Celebrating Summer's End

Modern pagans celebrate the wheel of the year with eight seasonal holidays-the solstices and equinoxes and the cross-quarter-days in between. The ancient Celtic festival Lughnasa (pronounced loonasah), falling midway between summer solstice and autumn equinox, marks the end of summer and the beginning of the harvest. The Anglo-Saxons called it Lammas, for loaf-mass, after the blessing of bread, made from the first harvest of grain. Today, most pagans observe the holiday on August 1.

The 1990 play "Dancing at Lughnasa" (later a movie starring Meryl Streep) depicts the melancholy that underlies this festival, the sorrow at the end of summer, the sacrifice that comes with cutting the grain.

In ancient times, Lughnasa was also the time of an assembly in honor of the Celtic hero-god

(nasad means assembly). The poet Cuan o'Lothchain wrote in 1007 that the purpose of the assembly was to provide corn, milk, good weather, and peace, and that Ireland will always have song as long as the assembly is held.

At the famous assembly in Leinster, Ireland, which was held in August every third year and lasted for seven days, a poem was written in 1040 to celebrate the fair. This description gives a flavor of what it must have been like:

Three busy markets on the ground,
A market of food, a market of live stock,
The great market of the Greek strangers
Where there is gold and fine raiment.
The slope of the horses, the slope of the cooking,
The slope of the women met for embroidery.

Folklorist Maire MacNeill wrote a book about Lughnasa, looking for clues about the origins of the festival from a variety of sources including a survey administered in Ireland in 1942. As a folklorist, I always look at the simple, earth-based folk customs that persist for the core themes of the holiday.

This holiday has many names, including Bron Trogain, sometimes translated as "earth sorrows under her fruits." Other names refer to customs associated with the holiday like Garlic Sunday, Black Crom's Sunday, the Last Sunday of Summer, the First Sunday of Autumn, Bilberry Sunday, and Garland Sunday.

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