mabon
The Fall Equinox
Name of Sabbat: Mabon (also called the Autumn Equinox and Harvest Home)
Date: On the day of the autumnal equinox (which occurs on or about September 21 in the Northern Hemisphere)
Pronunciation: “MAY-bonn” (sometimes also pronounced “May-BIN” or “Mah-BAHN”)
Mabon is both a new holiday and an ancient one. There’s no evidence of any specific celebrations of the fall equinox in the ancient record, but there’s plenty of evidence for harvest celebrations, and at least one of them occurred in September and has some Pagan and Witch-like attributes as well. While the word Mabon as a name for the Autumn Equinox has been in use only since the mid-1970s, there are some genuinely old customs associated with the September harvest.
Most of the sabbats derive their names from genuinely ancient Celtic-Irish holidays (Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh) or Germanic/Anglo-Saxon ones (Yule, Lammas). The remaining three were given the names Ostara, Litha, and Mabon by American Witch Aidan Kelly (see chapter 3). Ostara and Litha were inspired by the calendar put forth by the English historian Bede, but Mabon comes from a completely different place. (If Kelly had chosen a name from Bede for the Autumn Equinox, it’s likely that we’d be calling it Halig or Haleg today, his equivalent to September, which translates as “holy month.” 72 )
Welsh mythology tells of a figure named Mabon ap Modron, and he appears in a few of King Arthur’s lesser known myths and in the Welsh collection of literature known as The Mabinogion (which dates from the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, though the corpus most likely existed long before that as oral lore). In myth, Mabon is most certainly a very minor figure and is not associated with the fall equinox or the harvest in any real way. He generally appears as a young man, and some scholars have connected him to the Celtic Maponus, who was a god of youth and was often conflated with the Roman Apollo.73 All of this lines up quite well with the literal translation of Mabon ap Modron, which means “son of the mother.” 74
Kelly himself admits that when naming the Fall Equinox, he wasn’t searching for a historical name associated with the actual event but with a myth that might have been. It was Kelly’s belief that throughout Western mythology there was a tale of a young person being saved from certain death near the fall equinox. Mabon just happened to be the name of one of those young deities saved from an early demise, and Kelly chose it as the name for his holiday.75 How well this all makes sense depends on one’s interpretation of mythology, but there’s certainly no denying the near instantaneous popularity of Mabon as a name for the Autumn Equinox.
Though there was no Autumn Equinox celebration in the ancient pagan world, the British holiday of Harvest Home is nearly equivalent. Harvest Home doesn’t line up exactly with the Autumn Equinox. It was celebrated after a community’s major grain harvest and could occur in both August and September, but many of its harvest customs feel Pagan (though we don’t know for sure when they originated). And customs that were a part of later Harvest Home celebrations can be found in thirteenth-century records, which is just about where one would expect them to be if they were truly ancient.
The most common way of celebrating Harvest Home was with food and drink at the end of a long day of working in the fields. That drink was alcoholic, which might have led to merriment and a party-like atmosphere. Feasting after a successful harvest goes back to at least the Romans in the written record, so this type of tradition is probably to be expected.76 But Harvest Home was about more than just feasting after a hard day of work. It was truly celebratory.
By the English Renaissance, Harvest Home celebrations had grown in size and scope. In the book Travels in England During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, the German writer Paul Hentzer (1558–1623) mentions a Harvest Home celebration in Windsor:
We happened to meet some country people celebrating Harvest Home; their last load of corn they crown with flowers, having besides an image richly dressed, by which perhaps would signify Ceres. 77
An account of Harvest Home from 1710 mentions gifts of ribbons and lace and “rows of pins” for all the children who helped with the work.78 That same account also mentions tobacco and drink for the adults, and dessert for everyone involved. Gifts, drinks, lots of food, a harvest doll to celebrate the occasion—that sounds like a party to me!
In addition to the general festivities that accompanied the harvest, it was also an opportunity to elect “harvest royalty.” Harvest foremen were called Harvest Lords,79 which not surprisingly led to the election of Harvest Queens as well. This type of August/September royalty has more in common with the “queens” elected at county fairs today than with the Lords of Misrule at Yuletide, but it’s still given me fodder for my own Mabon celebrations over the years.
Ways to Celebrate Mabon
For many Witches, Mabon is the harvest celebration. Not only are cereal crops harvested in much of the Northern Hemisphere during September, but there are also tomatoes, sunflower seeds, the first pumpkins, and lots of apples to enjoy. Though not included in this book, many of the Mabon rituals I’ve written over the years have included food. It’s pretty easy to build a ritual around all of the great things taken in near the fall equinox.
For many Witches, Mabon is the Witch version of the Canadian and American holiday Thanksgiving. Relaxed feasting can be kind of hard to do at Samhain (it’s always so busy!), but that’s rarely the case in September. When I ran a Pagan college student group, Mabon was our biggest sabbat celebration of the year. We’d always have a giant potluck dinner, and our feasting was just as important to our celebration as any ritual. Victor Anderson (1917–2001), who founded the Feri Tradition of Witchcraft along with his wife, Cora (1944–2008), stated that his first coven back in 1932 (the Harpy Coven) regularly had meals inside their magick circle on the sabbats. Feasting doesn’t have to be only before or after a ritual.80
Harvest Home celebrations were about more than feasting and drinking. They also included games of skill related to the harvest. In some communities, harvesting that last sheaf of wheat was turned into a contest, with individuals taking turns throwing scythes at it until it fell. While such an activity might be dangerous in a circle, games symbolizing the harvest are often a part of many Mabon celebrations.
In many communities, the last sheaf of grain was gathered up and given both a female form and a name. Often that name was the Cailleach, and just how this figure was honored varied throughout the British Isles. In some communities she was sometimes given a place during feasts, and in others she was used to scare children. If her associations in a particular village were positive, she was also sometimes known as the neck, the Old Sow, the Frog, or the Mare. Where she was feared, she was sometimes called the Bitch or the Witch.81 The Cailleach most likely represented the power of the harvest, along with the coming of winter, and many Modern Witches honor her as the first form of the Crone goddess. The figure identified previously as Ceres by Paul Hentzer (see the quote in the previous section) was most likely a version of the Cailleach.
In addition to the theme of the coming Crone of winter, Mabon celebrations often make use of the theme of the dying and resurrected god. That particular deity isn’t just John Barleycorn; his echoes can be found in several other deities. He’s in the wine harvest presided over by Dionysus and in the myths of the Egyptian Osiris, who taught people how to cultivate their fields and turn their grain into bread before being killed by his brother Set and becoming the ruler of the land of the dead.
Another deity to work with and build rituals around at Mabon is Persephone, who is seen by many as returning to the Underworld on the Autumn Equinox. Rituals featuring Persephone in the early autumn help prepare us for Samhain and the coming changes to the earth. The Irish-Celtic Dagda is another popular deity at Mabon. The Dagda is an agricultural deity and a god of plenty, which is always appropriate at Witchcraft’s biggest harvest festival.
Like its March cousin, Mabon is also a time of balance, when light and darkness are represented equally. Magickal workings focused on balance are especially powerful at the Autumn Equinox. Despite not being celebrated thousands of years ago as Mabon, the Autumn Equinox is an intensely magickal and celebratory time of year.
72. Depending on who is doing the translating, Bede’s “holy month” is generally written as Haligmonað or Haleg-monath.
73. Cotterell, The Encyclopedia of Mythology, 144.
74. Aidan Kelly, “About Naming, Ostara, Litha, and Mabon,” Including Paganism (blog), May 2, 2017, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/aidankelly/2017/05/naming-ostara-litha-mabon/.
75. Ibid.
76. Hutton, Stations of the Sun, 332.
77. Brand, Brand’s Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, 307.
78. Ibid.
79. This can be found in the Thomas Tusser (1524–1580) poem “The End of the Harvest,” as the “lord” led the harvest into the barn with singing and merriment.
80. Kelly, A Tapestry of Witches: A History of the Craft in America, Vol. 1, 29.
81. Hutton, Stations of the Sun, 337–338.