Sabbats Out of Season: What to Do When You Live Where the Seasons Do Not Shift
Diana Rajchel
Southern Hemisphere Pagans who honor the sabbat wheel know the problems well: Sweltering while images of snowy Santa Claus overtake the Internet. Staring at dried leaf crafts for altar decoration while spring plants bloom outside. Shivering while reading Midsummer sabbat recipes for gazpacho. For those in the Southern Hemisphere, a simple reversal of the calendar helps: Samhain equals Beltane, and Yule equals Midsummer.
For those of us who live close enough to the equator where seasons either don’t happen or happen very subtly, turning the wheel to the opposite setting does not work. The popular sabbat wheel is based on a four-season model that includes behaviors from deciduous trees that don’t happen as consistently at central latitudes. For instance, in San Francisco, October 31 marks the tapering of the warmest two months of the year. Plants bloom year round. While rain can sometimes divide one half of the year from the other, during droughts there is no division between periods of warmth and cold to recognize.
The living and dying Lord becomes fuzzier when you live someplace where nothing dies on a reliable schedule. People who live in regions with four seasons consciously and unconsciously plan their year around the rest periods offered by the extremes of the hot and cold seasons. Yet when neither intense cold nor intense heat are part of the climate, that inherent rhythm seems to disappear. It doesn’t actually disappear; there’s still a beat and rhythm. It’s just that it comes from a new song of seasons. It can takes months or even years of observation to align your rhythm with that of a new climate.
Look to the Year-Round Eternal Cycles
If you are determined to stick to the sabbat wheel, there are ways to recognize and connect to the wheel energy of the place where you live. Light, tides, and the moon function on their own universal schedule. Local cultures develop their own seasons with related slowdowns and rushes in tune with ancestral and seasonal celebrations. Learning those practices can make all the difference in how you connect to your new home.
The shifting of light may happen at different angles across the globe, but each equinox and solstice distributes light the same way at the same point in time. At the winter solstice, the dark comes early, even in warm areas. As the earth changes angle, the light creeps back month by month, until spring comes and the light lingers later into the night. Connecting to the rhythms of light and dark can help you cultivate an awareness anchored in the sun.
If you live close to the ocean, the tides and the behavior of the seas display seasons of their own. Rough seas tend to happen most during winter months. In North America, December through February sees a drop in cruises on the Pacific and surfers in the water, because the ocean becomes too wild for play. This is a time of caution, just like winter in lands of ice and snow.
To connect to the push and pull of the tide, connect to the moon. Marking time month by month allows you to break down your experience into more digestible chunks. Observing a lunar calendar can ease the mental pressure that builds up when you attempt to add a solar holiday calendar to that mix.
As the earth rotates around the sun, the star patterns change. In the Northern Hemisphere, Orion’s belt shines down during the winter months. Pay attention to subtle changes in the nighttime atmosphere as you spot the constellations.
Observe
Even desert climates have seasons; they just play out in a subtler way than they do in temperate climates. The hard part of learning those patterns is that you must be in them to recognize them.
While building your relationship to regional seasons, it may help to use a weather tracking app and make note of temperature, barometric pressure, and precipitation. In one state, the temperature alone may tell you if you need to turn on the air conditioner. In other areas, humidity indicates more accurately than heat whether to do so.
Allergy sufferers are already intimately familiar with another pattern to track: pollen count. Those with smartphones can download apps that inform users not just of the amount of pollen in the atmosphere but also the types of pollen most prevalent that day. This adds a layer of seasonal recognition by indicating which native plants pollinate at what time. You can further attune yourself to the new reality of a sabbat season by observing which animals mate and when they give birth. The cycles of conception and nascence establish an even more detailed seasonal schedule.
Look within the Mysteries
Each sabbat has at its core an emotional experience, a parallel that links the life and death of humanity to the life and death of plants. We grow, blossom, wither, and die at a different pace than do plants—but we do it all the same. Understanding the emotional core allows you to celebrate seasons of the soul. Meditating on each holiday and its associated myths can help you recognize spiritual themes to practice in your new environment.
Samhain
Above all, this is a time of endings, especially endings of life. This period of time calls for ending old projects, sreaching out to community members for help in tough times, and taking time alone to meditate on your choices and relationships. Reflect on what is eternal—what is the same everywhere, no matter what? Ancestors play a role in this connection, as do stories of gods, taxes, life, and death.
Yule
This season is about celebrating hope and reaching out to your community after a time of withdrawal. This does not mean we deny the darkness in the world—the winter solstice is always the longest night of the year. Acknowledging the pain and hunger that the long night brings for many in the world is one of the motivators for extending a hand to help others.
Imbolc
This sabbat is about seeding both healing and creative energies so they expand into the coming season. Its historical association with lambing season aligns it with the very beginnings of rebirth. Even if no one raises lambs near you, the symbolism can still apply. It is a time to begin projects intended to make life easier, whether that is making candles or seeking improved medical care.
Ostara
While this sabbat is commonly described as a time of rebirth, birthing has often already happened, and this is really a time of emergence for both mothers and their young. People who withdrew during the darker months now shift back to greater social interaction and reaching out to one another. There is a shift from introspection to extroversion, as the soul seeks communal connection. Projects started at Imbolc begin to show progress.
Beltane
Yes, this sabbat is about spring finally starting to blossom and about sex and sensuality. This is a time to look to the things that delight you and to nurture a sense of joy within yourself. That joy can include connection to others, and in more forms than just erotic pleasure.
Litha
This day, when the light burns the brightest, also has a great deal of eroticism attached to it, but it comes with the bittersweet awareness that all things must end. The sun sets a little earlier each day from now until the winter solstice. This happens whether the weather is hot or cold. Look for things that give you both joy and sadness, moments in your heart that at the time seemed like a wonderful forever that ended all too soon.
Lughnasadh
On this day, celebrate accomplishments, projects just starting to bear fruit. The first of two or three harvest celebrations (depending on how you view Samhain), this is the time to consider your accomplishments in life—career, love, children. Look at what you enjoyed cultivating and use this time to weed out what brought you failure, or success without joy.
Mabon
Typically the middle of harvest season, when people clear fields and gardens in earnest, this is a time of assessment and preparation. What in your life can you do without—and perhaps benefit from removing from your load? What can you do at this time to provide a cushion for hard times, such as bad weather, financial difficulty, or sickness? What future would you like to have—and what can you do at this time to prepare for that?
When you move to a new climate, temperatures may feel out of step with what a calendar calls “spring” and precipitation may throw off your sense of night and day. You can change your calendar to reflect the seasons of another culture, or you can simply reset your sabbat clock to focus on the inner experience rather than on external changes.
Diana Rajchel is a third degree Wiccan priestess in the Shadowmoon tradition. She fills Pagan infrastructure gaps with services to people of all spiritualties relating to life, death, birth, and peace of mind. Author of Divorcing a Real Witch and books on Mabon and Samhain, she has written on topics relating to Paganism and the occult since 1999. Rajchel is also an experienced tarot reader, has a lively interest in how American folk magic like hoodoo can apply to modern life, and is fascinated by modern urbanism and how magical lifestyles fit with it. At present, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her partner.
Illustrator: Kathleen Edwards