Wheel of the Year

The Wheel of the Year divides the solar cycle into eight festivals spaced roughly six and a half weeks apart, alternating two kinds of observance. The quarter days are astronomical: the two solstices, kept as Yule and Litha, and the two equinoxes, kept as Ostara and Mabon. Between them fall the cross quarter festivals, drawn from the old Irish reckoning of the year: Samhain at the start of November, Imbolc at the start of February, Beltane at the start of May and Lughnasadh at the start of August. Together they give practitioners a festival never more than a few weeks away, and the wheel is usually drawn as exactly that, a circle with eight spokes, turned by the sun.

In Wiccan practice the sabbats carry a seasonal mythology of the God and Goddess through birth, growth, harvest and death, though the tellings vary widely between traditions and much of modern Paganism keeps the festivals without that frame. Alongside the sabbats, many groups keep esbats, working meetings set by the moon, most commonly at full moon, so the calendar runs on two wheels at once, solar and lunar. The atlas holds each sabbat as its own entry with its own history, because the eight festivals have eight quite different pedigrees, and links them here as members of the single cycle that modern practice joins them into.

Every festival on the wheel is older than the wheel. Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh are attested in early Irish sources as the hinges of the agricultural year; midwinter and midsummer observances are widespread in the European record; and the equinoxes have been marked wherever astronomy was practised. But the eightfold scheme that joins them, every festival kept by the same people in a single turning cycle, is a modern construction, and the scholarship on modern Paganism has traced its assembly in detail.

The historian Ronald Hutton locates the join in the mid twentieth century, when Gerald Gardner's early Wiccan coven, which kept the four cross quarter nights, and the modern Druid orders, which kept solstices and equinoxes, brought their calendars together; by the end of the 1950s the eight festival year was standard in Wicca and spread outward from it.

Some of the names are newer still: Litha, Mabon and Ostara were applied to the solstice and equinox festivals in the 1970s, borrowings from Bede and from Welsh legend rather than survivals. None of this diminishes the wheel, and the traditions that keep it increasingly say so themselves: it is a modern liturgical calendar built from genuinely old parts, and its honesty about that construction is part of the story the atlas records.