The Turning of the Year

The Sabbats are the eight seasonal festivals of the Wiccan and modern Pagan Wheel of the Year, marking the solstices and equinoxes together with the four cross-quarter days that fall between them, the festivals many communities call by names such as Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh, drawn from Celtic and Germanic calendars. Together they trace the sun's course and the agricultural year, and are commonly told as a mythic cycle of the birth, growth, death and rebirth of a god associated with the sun and the grain, and of the changing aspects of the Goddess through the seasons.

The eightfold scheme itself is modern: it was assembled in the mid-twentieth century, chiefly through the collaboration of Gerald Gardner and the Druid Ross Nichols, by combining two older four-festival cycles. Ronald Hutton has documented how the individual festivals draw on genuine folk custom while the complete Wheel is a twentieth-century synthesis.