irish traditions, marking the time when the last of the harvest was finally in the barns, the animals butchered.  It marked the turning to the wheel towards winter and the cold.  In a more ritual context, it’s a day to celebrate the dead who have passed over already to the next cycle of the year, with places set at the feast for them to have a meal with their progeny.  Food is abundant, and so there are some similarities to harvest festivals.  However, this is primarily a feast for the dead.  Usually I make an offering plate of the foods we have at our feast and dedicate it to the ancestors who taught me the skills I need to cook the meal and who cooked and provided for the family so that I could be born.  Many neopagans consider this the beginning of the new year. 

Yule:  Yule is my favorite of the high days.  Partly this is because of my youth and the family ties that we had to the traditions of this holiday, and partly it’s because it’s one of the bigger gatherings for my friends.   This importance is a reflection of the importance it seems to have had for our ancestors.  It signifies the darkest night of the year, and so a gathering on that night helped to alleviate the fear that the sun would fail to return.  One of my favorite traditions is that we keep a vigil by our fire that night to lend our strength to Sunna.  There are a number of other traditions that have survived for this holiday, such as the tree/greenery in the house, the ham on the table, and the giving of gifts.  For our ancestors, giving a gift was a strengthening of the kin bond, and showed that you gave of yourself in the hopes that they would survive the rest of winter, and leaving out an offering for the elves/Santa and his reindeer/Sleipnir showed good intent and to encourage the wild hunt to pass you by.

Imbolc:  For me, this is the celebration that Spring is coming.  Some of the groups I’ve been in celebrate it with Breaking Old Man Winter (smashing ice sculpture with a Thor’s Hammer), or Charming of the Plow to get ready for the planting season.  It’s the time when the milk starts to flow on the farms, so there is the beginning of fresh food and hope for more.  While I don’t live an agrarian life, I do see this as a time when I start planning my garden and getting the seeds started indoors, my own offering to the lifestyle of my ancestors.  Even though it’s still cold out, you can feel life beginning to return to the land from the sleep of winter.  This, to me, is the heart of this holy day.

Spring Equinox:  I celebrate Ostara for the Spring Equinox.  Ostara brings the quickening of life.  The days are now longer than the nights, and the world is slowly beginning to warm around us.  The snow is melting or mostly gone (not last year!) and the ground is coming back to life.  Many of the traditions of Ostara, at least as best as we can determine, have survived in modern Christianity.  Eggs, rabbits, and flowers were all signs of fertility to our ancestors that have no mention in the Christian Bible and yet are a huge part of modern Easter celebrations.  Ostara is when many animals with shorter gestations come into season after the long winter, and egg production among chickens picks up with the longer daylight hours.  The first greens of spring are available, which after living for months on preserved food is something to celebrate!

Beltaine: Beltaine is a celebration of fertility and love.  For many neopagans, it’s a celebration of sexuality and reproduction.  For many cultures, it’s a time of purification and the beginning of the summer.  Especially in more pastoral cultures, this was a time when grazing lands would change for summer, and protections would be sought before taking the herds to their new pastures.  As this was the beginning of the warring and raiding season as well as the time when animals were being born and growing, the protections were not only around health, but also around security.  While modern pagans tend to focus on the love aspects of the holiday, tradition points to security being equally important around this high day.

In Germanic traditions, the May holiday is focused around magic.  May Eve, or Walpurgisnacht is a night associated with witches, and even today celebrations occur around the Brocken in Germany and is celebrated with huge bonfires, dancing, and alcohol.  In that way, it isn’t really all that different from other pagan traditions about Beltaine.

Summer Solstice: Summer Solstice is the longest day of the year.  In my hearth culture, we gather for a camping trip and toast the summer gods around the bonfire.  It’s a time when we recognize that winter is beginning to close in once more, and we ask for the gods’ blessing on the coming harvest and the growing community.  Because we traditionally have crazy weather at Midsummer (the last three years we’ve had tornados touch down within a mile of our camping spot!), we usually hold a blot to Thor and ask him to be the protector of our people.  Fire seems to be a universal neopagan part of this holy day, perhaps because it is when the nights start to get longer again.  While not part of the harvest celebrations which focus on grain, we are beginning to see fruit and vegetables ripen and swell, showing the fertility of the earth being fulfilled.

Lughnasadah: Lughnasadah is the feast of the warrior and the first of the harvest festivals.  Taking place in early August, about half way between the Summer Solstice and Autumn Equinox.  In other lands, this is celebrated as Lammas or Loafmass, where the grain is harvested and turned to flour and the first breads of the season’s bounty are baked.  After a bad winter, this might be the first grain that has been available for quite some time.  It is believed that the traditions around fairs are some of the surviving remnants of this holy day.  It also encompassed athletic games that were traditionally done to honor Lugh’s foster-mother, although I haven’t found many sources that cite this.  I think it more likely that this was the time of year when young men returned from raids and used the athletic games as a time to show off their newly gotten wealth and prowess with arms.  They may have done it in honor of a goddess, but I feel that was likely secondary to their desire to show off and party as part of their return.

Fall Equinox:  The fall equinox was the end of the harvest season.  The last of the grains were gathered in and people began preparations for the long, cold, winter.  In the Germanic tradition, we call it Winterfinding (because we can’t lose winter!!!), when there begins to be a chill in the air.  The animals are turned out to fatten up the last bit before the slaughter, and the wood is stacked and ready for the coming year.  Now that the farming season is over, it’s time to turn to the more sedentary chores of winter that couldn’t be done in the rush to get the last of the harvest in while the weather was good.  One of the things we celebrate here is community and the relationships between people that keep us sane and healthy during the long dark winter.