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Other Wheels

The eight-spoked wheel is ours, and we love it, but it is not the only way to keep the year, and it is younger than some of the people who keep it. This page is about where it came from, how other pagans count their seasons, and how to find the wheel that turns where you actually live.

How our wheel was made

No ancient people kept all eight Sabbats. The wheel is a twentieth-century creation, put together from older parts with real skill, and we think it is none the worse for that.

The four fire festivals, Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh, come from the Gaelic calendar of Ireland and Scotland, where they marked the quarters of the farming and herding year. The folklorist Margaret Murray argued in the 1920s that a secret witch religion had kept them as its great gatherings, and although her theory has not survived the historians, Gerald Gardner's coven took the four festivals from her and kept them. The solstices and equinoxes joined them in the late 1950s, when the coven decided to celebrate those too, perhaps nudged by Gardner's friend the Druid Ross Nichols, whose order already kept the sun's stations. The names that are not Gaelic, Ostara, Litha and Mabon, were settled on in America in the 1970s. Mabon, as our Mabon page admits, was chosen by Aidan Kelly from a figure in Welsh legend who has nothing whatever to do with the autumn equinox.

None of this makes the wheel less true. A tradition that knows how it was made can go on making itself. Our ancestors did not hand us a finished calendar. They handed us the materials, and we built the wheel the way people have always built them, from what was to hand and what the land asked for.

The Gaelic year

The Irish and Scottish calendar from which the fire festivals come is a year of two halves: the dark half from Samhain to Beltane, and the bright half from Beltane to Samhain, with Imbolc and Lughnasadh as the hinges between. The year begins in the dark, at Samhain, and so does the day, at sunset, which is why we begin our fire festivals the evening before. If you keep only four festivals, keep these four. Many Gaelic polytheists keep exactly these and no others.

The Heathen year

Norse and Germanic Heathens keep a different calendar, built from the old sources and from the farming year of the north. It varies from group to group, but three festivals are kept almost everywhere.

Winter Nights

In mid-October, at the beginning of winter. The harvest is in and the herds are counted, and offerings are made to the elves and to the dísir, the female ancestral spirits who watch over a family. In spirit it is not far from our Samhain.

Yule

At midwinter, often kept over twelve nights, with feasting, oath-making and the honouring of the ancestors. A good deal of what the modern world thinks of as Christmas cheer is Yule in disguise, and Heathens will tell you so.

Sigrblót

The victory offering at the beginning of summer, in mid-April, for success in the season's undertakings.

Many Heathens keep others besides: an offering to the dísir at winter's end, a Midsummer, harvest blóts, days for particular gods. Few keep the eight Sabbats, and it is good manners not to assume they do.

Greek, Roman and Egyptian years

Hellenic polytheists mostly follow the old Athenian calendar, whose months begin at the new moon, so their festivals wander against our calendar from year to year. Among them are the Anthesteria in early spring, when the jars of new wine were opened and the dead walked the city for a day, and the Thesmophoria in autumn, kept by women for Demeter. Followers of the Religio Romana keep the Parentalia in February, nine days for the family dead; the Lemuria in May, when the head of the household walks the house at midnight throwing black beans over his shoulder to buy off restless ghosts; and the Saturnalia in December, when the world turns upside down and the servants are waited on. Kemetics keep Wep Ronpet, the opening of the year, in high summer, when the star Sirius rose before the sun and the Nile began to flood. If you think the Celts had cornered the market in festivals of the dead, the Romans would like a word.

Astronomical dates

The solstices and equinoxes are set by the sky; the fire festivals are set by the calendar. Some witches prefer to keep the fire festivals by the sky as well, on the day the sun reaches the midpoint between solstice and equinox, which in the astrologers' language is when it stands at fifteen degrees of one of the fixed signs. These astronomical cross-quarters fall a few days after the calendar dates.

At the Hearth we gather on the calendar dates, because they are the ones people can plan around. But a few of us light a second candle on the astronomical day, and we have grown fond of a festival that lingers for a week.

The wheel in the south

In the southern hemisphere the seasons run the other way, and most witches there turn the whole wheel by six months: Samhain at the end of April, Yule in June, Beltane at the beginning of November. Many reverse the circle too. In the south the sun crosses the sky by way of the north, so sunwise is anticlockwise, and Australian witches commonly cast their circles that way; some also move Fire to the north, toward the equator, and Earth to the south. Others keep the northern dates and directions, out of loyalty to the books or so as to celebrate at the same moment as friends overseas. Southern witches will tell you that keeping Yule in June, while the shops sell snowmen in the December heat, teaches you the difference between a calendar and a season very quickly. You can turn the dates on this site, and in the table above, to the southern wheel with the switch under Next on the Wheel.

The wheel where you live

The Sabbats were made for the farms of northwestern Europe, and they fit the stone walls and maple woods of New England well enough. But the land where you live keeps its own festivals, and the best witches we know keep those too. Notice the first frost and the last. Notice when the sap rises in the maples, when the shad run up the river, when the fiddleheads come up and when the geese go over. Notice what your neighbours celebrate, and when: the county fair, the first snow day, the apple picking. Write them in your Book of Shadows for a year. At the end of it you will have your own wheel, and it will be truer than any book.