August

Sextilis, the sixth month of the year that began in March, followed Caesar's July into imperial hands in 8 BCE, when the senate decreed that it should bear the name of Augustus. The decree, which the later writer Macrobius preserves, gave its reasons: in this month Augustus had entered his first consulship, celebrated three triumphs, and ended the civil wars with the fall of Alexandria, so the month was judged most fortunate to him and to Rome. Unlike the emperors who came after, whose renamed months died with them, Augustus had chosen a month genuinely woven through his own history, and the name held.

A famous story says he also lengthened it, stealing a day from February so that his month would not be shorter than Caesar's July. The tale first appears in the thirteenth century schoolbook of Johannes de Sacrobosco and modern scholarship rejects it: the old Sextilis of the republican calendar had twenty nine days, Julius Caesar's reform had already raised it to thirty one two decades before the renaming, and February's length was fixed by the same reform. The legend survives because it is tidy, but the calendar it describes never existed.

Roman August itself was a working month of harvest festivals: the Portunalia, the Consualia of the storing of grain, the Volcanalia of the twenty third when the destructive fire of the god Vulcan was asked to spare the full granaries, and the Opiconsivia of plenty at the month's end, a sequence that reads as one long negotiation with the gathered year.

Sources Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price with The Oxford Companion to the Year: An Exploration of Calendar Customs and Time-ReckoningBonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens

The fifteenth of August is the heaviest single date in the month's religious calendar. The Catholic Church keeps it as the Assumption of Mary, the taking of the Virgin body and soul into heaven, defined as dogma by Pius XII in 1950 though celebrated on the date for well over a millennium before. The Orthodox East keeps the same day as the Dormition of the Theotokos, her falling asleep, and prepares for it with a strict two week fast from the first of the month, so that the whole first half of August in Orthodox practice leans toward the feast. Nine days earlier, on the sixth, both traditions keep the Transfiguration, the revelation of Christ's glory on the mountain, a summer feast on which Orthodox custom blesses the first grapes of the year.

August opens with the firstfruits. Lughnasadh, the Gaelic festival of the first of August, was the funeral games the god Lugh founded for his foster mother Tailtiu, and its Christianised English double is Lammas, the loaf mass, when bread baked from the first of the new wheat was brought to church. Modern Pagans keep the day as the first of the three harvest stations of the Wheel of the Year.

In Japan the middle of August is Obon, when the spirits of the ancestors are welcomed home with lanterns, fed and entertained with the circling bon odori dances, and sent back across the water with floating lights. The related Hungry Ghost Festival of the Chinese seventh lunar month falls in August in most years, another feast in which the living owe the dead hospitality at the summer's turning.

Sources The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) with Celtic Culture: A Historical EncyclopediaJohn T. Koch (ed.), Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory ParadigmMark Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli (eds)