BY Janice Scott-Reeder King
Dear friends,
There are four main Wiccan festivals and four Druid festivals. Just because someone put them on a wheel together doesn't mean they belong there or that they were all celebrated by the same religious or philosophical group.Let's take the four main Druid festivals which are actually the only Druidic festivals. You will notice this because all those honking huge stone monuments are precisely aligned to 4 points of the year not 8.I did not move those stones around to create that fact so don't blame me.They mark what is beginning and ends of seasons as are needed for agriculture. You begin with the Winter Solstice.
What? You thought we were on the Gregorian calendar that wasn't created for thousands of years after these monuments were built? The Gregorian Calendar was introduced in February of 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII. If you plan on being a Druid, you need to use your gray matter. The Winter Solstice is the turning point of the dark part of the year and the days will now get longer. If you survived that long, you had it made. Next you have the Spring Equinox, the point at which the day and night times are equal. Crops need to be planted by this point or they won't have a long enough growing period and will be killed by frost before they ripen. Summer Solstice marks the longest day of the year and is when the days begin to shorten. It is time to plan for winter. You can figure what crops are doing well and plant some winter root crops. Finally comes the Fall Equinox when day and night are once again equal and you should be preparing the harvests. Harvests have to be carefully planned or you have part of your food rotting in the field before you can get to it. Hence you have to know exactly how long the plant takes to grow, fruit and ripen. The entire village normally moved from field to field harvesting based on careful planting so nothing rotted. Each farmer grew what they were best at growing. Not only that but you has annual rainfall events and crops had to be out of the fields before the rains came or once again you had a rotted mess.This is more than seasonally important as most city dwellers do not know. There are long season and short season crops. There are crops that require x amount of light to flower and fruit and day neutral crops. There are summer and winter crops. Knowledge of this allowed the farmer to create a balanced diet for his family and animals. If you plant cauliflower in the late spring, it will bolt or go to seed in summer when it gets hot without producing a food crop. This is why it is a cold season crop. On the other hand, corn requires heat so it grows over the summer. Most greens have to be grown in the spring and fall because summer is too hot for them. It was a balancing act and knowing the exact timing of the seasons was life or death.What you need to note is none of these holidays are associated with a “god”. It was only when someone added them to the Wiccan four festivals did they become associated with “gods”. Your four Wiccan festivals are all celebrations not of seasons but of gods. We start in February with Imbolc which honors Brigit. Beltane shows up in April/May now, though originally it was May 5th and it celebrates the god and goddess of fertility whose names are oddly never mentioned. August 1st marks Lughnasadh which honors the God Lugh, the master craftsman. It is not Lammas as Lammas is a Christian creation. And lastly you have Samhain who never was a god. The October 31st date marks the end of the final harvest and the death of the gods, not the god of death. Wicca is a fertility religion. This is the one Celtic holiday we can actually be certain of and it was adopted by every religion that followed it from becoming on Nov 1st the Feast of the Dead to a couple of days later becoming the Day of the Dead in Latin America when it was meshed with the Mayan and Aztec religions. It has no astronomical significance and hence is not a Druidic holiday.Samhain or October 31st is not the Druid New Year because all Druidic holidays are based on astronomical and seasonal events that occur every year. The Wiccan Holidays are nicely based on the Gregorian Calendar which came thousands of years after the Druids marked out their calendar. Since the Wiccans and pagans previously depended on a lunar calendar with 13 months it is highly unlikely these festivals fell on these same dates every year but were more likely marked by agricultural or lunar events and when villages had time to celebrate.For example I'll use the most under rated holiday, Imbolc or Brigit's Day. Although the Christians hijacked the holiday and Brigit's cross, it has a pagan basis. The original “cross” which comes out looking more like the Hindu swastika that Hitler inverted and stole. In Sanskrit swastika means well being. Oddly Brigit's Cross has a similar meaning as instead of being woven from rushes as it is in modern day it was woven from grain stalks or hay. The significance was you had some precious food either human or animal left from the winter, a few brave plants were peaking through the snow and it was time to celebrate surviving or well being. When the cross is woven from grain, the grain heads tend to droop at the ends of the cross producing a swastika appearance or a wheel, hence the little known designation of Brigit's Wheel.Modern Wicca has neatly meshed all of this together and now it has even more neatly lost the meanings of the holidays in some quarters. In this Druid's logical opinion, our new year or count for years would have begun on the Spring Equinox as that is the start of the growing season. There is no logical reason we would start the year at the end of the growing season or in the middle of the winter or associate it with any harvest as those are variable. Astronomical events are fixed.
