festivals

Celtic festival names

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 7 Comments

Some time back I posted a video about cultural appropriation and Lora O’Brien pointed out that the modern Wiccan and Pagan usage of Sabbat names is appropriated from Irish culture and language.

Gerald Gardner and other early Wiccans did not use the Irish names for these festivals — that happened later. Wicca is not a Celtic religion.

It does seem wrong to lift these festivals out of context. There are other old names for these festivals in England and Wales (the Scots Gaelic has similar names to the Irish Gaelic, but pronounced differently).

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Pagan festivals

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 2 Comments

Pagan festivals (and traditional, Indigenous, Earth-based festivals around the world) are mostly about the cycles of the year. If you were a pastoralist, you had times when the sheep went up to the high pasture and times when they came down again. If you were a grower of crops, your cycle of festivals revolved around when you planted the crops and harvested them. There were times of plenty and times of hunger. Festivals marked the end of one phase and the beginning of another.

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Beltane is coming

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 5 Comments

Everyone’s getting ready for Beltane. In the face of climate change, the Anthropocene, mass extinction, and all the scary stuff, it feels important to celebrate Nature and all its diversity. That does not imply to me in any way that we should focus only on heterosexual fecundity. Nature is diverse, and that includes humans. All acts of love and pleasure are Her rituals.

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