Lughnasadh

Lughnasadh is the Wiccan and Pagan Sabbat marking the first of the three harvest festivals, kept around 1 August, at the midpoint between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox. It celebrates the first cutting of the grain and gives thanks for the fruits of labour; its themes are abundance, gratitude, and the reflection that the harvest is bought by the death of the crop, so that the festival often carries a note of sacrifice, the "sacrificial king" or the cut grain giving its life that others may live. Practitioners bake and share bread from the new wheat, feast, hold games, and reflect on what they have sown and reaped in their own lives over the year.

Its two names point to its two roots. Lughnasadh is a genuine medieval Gaelic festival named for the god Lugh, said in Irish tradition to have founded it as funeral games in honour of his foster-mother Tailtiu, and it was a great occasion of assemblies, fairs and games. Lammas, the alternative name, is English and Christian, "loaf-mass", the day on which a loaf from the first-ripe grain was brought to church to be blessed. The modern Sabbat draws both together within the eightfold Wheel. As the opening of the harvest season, Lughnasadh turns the year toward autumn and toward gratitude for, and reflection on, what has been grown.

Folklorists studying Irish popular religion have long argued that Reek Sunday, the annual Catholic pilgrimage up Croagh Patrick in County Mayo on the last Sunday of July, close to the traditional date of Lughnasadh, continues a much older pattern of communal hilltop gathering associated with the Lughnasadh season, pointing to the mountain's continued association with harvest blessing, its geographic and calendar proximity to the older festival, and comparable hilltop assembly customs recorded at other sites around the same time of year across Ireland historically.

Whether any given individual practice at Croagh Patrick today descends in an unbroken line from pre-Christian Lughnasadh custom, or represents an independently Christian devotional practice that happens to fall in the same season on a similarly prominent hill, is difficult to establish with certainty from the available historical record, and folklorists disagree on how much continuity to claim; what is not disputed is that thousands of pilgrims, some climbing barefoot as a penitential practice, still ascend the mountain every year in the same July and August season the Gaelic calendar once marked as the turn toward harvest, whatever the exact line of descent between the two observances turns out to be.