The Daily: 22 September 2024

Happy Mabon?

Is it possible to unselfconsciously use the Wiccan-derived names for the quarter days? Because I can’t seem to get there. For the third quarter day of the year, they chose a rather obscure deity to name this holiday. I couldn’t say what the Cymric (Welsh) Mabon, or Maponos, the perpetually young Son of the Great Mother, has to do with the middle of the harvest season. Perhaps if you squint in just the right way, Mabon’s characteristics could lean toward equating the young god with Kore, Demeter’s daughter, and so he could be a grain god on his annual autumn return to the Otherworld. But that interpretation is a stretch.

It would be one thing if the holiday had been traditionally named Mabon and anthropology then had to come up with an explanation for this strange appellation. Then you might turn to grain gods (though, to paraphrase House, it’s never grain gods…). But to apply tortured grain god logic to a choice made in the mid 20th century probably indicates that there was no logic — nor grain gods — in the choice. In any case, it feels awkward saying Happy Mabon, when what I mean is Happy Harvest Home. That goes double for Ostara (not a thing) and Litha (a word taken from a Tolkien appendix). The only quarter day name I use is Yule — because that is, in fact, a traditional name for the fourth quarter day in the year, the winter solstice.

To be honest, I don’t always use the NeoPagan names for the cross-quarter days either. I’m not convinced those days were ever called by their Celt-esque names. Take Samhain, for example. In the Romano-Gaulic Coligny Calendar, there was a month named Samonios, which means something like “month of summer”, but that moon cycle began in mid to late May and stretched into June — and there’s no reason to assume that this early summer month was called Samonios anywhere else in the Celtic world nor at any time period other than late Roman Gaul. So the name for the late autumn holiday doesn’t seem to derive from Samonios.

Now, there was a sacred time that in Irish myths that was called Samhaine, end of summer, or in Cymraeg, Calan Gaeaff, beginning of winter, but there is scant evidence that this corresponded to the last day of October. For that matter, October, as such, was not a recognized time period among the insular Celtic tribes nor in the Coligny Calendar. There might have been a Samhaine, but it wasn’t necessarily Halloween, nor does the mythic Samhaine have much thematically in common with the modern celebration. So, for me, that really fun time from October 31 (or from October 1, for some of us) through somewhere around Bonfire Night on November 5th is not Samhaine; it’s Halloween — with special dispensation for All Saints and Día de los Muertos.

In any case, these names don’t have much of a pedigree. The Wiccan calendar is a Wiccan invention — which is not a bad thing. It’s quite a functional ritual year, with eight holidays and thirteen moon cycles to mark the time and give us reasons to gather and celebrate life. But it’s not old and we really shouldn’t be pretending otherwise with silly anachronistic appellations and synthetic traditions that don’t quite fit the days. (Hence this project to come up with a ritual calendar that is a bit more organic — definitely more rooted in my particular place and ancestry.)

The cross-quarter days — Candlemas, May Day, Lammas, and Halloween — do have old roots, but we’re not sure what any of them actually meant to the peoples who celebrated them, though we can be reasonably certain that nobody knew these holidays as Imbolg, Beltaine, Lughnasadh or Samhaine. We can also be reasonably certain that none of these holidays fell on their modern dates since the modern calendar is Roman, based on the sun, and the cross-quarter days were from cultures that followed the moon. Lunar and lunisolar calendars shift, though perhaps observant cultures counted from the mostly fixed quarter days to get to mostly fixed cross-quarter days (in which case they should all be around the 4th or 5th of the Roman month rather than the 1st, but whatever). So maybe… but these cross-quarter days were more about culture and myth than seasons. There were seasonal markers — the ewes began to lactate, the hawthorn bloomed — but these celebrations were not directly tied to the solar cycle. They floated around based on the weather, natural events, and tribal traditions. A rather subjective ritual calendar, as all well-rooted things should be.

One might think that the quarter days — the winter solstice, spring equinox, summer solstice and autumn equinox — being actual seasonal markers, might have been more widely observed. And this is true in deeper time than European history. But for the last millennia in Europe, it was quite dangerous to openly honor the seasons, so we have few stories and traditions and no names for these days. Tellingly, few of those who practice traditional witchcraft, few of those who come from families that quietly passed down pagan rituals and lore for generations, recognize the quarter days. And hardly anyone celebrated the autumn equinox. The one notable exception is the Anglo-Saxon “holy moon” centered on this solar event. But they surely didn’t call it Mabon. Nor even an equinox. We can’t even be certain that they had a word for autumn since many cultures do not. And, whatever they called it, they were celebrating the Harvest Moon, not the fall equinox.

But whatever its name and however it is observed, all across the northern hemisphere today is the autumnal equinox, the day the sun passes the ecliptic on its apparent trip south. (In the south it’s the vernal equinox… so, time for flowers and eggs, not grain gods…) In my part of the world, today is not quite the first day of less than twelve hours of daylight; that’s on the 25th. It’s also not the day that the sun rises and sets directly east and west on the horizon; that happens tomorrow. It is merely the day that the sun has crossed an imaginary line in the sky into the southern hemisphere. That happens today at 8:43am. Not a particularly exciting event…

However, it is a Sunday in late September, and here in New England there are fall festivals left, right and center, with food and newly tapped cider, music and craft fairs and parades, and, my favorite, the pumpkin chucking contest. There is a town in New Hampshire that employs a full-sized trebuchet to toss pie pumpkins into the town pond. There are no prizes for this “contest”, but the pumpkins that fly far out into the water or make an enormous splash never fail to elicit crowd cheers — and the lines to take a turn at pumpkin hurling on a giant siege weapon wrap around an entire block.

We may not have a trebuchet here, but spirits are starting to lift with the cooling temperatures and much less epic weather. This is approximately what an average fall used to be. (We keep wondering how we’re going to be paying for this…) Still, it is the middle of fall, the reason people choose to live in New England. Fall is a fetish in this part of the world, for obvious reasons. New England has absolutely arresting fall foliage. The combination of sunshine yellow birches and maples that range from outrageous orange to fire engine red against a background of deep green pines and nearly black firs is unmatched – even in years like this one when the colors are tempered by brown and rust. It seems that we won’t get the full autumnal palette this year, but it’s still beautiful. Maybe a bit melancholy, but that’s what autumn is after all.

Another reason to especially love fall is that New England’s harvest is heavily skewed to the autumn fruits and veg. We have brief encounters with tomatoes and cucumbers. Melons are a rare treat. But summer is only the appetizer on the full flow of fall foods. Beans and peas tend to be more prolific in the fall. Greens of all kinds prefer the cool weather, but more importantly there is less predation from insects and rodents, heading into October. It is cold enough at night now that most of the bugs are sluggish, and the main leaf-eating rodents are groundhogs who bed down in their winter burrows around Michaelmas. But the bulk of the harvest comes from the long season squashes, potatoes, and the autumn apples and pears – which are also a rainbow of warm autumnal color — and all that is ripe right now!

So we love fall. This is a season of gorgeous opulence. But even in a good year, there is a nervous edge to New England autumn celebrations, a frenetic note jangling underneath the joy — a season of squirrels on caffeine — because fall leads into winter, and that means something in this part of the world. For the next five or six months, we can expect deadly cold, deep snow, and a prodigious number of ways to be cut off from all contact with the world. Power outages, and the resultant loss in communications, happen regularly. Deliveries of food to markets or heating fuel to homes and businesses can be interrupted for days. Travel to work or to buy necessities becomes impossible at least several times a month. In New England, the autumn harvest season precedes months of real dearth.

And today we are halfway through fall.

Even in this modern age, in New England, fall is the season of frantic stockpiling. Maybe I should say despite this modern age, as many aspects of our culture put us at a disadvantage when it comes to muddling through disaster. When supply lines and transport distances were shorter, winter was a less fragile time. Today, many of us don’t have space to store what we need, even if we could procure it locally. Yet, in a culture where heat and water are reliant on a functioning electrical grid and food comes from half a world away, even a mild winter storm wreaks havoc.

In Vermont, we have too much experience with winter’s disruption to trust that the modern age will keep the heat on and the food on the table. Those that live by more durable life-ways are rushing to put by enough before winter ends all activity. No less than four of the people I work with, people who work in a bank, I should say, were stacking wood last weekend. One cut her own firewood over Labor Day weekend… though that won’t be ready to burn until this time next year at earliest. There are regular pantry discussions and anxious comparisons, as people try to reassure themselves that there will be food despite the inevitable isolation. For the second autumn in a row, the usual winterizing repair work on siding, windows and roofs is amplified by the extra demands of flood damage remediation. Public Works is also working full tilt to fix roads and bridges and drainage systems before construction becomes impossible and winter, once again, renders the roads impassable. Yes, Vermonters are, once again, worrying away at the uncertainty of sufficiency. In our minds is a constant apprehensive refrain: Will it be enough?… And the terrifying corollary: What happens if it isn’t?

It’s all well and good to take each day as it comes and not worry about tomorrow if you can reasonably expect that tomorrow is not a cause for concern, but all such philosophy falls apart in a Vermont winter. The grasshopper will die. The ants might make it… if they’ve taken advantage of every last scrap of autumnal abundance. And if there isn’t some extreme event that has substantially diminished that abundance, which doesn’t seem to be possible any longer. So Vermonters are trying to convince themselves that they’ve been diligent ants despite another summer of extremities. We are celebrating loudly, perhaps hoping thereby to propitiate the grain gods and their vengeful mothers. But as we cheer the parades and chuck the pumpkins and down cider by the bucketful, there’s that needling unease. Will it be enough? And what happens when it isn’t?

This weeked, to celebrate the harvest and thumb my nose at the approaching winter, I put the cured garlic, onions and potatoes in the cellar. There are two bushels of potatoes and a basket of tiny ones that will go back in the ground to overwinter. I’ve got applesauce in the slow cooker and am making a walnut-plum sauce for winter celebrations. I have to cut back the summer squash and cucumbers that are all limp and mildewed, but the peas are coming up and I’ll be shelling the Lazy Housewife white beans. I roasted three winter squashes and turned them into four loaves of “pumpkin” bread. It is not quite cold enough to need to close the storm windows or turn on the furnace yet, but I have put the window air conditioner away and I’ve changed the furnace filters. Still, being somewhat skittish about sudden frost, I moved the tender perennials indoors, and this is the weekend to toss the summer annuals and fill the remaining porch pots with mums. 

(What I am not doing is holding my Harvest Home celebration. That will be next week, with Michaelmas.)

Today, there is abundance. I have enough, and the days are good. No smoke, no flood. No snow either. It is cool, but it’s not yet cold. The trees are only starting to turn colors. There is still time before winter. Time to put by a bit more of the autumn harvest. Time to plant over-wintering veg for a spring harvest. Soon time to celebrate the Harvest Home. 

And maybe time to build a pumpkin-chucking trebuchet…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024