Mabon

Mabon is the Wiccan and Pagan Sabbat of the autumn equinox (around 21-23 September), the second of the three harvest festivals, when day and night again stand equal before the dark half of the year takes hold. It is kept as a kind of pagan thanksgiving, giving thanks for the fruits of the "second harvest", the ripened orchard fruit, the vine and the later crops; its themes are balance (of light and dark, held in equilibrium at the equinox), gratitude, and the letting-go that autumn brings. Practitioners share a feast of the season's abundance, with grapes and wine, apples, gourds and grain as symbols, and reflect on what they release as the year turns toward rest.

Of all the Sabbats, Mabon has the most transparently modern name. There is no ancient autumn-equinox festival of this name; the name was supplied in 1974 by Aidan Kelly, who took it from Mabon ap Modron ("Son of the Mother"), a figure of Welsh mythology, in order to give the equinox a Celtic-sounding name to match Yule and Beltane, and it spread through the pagan movement. The autumn equinox as a harvest-home celebration draws on genuine and widespread European traditions of thanksgiving for the ingathering, but the name Mabon, and its attachment to the Welsh myth, is a deliberate twentieth-century coinage, an honest instance of a living tradition consciously making its own calendar.

Precisely because Mabon's origin as a 1974 invention is so well documented and so openly acknowledged even by practitioners, a number of modern Pagans and especially Druids decline to use the name at all, preferring the plainer Autumn Equinox or, within Druidry specifically, Alban Elfed, a Welsh-flavoured term itself coined in the late eighteenth century by Iolo Morganwg as part of his own invented Druidic ceremonial, so that a practitioner avoiding the openly recent Mabon may nonetheless be using an alternative name with an almost equally recent and equally documented invented history.

The disagreement over naming reflects a broader and ongoing internal conversation in modern Paganism about how much weight an admittedly modern coinage should be allowed to carry, some practitioners treating a well used, meaningful modern name as entirely legitimate regardless of its recent origin, since all religious vocabulary was coined at some point, and others preferring to mark the equinox by a name that makes no claim, however loose, to ancient pedigree at all, a live difference of practice and preference rather than a settled convention across the modern Pagan movement.

Others avoid Mabon by reaching for an older English name instead of a Welsh-derived neologism: Harvest Home, a term genuinely attested in English rural tradition for centuries before 1974 to mark the completion of the grain harvest, offers practitioners a name with real historical depth in the British Isles, even though its original sense was tied to the grain harvest specifically rather than to the equinox as an astronomical event.