Harvest Time
How looking beyond a single holiday can build a more meaningful season. It's not too late to make this year's harvest fruitful...
We've finished Lammas, sometimes called Lughnassah, the holiday on the pagan Wheel of the Year that takes place around August 1st. We commonly refer to this time as the first of the fall harvest festivals. We begin with Lammas, move on to the Fall Equinox (sometimes called Mabon) in mid-September, and conclude with Samhain at the end of October.
One might ask whether three harvest festivals are really necessary. Doesn't it seem a bit excessive?
Not when you stop to consider what life was like in pre-Christian Europe. Harvest was terribly important, because winter was long, cold, and there were no grocery stores or instacart.
If you want an idea of how hard this was, take a gander at the new show "Back to the Frontier," courtesy of the Magnolia Network, which pits modern day families against the frontier way of life from 1870, forcing technophiles and instagram addicts to homestead on a farm with nothing but what would have been available to frontier settlers from the time period. I'm not a huge fan of Chip and Joanna Gaines usually. (They single-handedly ruined shiplap as a design element for a generation of homeowners.) And there is nothing in there that hasn't already been done by PBS on their classic "Frontier House" from 2002, and my favorite in this genre, "The 1900 House" which may be streamed on Netflix. But they do a pretty good job of outlining how frontier life differs from modern expectations. Also check out on Hulu "The Food That Built America," which chronicles the rise of modern foods like breakfast cereal, ketchup, frozen peas, and in doing so, provides a really interesting glimpse into how far we've come (and how far we've fallen) in terms of food and health in the 21st Century.
But I digress.
The point is that food and survival were a much different proposition before the invention of refrigeration, the supermarket, and shelf-stable foods. If winter came and you didn't have a fully stocked pantry with plenty of dried meat and preserved goods and other staples stored up, you would be in trouble come January. There were no grocers stocking food just down the street that you could run to if you ran out of eggs or needed some extra potatoes. If you were lucky you had neighbors who could be generous if for some reason your food stores were insufficient to meet your needs, but anything that your neighbors might share with you was coming out of their stores, and left them at risk of going hungry themselves.
A successful harvest season was absolutely critical for your survival into the next year. It's no wonder then, that in marking progress over the course of the Wheel of the Year, so much energy would be devoted to celebrating and marking the progress of the harvest.
As modern pagans, we're busy people. And as 21st Century people we don't have to think about harvest time, really. If we want strawberries in the middle of winter, the local supermarket will stock them. They might be more expensive in December than they are in June, but they'll be available. If we run out of butter or milk or flour, we can pull out our phone, make an Instacart order and have it on our doorstep in a matter of hours. And if, heaven forfend, we don't feel like cooking, a quick trip to the local drive-thru window at any of a dozen or more fast food places and we can have a hot meal in our hands for under $20. We generally don't have to engage in the kind of long-range planning that our forerunners did when it comes to availability of food. Most of us struggle to do meal planning for a week ahead, much less plan for an entire winter's eating. We're strictly short term.
And that can also become true of our planning for pagan holiday celebrations as well. Unless you're the sort of person who does the same thing every year for the same holiday, you're usually not thinking too far ahead in terms of ritual and practice and celebration. With a notch on the Wheel of the Year happening every six weeks, it can sometimes feel hard to keep up. "Crap! We just did Lughnassah and we already need to plan for Fall Equinox? Really?" As a coven leader and priestess, I can almost hear my own voice in my own head. Can't a witch get a break?
But when you decide to look past the end of your nose, that's when you can start to really make a difference in your experience.
The three harvest holidays, when addressed together, and the celebrations of these holidays are planned together, it's amazing what you end up learning and experiencing. Because the three holidays become a progression that can not only inform your understanding of how our forerunners thought of their relationship to nature and the land, but they can transform how you're handling the inevitable stress of this time of year.
The progression of the three holidays looks like this: Lammas, or Lughnassah, as the first harvest festival becomes a celebration of those "first fruits" of the harvest, of that moment when you begin to pluck the ripened fruits from the trees, and the vegetables that have presented themselves, and rather than just eating them straight off the vine, now you have to think about what to do with them. At Lammas you need to start making a plan for the harvest, for what is to come. There are lots of questions at this point, and not all of them have answers yet. How has this harvest been going? What plantings have gone well, and which have not? Are there "volunteers" -- things that have appeared that you never planted, but seeded themselves in your garden anyway? What resources do you need in order to successfully bring this harvest in and successfully lay up enough provisions for the dark season that is coming? Lammas is the time to take stock of what's happened so far on your journey, with the projects you have been working on, and start giving some thought to what must be done to bring it all to fruition, and to completion.
Next comes Fall Equinox, also known as Mabon, six weeks later. Fall Equinox is not only the midpoint between the height of the summer solstice and the deepest dark of winter solstice, it is the midpoint of the harvest season. Fall Equinox therefore is the moment where you are in the thick of the action of harvesting, and you are both doing the most and hopefully reaping the most from what you do. By now you are hard at work bringing in the crops from the fields and the fruits from the trees and the vegetables from the garden. The information is coming fast and furious. You know the answers to all of those questions that first presented themselves at Lammas. You know about how much you're going to take in from your harvest. If you don't have systems in place to harvest everything and begin processing the raw material for being put up in the larder, you're in trouble. There is much to manage, and much to do, and hopefully the abundance is palpable. If you think you might be in trouble (if the harvest isn't as abundant as you'd hoped), now is the time to start thinking about how to plan so as to avoid the worst of the implications of that fact.
Many choose to call this "pagan Thanksgiving" because focusing on abundance and harvest is very much like the American holiday in November, and to the Canadian holiday in October. A feast that celebrates the fruits of one's labors seems appropriate. And it is. It is only part of the vibe, however. That sense of being in the middle of things, of existing at the fulcrum of an experience is also very much a part of what is in the air during this holiday.
We don't often as modern people take the time to celebrate being in the midst of a thing, but there is value in doing so. When life feels like a long, hard slog filled with toil and uncertainty, celebrating the fact that you made it this far can be very important to maintaining the morale needed to finish the job. Mabon isn't a time of completion. Far from it in fact. If we're looking at the season with a real eye to what is happening in nature and in pre-Christian village communities, there is still much to do. Nothing is finished, everything is in motion, and there is very much an open question of will it all be enough?
Fall Equinox is that rare but very necessary thing of celebrating even as we stand in the middle of everything, wondering how it's all going to turn out. In the 21st Century especially, this holiday is no longer a throwaway, or an afterthought. I really believe that in the uncertain times we're living in, the vibe of Fall Equinox is vital.
Bringing up the rear is Samhain, six weeks later at the end of October. Samhain is such a storied and important holiday that we can get into a rut with it. Because it has been celebrated so thoroughly for so long by so many, we think we already know what we're doing here. But Samhain's flavor changes when you see it as the rear guard in the trio of harvest festivals. See, Samhain is the last chance to get things sorted before the darkness falls and the winter rolls in. By now all the crops that can be harvested have been collected. Anything that can be preserved, dried, canned or pickled for future use has been put up in the pantry and is waiting to sustain us through the winter. We've pulled out the winter comforters and sweaters and warm clothing and boots and made them ready.
Samhain is a celebration of the veil growing thin between this world and the next. And it is about messages from our ancestors, in part because we are facing into a season where death is going to become a super real possibility, and where we lean into the survival skills we have learned from those who came before us. We celebrate with, communicate with, and invoke the protection of ancestors because we are ultimately here because of all they did to survive. And we hope to do the same through the long winter ahead. It's a time to celebrate all that we have survived, all that we are doing to survive, and invoke blessings on ourselves to ensure that survival over the long, cold season that is breathing down our necks. It is the celebration of the end of harvest, and the beginning of the dark time.
When you look at these three holidays together, as a trilogy that tells a story that has a beginning, a middle and an end, suddenly things look different, and how you plan your celebrations around them might change as a result. The things that you're doing in August can be carried with you into the rest of the harvest season and the two festivals that follow Lammas. You can begin a work as part of your Lammas celebration, continue building it through the Fall Equinox, and then celebrate its completion at Samhain. Indeed, by doing that, you're using the natural momentum of the Wheel of the Year to create a harvest of a kind. I have always maintained that the Wheel of the Year is a system that works if you work it, and this is only one part of the possible ways to harness the energy the Wheel provides to make a difference in your life.
Even though we are now in the middle of the harvest season, it's not too late to begin using that harvest energy in your own life. Indeed, right now is the perfect time. At Lammas we make the plans, and if we are finding the plans we had at the beginning are not enough to get what we need, we use the time going into the Fall Equinox to shore up those plans. We ask ourselves what else we might need to make our harvest plentiful, and we start to put those things in place. Do we need to trade some of our harvest to a neighbor to get something we lack? Do we need to recruit workers from other towns to help bring in what we've produced? Do we have enough jars to put up all the preserves? Maybe we need to get more? These are questions that you ask after Lammas and as you move into the height of the harvest at the Equinox.
In other words, if you take the long view, It's not too late to make this year's harvest successful.
Blessed be, witches!