Mabon Intro

The celebration of the Autumnal Equinox, the border between summer and autumn, is known by many Neo-Pagans as Mabon, the name of a Celtic hero from The Mabinogion, a collection of medieval Welsh mythology. In the tale “Culhwch and Olwen,” King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table must rescue the long-forgotten huntsman Mabon ap Modron (a name that means ‘the son of the mother’) from a dank dungeon in the hellish realm of Gloucester, for his special skills are needed in the quest to capture the enchanted boar Twrch Trwyth. Mabon is glad to be liberated from his long imprisonment and soon proves his valor among King Arthur’s men. The hero’s name was associated with the Autumnal Equinox in the 1970s by the American Neo-Pagan author Aidan Kelly while creating a liturgy for a California-based offshoot of Wicca with the somewhat tongue-in-cheek name the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn. As Kelly describes in a 2017 blog post on the website Patheos, he was dissatisfied with the traditional names of northern European harvest festivals and wanted something with some Celtic cachet. He saw a parallel in the tale of Mabon ap Modron, who was kidnapped as a baby, with the tale of Persephone, whose abduction to the underworld represents the advent of autumn. Furthermore, Kelly was intrigued by similar myths of young people being rescued from certain doom, such as the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, and associated them with the autumnal equinox as well. Thus, Kelly chose to name this equinoctial festival “Mabon,” and the name was soon popularized by Oberon Zell’s journal Green Egg. However, Kelly is something of a persona non grata among more traditional Wiccans, so some of them reject his contributions to Pagan ritual.

Regardless, the Autumnal Equinox has long been celebrated as a major turning point, as it is the time when we cross the threshold back into the dark half of the year. In constructing my graphic of the Wheel of the Year, seen above, I searched for an appropriate dichotomy to mark this axis and settled on Hello/Goodbye. In this sense, “goodbye” goes beyond a simple valediction to encompass letting go of old ideas, old habits, old relationships. We find ourselves at the midway point between “heat” and “death,” where we can start the process of unwinding that precedes the coming of winter. “Goodbye” can serve as a theme for Mabon celebrations, as we get ready to retreat to our sanctuaries and turn inward for a period of restful self-reflection—but before we can do that, we need to settle our accounts, tie up loose ends, and ask ourselves, what is it time to let go of?