Mabon Reflections

By Kelly Hansen Maher


The autumnal equinox, when celebrated as Mabon, is the second of three harvest festivals. Before, at summer’s peak, we celebrated the first of the three. We blessed the loaf and the sweet corn, we enjoyed fresh peaches and ripe berries. Tonight marks the end of summer and the start of autumn. As an equinox, Mabon is a “hinge” Sabbat, when we continue to enjoy our immediate, golden bounty, but we also start to preserve, can, and store, in preparation for winter.

These days, I’ll be out apple picking. In a bumper-crop year like this, I’ll scoop up dozens of dropped apples and try to keep up with the tree. Birds and insects will pierce the apple skins, expose the seed-stars, and take up the job of passage. This year, too, black walnuts from the neighbor’s tree, enclosed in their heavy green balls, fall on our heads as we leave the driveway. We crush them with our cars and make messes. Acorns are falling by the gallon, and I rake them up, add them to the compost.

The plants have many animal helpers—like us, like squirrels and birds—whose industry assists the release and journey of the seed. Even when we harvesters try to preempt rot and preserve what is too tender to last, we are in good relation with the earth. We take what we can, so that we may nourish ourselves in times of scarcity. But we couldn’t possibly take it all. And so the wheel turns.

Equinox means equal night. The autumnal equinox, specifically, means that night’s minutes, hours will begin to overtake day’s and will do so more rapidly than at any other time of year. The earth, too, shifts from production to storage. Mold, rot, and decay will soon move over our gardens and fields, as we tilt ever closer to the next and final harvest celebration, and the death rites of Samhain.

But tonight, we perch. What if we enact the natural forces of Mabon in our own lives? Earth’s seeds, having reached peak potency, are ready to disperse. Once separated from their parent plants, they will embed anew; but it is a long wait to their next form. What must you cast off from? Also: what carries you? Do you hang on the wind, attach yourself to another’s passage, or fall directly to soil?

Shook loose, we are aloft, adrift, we hitchhike, we migrate. Like the word cleave—which can mean to attach as well as to sever, we can meet the equinox both ways. And then we launch, with the new season, into something else. Just for this time, though, can we suspend, outside of form, and honor the sacred carry?

Lawrence of Etruria

Near the end of his life, the British novelist D.H. Lawrence traveled with his friend Earl Brewster to Tuscany to tour tombs and ruins of the ancient Etruscan civilization. The resulting book, Etruscan Places, published posthumously in 1932, is largely a rumination on the state of Italy under Benito Mussolini’s fascist government, which Lawrence compares unfavorably to the Etruscan culture as depicted in elaborate frescos found within the ancient tombs. However, Lawrence also makes several observations about the Etruscan religion, as he conceptualizes it, which reveal an intriguing sensibility on his part that could be described as Gaean, as it definitely reflects the ideas about Gaean Spirituality discussed in previous posts.

In the second chapter, “Tarquinia,” Lawrence displays a receptivity to the belief in a near-universal prehistoric nature religion, even suggesting that it predated the concept of discrete divinities.

There was never an Etruscan nation: only, in historical times, a great league of tribes or nations using the Etruscan language and the Etruscan script—at least officially—and uniting in their religious feeling and observances…. It is probably to a great extent the language of the old aboriginals of southern Etruria, just as the religion is in all probability basically aboriginal, belonging to some vast old religion of the prehistoric world. From the shadow of the prehistoric world emerge dying religions that have not yet invented gods or goddesses, but live by the mystery of the elemental powers in the Universe, the complex vitalities of what we feebly call Nature (p.43).

In the next chapter, “The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia,” Lawrence picks up the thread again, describing the Etruscan religion as one that saw the Planet Earth as a unified living organism, existing in an animistic universe. People and other animals, while discrete entities, are part of the larger system—not separate from it. Lawrence clearly admires the idea of the living world, Gaea, though he wouldn’t have called it that.

To the Etruscan all was alive; the whole universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all. He had to draw life into himself, out of the wandering huge vitalities of the world. The cosmos was alive, like a vast creature. The whole thing breathed and stirred. Evaporation went up like breath from the nostrils of a whale, steaming up. The sky received it in its blue bosom, breathed it in and pondered on it and transmuted it, before breathing it out again. Inside the earth were fires like the heat in the hot red liver of a beast. Out of the fissures of the earth came breaths of other breathings, vapours direct from the living physical underneath, exhalations carrying inspiration. The whole thing was alive, and had a great soul, or anima: and in spite of one great soul, there were myriad roving, lesser souls; every man, every creature and tree and lake and mountain and stream, was animate, had its own peculiar consciousness. And has it to-day. The cosmos was one, and its anima was one; but it was made up of creatures. And the greatest creature was earth, with its soul of inner fire (p.89).

The fourth chapter describes how classical civilization moved away from and suppressed the Gaean consciousness, replacing the original ecofeminist understanding of the cosmos with a patriarchal, mechanistic system. An integral part of this new system, Lawrence contends, is the concept of hell—a sort of “anti-nature”—which was alien to the Etruscan way of thinking.

The old religion of the profound attempt of man to harmonize himself with nature, and hold his own and come to flower in the great seething of life, changed with the Greeks and Romans into a desire to resist nature, to produce a mental cunning and a mechanical force that would outwit Nature and chain her down completely, completely, till at last there should be nothing free in nature at all, all should be controlled, domesticated, put to man’s meaner uses. Curiously enough, with the idea of the triumph over nature arose the idea of a gloomy Hades, a hell and purgatory. To the peoples of the great natural religions the after-life was a continuing of the wonder-journey of life. To the peoples of the Idea the after-life is hell, or purgatory, or nothingness, and paradise is an inadequate fiction (p.131).

Here we see the same basic ideas later expounded on by late 20th-century Neo-Pagan writers such as Oberon & Morning Glory Zell and Anodea Judith, so the roots of Gaean Spirituality clearly go deeper than the counterculture movement of the 1970s. D.H. Lawrence was responding to the same need for a radically different conception of the cosmos in the 1920s that would inspire the later Pagan resurgence.

Revisionism and Counter-Revisionism in Pagan History

In a 2011 article published in the journal Pomegranate, “Revisionism and Counter-Revisionism in Pagan History,” English historian Ronald Hutton discusses the conflicting narratives put forth to account for the development of modern forms of paganism. A “scholarly orthodoxy” had been established over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, he explains, that held that Neo-Paganism could trace a direct lineage from the pre-Christian religions practiced in Europe in ancient times. The vast majority of ordinary Europeans, it was claimed, defied Christianization and continued their pagan traditions while merely paying lip service to the new religion of the elite classes. Support for this idea was drawn from decorations found in early Christian churches said to represent pagan deities such as the Green Man, the respectful preservation of geoglyphs like the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset, the continuing tradition of Morris dancing at springtime village festivals, the passing down of ancient folk remedies and superstitions, and other perceived holdovers from prehistory. In light of all this, scholars maintained that a continent-spanning nature religion, generally known as “witchcraft,” survived—and even flourished—until being persecuted nearly out of existence by Christian “witch hunts” between the 15th and 17th centuries. After its emergence into the public consciousness in the 1950s, Gerald Gardner’s Wiccan religion claimed an unbroken line of descent from this suppressed witchcraft tradition.

However, Hutton continues, subsequent scholarship could not uphold this view. No evidence of such a witchcraft religion resisting national Christianization could be found, and meticulous alternative explanations and interpretations of the previous suppositions were put forward. Accounts of witch practices taken from early modern trial transcripts were dismissed as inventions of the prosecutors. By the end of the 20th century, the old orthodoxy had fallen apart, having found no one in the academic community willing to defend it. Hutton refers to this scholarly realignment as “revisionism” and goes on to describe how this proved not to be the death knell of Neo-Paganism, for it was able to thrive despite the loss of this historical validation as a thoroughly modern religious movement:

These developments made the foundation story of modern Paganism untenable and opened the way to the construction of a different sort of history for it, which could be based on demonstrable evidence. In this, it was certainly based on older images and ideas, gathered from the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds, but evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to suit modern needs and ideals; which it did very well, thereby explaining most of its appeal and viability. As such, it was no less genuine than any other faith which had undergone a process of renewal and revival, such as Protestant Christianity’s rejection of more than a millennium of developing Catholic theology and ritual to return to what its exponents regarded as ancient truths. (p.227)

Hutton further argues that the collapse of the old narrative was, in fact, beneficial to Neo-Paganism, as it had encouraged a set of antisocial attitudes in its adherents. The legacy of the witch trials inspired “a deep suspicion of mainstream society and a particularly adversarial attitude towards established Christianity” (p.231). Modern-day witches complained that tens of thousands, if not millions, of their forebears had been unjustly executed by Christian authorities with the full complicity of their families, friends, and neighbors. They were thus drawn into unproductive and alienating historical debates that hindered the larger Neo-Pagan community from gaining widespread acceptance. Furthermore, the idea that paganism survived centuries of repression only through the secret rites of “true believers” held back the development of new approaches by placing a premium on initiation and its attendant hierarchical structures, creating just the sort of rules and restrictions that many ex-Christians had turned to Neo-Paganism to escape. Conversely, Hutton asserts:

The revisionist history encourages a greater sense of integration into, and of a common inheritance with, the parent society. Instead of a line of martyrs and embattled tradition-bearers, the immediate ancestors of Paganism become a succession of cultural radicals, appearing from the eighteenth century onward, who carried out the work of distinguishing the Pagan elements preserved in Western culture and recombining them with images and ideas retrieved directly from the remains of the ancient past, to create a set of modern religions…. In this model, Paganism is not something inherently different from mainstream society, and traditionally oppressed and persecuted by it, but represents an extreme, and courageous, distillation of some of its deepest and most important modern impulses. That is precisely why Pagans can regard themselves as peculiarly well positioned to serve some of the most profound instincts and needs of modernity. This model reduces the emphasis on the authority of elders, group leaders, and initiatory lineages and encourages a greater liberalism and eclecticism within the movement, as that movement itself arose from creativity, self-expression, and individual will within the relatively recent past (pp.231–232).

Neo-Paganism, then, is perhaps better suited to modern sensibilities—and modern problems—than any ancient religion. The past, though it haunts us, has fallen away, and I believe we’re better off focusing on the future.

Lughnasadh Intro

Lughnasadh is the name of a major Celtic feast that can be traced back to early medieval sources. It means ‘Festival of Lugh,’ a god who appears frequently in early Irish literature, and was held on or about August 1st, which in the British Isles marked the beginning of the autumn season. In America, however, we find ourselves at mid-summer at this time due to climatic differences. According to historian Ronald Hutton in his 1996 book The Stations of the Sun, this pagan Celtic festival and its Anglo-Saxon counterpart, Lammas, are attested to in official records as early as the seventh century. They were both intended to celebrate the opening of the harvest season, when the first batches of corn were ready to be eaten (pp.327–331). The evidence for how these festivals were celebrated is scant, but the sources suggest it generally involved open-air feasting, hill-climbing, and assorted sports and games, which seems appropriate for the warmest season of the year.

Given that our celebration of Lughnasadh occurs at mid-summer, it makes sense for the theme of our festivities to be “Heat,” the phenomenon that does more than any other to preserve life. The sun’s heat warms the surface of Planet Earth, allowing lifeforms of every description to thrive. The heat of Earth’s core causes the convective circulation that generates the planet’s magnetic field, which in turn preserves its protective atmosphere. Even at the bottom of the ocean, cut off from the sun’s rays, extremophile organisms exist in vents of boiling water heated by subterranean magma. Where there is heat, life flourishes. We can’t imagine life without heat, and this concept infuses our language. We recognize the life-preserving power of heat when we speak of “warm feelings” among friends or of how “hot” an attractive person is. Heat allows us to function and keeps us going when we would otherwise start to shut down. Lughnasadh, then, is a time to celebrate our persistence in the face of adversity.