LUGHNASSADH1 August
On the eve of the first harvest of the year, ancient peoples celebrated. They honored the earth for its fertility and congratulated themselves for a job well-begun. The crops on which these people fed were very important to them. A bad harvest meant a lean year and perhaps starvation during the winter. A good harvest meant plenty for all, and an easier winter. It is easy to see that this holiday was a pivotal celebration each year.
This celebration and the day on which it was held has been called Lammas, Lughnassad, August Eve, and many other names. The sense of the holiday is generally the same from one culture to another. The festivities served two main purposes. The first was obviously to celebrate the efforts the people had put toward the harvest: the clearing of the land, the planting of the crop, the husbandry of animals, the tending of the fields, and the herding of cattle. The second purpose was to call forth from divinity the fortune that would grant them good weather and luck for the remainder of the harvest and the winter. These two goals are the blend which make up the mystery of Lammas.
Lammas also has great significance in the solar cycle that makes up the modern pagar year, the Wheel. If the year is visualized a Wheel, then the eight holidays, or Sabbats, make up the spokes. Mythically, the God is born on Yule, is a young boy at Imbolc, and a teen during Oestara. Beltane marks the God's emergence into manhood, and Litha is the time of his climactic power. When Lammas arrives the people are bringing in the first harvest of the summer. As the God watches over the land and sees the crops being brought in, he faces his mortality. Mabon will see him readying for his death, and at Samhain he will leave this world, only to be reborn again on Yule. Thus is the cycle of the Wheel.
At the time of planting, in the spring, the God is coming into existence as a physical being. As the crops grow and mature, the God mirrors this developement. Litha marks the high point of the sun's power. As the God wanes in power, his strength is exchanged into the bounty of the fields. The harvest of the crops allows the people to take the God's strength, his sacrifice, and use it to power their own growth and lives.
The harvest has great power, as it is the culmination of the hopes and desires of the past season. This is the time of anticipation and planning. All too soon winter will be here. This preparation for the dark seasons to come takes many forms. The people begin to put away seeds for the planting that is to occur next year. They put away dreams and desires in the hopes that these, too, will flourish and grow, like the crops in the fields. They bask in the waning strength of the sun, taking in his strength to sustain them in the trials to come.
Modern pagans celebrate Lammas as anticipation: of the reaping of our efforts, of the end of the year, and of the year to come. With all of the fears, hopes, and dreams of what is to come, we see all sorts of possibilities. We work towards our goals, and the harvest is a culmination of our efforts during the past year. During the holiday we allow ourselves to voice our fears and ask that they be taken away from us. Once free of our fears we are able to look objectively at the harvest and see the rewards of our efforts. The harvest not only feeds us both literally and figuratively, through the satisfaction of seeing our work come to fruit, but it also provides us with the seeds for the coming year. These seeds, seeds of thoughts, ideas, and plans, are given to us to contemplate upon during the dark winter, so that come spring, we are ready to plant those seeds deep within ourselves and the Mother Earth, to prosper and grow and be harvested in the fall. This continuous cycle is just a part of the spiraling dance of nature.
- Sef Uther MacEoghainn, 1997