The intensification of agriculture after the middle of the second millennium would have made a careful appreciation of the changing seasons all the more important to the livelihood of the community. Indeed, it may have required an adjustment in time management and the creation of a calendar more designed to meet the demands of the farming year than one relying on the solstices. By the end of the first millennium BC it is known that in Gaul the year was divided into four quarters, Samhain, beginning on 1 November, Imbolc on 1 February, Beltane on 1 May, and Lughnasadh on 1 August, and this same calendar was in operation in Ireland in the first millennium AD. Since it is closely attuned to the farming year, the probability is that the calendar goes back much further and may well have developed at a time when the intensification of agriculture was getting under way in the second millennium. Samhain heralds the quiet winter period when people are at home repairing and making equipment and tending the livestock that are being overwintered. Imbolc marks the time when lambing and calving takes place and the ewes start to lactate, and land has to be prepared for spring sowing. At Beltane cattle are driven through fires to cleanse them of vermin and all the animals are put out to summer pasture. Lughnasadh is the period of harvesting and the preparation of the grain for storage, for turning livestock onto the harvested fields, and for weaning lambs. The culling of the flocks and herds, with the accompanying feasting, probably took place in the days leading up to the beginning of Samhain, when the old year ended and the new year began. This major turning point in the annual cycle was appropriated by the Christians to be the festival of All Saints and is still widely celebrated in its pagan form as Hallow-e’en. The agrarian calendar differs from the solar calendar of the fourth and third millennium, based on the equinoxes and solstices, and is probably to be regarded as part of the great transformation that was taking place in the mid-second millennium (pp. 269–270).
Cunliffe sees in the many ancient stone monuments of the British Isles evidence that observance of the other four points in the Wheel of the Year—the equinoxes and solstices—goes even further back, into the Stone Age. This is the historical foundation on which the modern re-interpretations of Neo-Paganism are based.
I should note that, in his 1996 book The Stations of the Sun, historian Ronald Hutton takes issue with the assertion that Samhain marked the Celtic New Year. He locates the origin of this idea in the work of the Oxford philologist Sir John Rhŷs in the late 19th century and argues that it is based on flimsy evidence and faulty reasoning. Rhŷs’s idea was then popularized by the Cambridge scholar Sir James Frazer, who used it to bolster his own claim that Samhain had been the Celtic feast of the dead, similar to Día de Muertos. Hutton points out that Frazer all but admits that there was no actual evidence of such a festival and that his theory is based on a set of circuitous conjectures.
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