Happy Lughnasadh! 10 things you might not know about this festival:
What is it? It’s a Gaelic festival which marks the beginning of the harvest season. It’s the first of two festivals connected to the harvest, the other being Alban Elfed, celebrated at the Autumn Equinox.
Lughnasadh is one of the four Gaelic seasonal festivals, along with Samhain, Imbolc and Beltane.
It’s also sometimes known as Lammas, from the old-anglosaxon “hlaef-mass” meaning loaf mass, mass where the first loaf of Bread is consecrated.
Lughnasadh is named for the god Lugh, patron of scholars, craftsmen, warriors and magicians. Lugh is also known as Lugh Samildánach (the Many Skilled) and Lugh Lámhfada (Lugh with the Long Arm).
In Welsh, the day is known as Calan Awst, originally a Latin term, meaning the Calends of August.
It is seen as one of the two most auspicious times for handfasting, the other being Beltane.
The celebration of Lughnasadh includes the ritual cutting of the first grain and an offering, possibly the making of a first meal from it and the ritual eating of it, and dancing. In olden days a bull might be sacrificed. Often the celebrations would take place on top of a hll and in some places there was a tradition of climbing hills or mountains. Some of the latter survive today although they are now seen as pilgrimages. The best known is the Reek Sunday pilgrimage to the top of Croagh Patrick in Ireland on the last Sunday in July.
It’s a time of joy and celebration but there’s an undercurrent of tension because not all the harvest was in yet, and there could still be floods that would wash most of it away.
While generally deemed to be on the 1st of August, if you want to celebrate as the Celts did, you should hold your celebrations on the evening of 31 July or on the nearest full moon.
Some Wiccans mark the holiday by baking a figure of the "corn god" in bread, and then symbolically sacrificing and eating it.
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