A Witches Bible - Janet Farrar, Stewar Farrar 1981

Lughnasadh, 31st July
The Sabbats
The Sabbats and Rites for Birth, Marriage and Death

Lughnasadh (pronounced ’loo-nus-uh’) means ’the commemoration of Lugh’. In its simplified spelling, Lúnasa, it is Irish Gaelic for the month of August. As Lunasda or Lunasdal (’loo-nus-duh’, ’-dul’), it is Scottish Gaelic for Lammas, 1st August; and the Manx equivalent is Laa Luanys or Laa Lunys. In Scotland, the period from a fortnight before Lunasda to a fortnight after is known as Iuchar, while in the Dingle Peninsula of County Kerry the second fortnight is known as An Lughna Dubh (the dark Lugh-festival) — suggesting “that they are echoes of a lunar reckoning whereby Lughnasa would have been celebrated in conjunction with a phase of the moon” (Máire MacNeill, The Festival of Lughnasa).

Throughout the British Isles (not only in the ’Celtic fringe’ but also in such places as County Durham and Yorkshire), Lughnasadh folk-customs have attached themselves almost entirely to the Sunday before or the Sunday after 1st August — not merely through Christianization but because they involved large gatherings of people, often on mountains or high hills, which were possible only on the days of leisure which Christianity had conveniently provided.

Of the Lughnasadh survivals in these islands, Ireland supplies a veritable gold-mine, partly because, as we have already pointed out, in Ireland rural culture has been far less eroded by urban culture than elsewhere, but also for another historical reason. During the centuries when the Catholic religion was proscribed or persecuted, the Irish peasantry, deprived of their buildings of worship, clung all the more fervently to the open-air holy places which were all that was left to them. So, obeying an urge far older than Christianity, priests and people together climbed the sacred heights or sought out the magical wells, to mark those turning-points in Mother Earth’s year which were too important to them to be unacknowledged merely because their churches were roofless or requisitioned by an alien creed. On such heights as Croagh Patrick, they still do; more of that later.

Máire MacNeill’s book, quoted above, brings together an astonishing wealth of these survivals — seven hundred pages of customs, folklore and root-legend which should not be missed by any serious student of the Eight Festivals.

Who was Lugh? He was a fire- and light-god of the Baal/Hercules type; his name may be from the same root as the Latin lux, meaning light (which also gives us Lucifer, ’the light-bringer’). He is really the same god as Baal/Beli/Balor, but a later and more sophisticated version of him. In mythology, the historical replacing of one god by a later form (following invasion, for example, or a revolutionary advance in technology) is often remembered as the killing, blinding or emasculation of the older by the younger, while the essential continuity is acknowledged by making the younger into the son or grandson of the elder. (If the superseded deity is a goddess, she often reappears as the wife of the newcomer.) Thus Lugh, in Irish legend, was a leader of the Tuatha Dé Danann (’the peoples of the Goddess Dana’), the last-but-one conquerors of Ireland in the mythological cycle, while Balor was king of the Fomors, whom the Tuatha Dé defeated; and in the battle Lugh blinded Balor. Yet according to most versions, Balor was his grandfather, and Dana/Danu was Balor’s wife. (In this case, marriage demoted Balor, not Dana.)

Other versions make Lugh Balor’s son. The folklore of our own village does, apparently; as Máire MacNeill (ibid.) records: “From Ballycroy in Mayo comes a saying proverbial in thunder-storms:

’Tá gaoth Lugha Lámhfhada ag eiteall anocht san aer.’

’Seadh, agus drithleógai a athar. Balor Béimeann an t-athair.’

(’Lugh Long-arm’s wind is flying in the air tonight.’

’Yes, and the sparks of his father, Balor Béimann.’)”

Lugh, then, is Balor all over again — and certainly associated with a technological revolution. In the legend of the Tuatha Dé’s victory, Lugh spares the life of Bres, a captured enemy leader, in exchange for advice on ploughing, sowing and reaping. “The story clearly contains a harvest myth in which the secret of agricultural prosperity is wrested from a powerful and reluctant god by Lugh” (MacNeill, ibid.).

Lugh’s superior cleverness and versatility is indicated by his titles Lugh Lámhfhada (pronounced ’loo law-vawda’) and Samhioldánach (’sawvil-dawnoch’, with the ’ch’ as in ’loch’), “equally skilled in all the arts”. His Welsh equivalent (grandson of Beli and Don) is Llew Llaw Gyffes, variously translated as “the lion with the steady hand” (Graves) and “the shining one with the skilful hand” (Gantz).

Significantly, Lugh is often the patron-deity of a town, such as Carlisle (Luguvalium), Lyon in France, Leyden in Holland and Legnica (German, Liegnitz) in Poland. Towns were alien to the earlier Celts; their first (Continental) towns were for commercial convenience in trading with the Mediterranean civilizations, from which they copied them; for strongpoints in exacting tribute from the trade-routes; or later, as a result of the absorption of Celtic Gaul into the patterns of the Roman Empire. Of the British Celts, a writer as late as Strabo (c. 55 BC — AD 25) could still say: “Their cities are the woods. They enclose a large area with felled trees and set up huts to house themselves and their animals, never with the intention of staying very long in these places.” So by the time the Celts got around to naming towns, Balor had been outshone by Lugh — apart from the fact that a large proportion of the population of those towns would be craftsmen, naturally devoted to Lugh Samhioldánach.

Talking of take-overs — they happened of course with the arrival of Christianity, too. A prime example is St Michael, who was a later form of the Lucifer he ’defeated’. T. C. Lethbridge, in Witches: Investigating an Ancient Religion, has shown how many parish churches of St Michael coincide with places where Lugh, the Celtic Lucifer or ’light-bringer’, would have been worshipped (pre-Reformation churches, that is; post-Reformation churchbuilders seem to have lost all sense of place-magic).¹ And Michael, in magical tradition, rules the fire element.

That Lugh is also a type of the god who undergoes death and rebirth in a sacrificial mating with the Goddess, is most clearly seen in the legend of his Welsh manifestation, Llew Llaw Gyffes. This story appears as part of The Romance of Math the Son of Mathonwy in the Mabinogion; Graves gives Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of it in The White Goddess.

Graves also says (ibid): “The Anglo-Saxon form of Lughomass, mass in honour of the God Lugh or Llew, was hlaf-mass, ’loaf-mass’, with reference to the corn-harvest and the killing of the Corn-king.” The Tailltean Games, held in Ireland at Lughnasadh, were orginally funeral-games, traditionally in honour of Lugh’s dead foster-mother Tailte; but as Graves points out, this tradition “is late and misleading”. The wake-games were clearly to honour the sacrificed Lugh himself. And unless one grasps the meaning of the sacrificial-mating theme, one might be puzzled by the apparent contradiction that an early Irish tradition also refers to the wedding-feats of Lugh at Tailtiu; in a sense, this too is a blurring of a half-remembered story, for he who mates with the Goddess at harvest is already her Waning Year consort. As Máire MacNeill rightly says (ibid): “Lughnasa, I would suggest, was one episode in the cycle of a divine marriage story but not necessarily the bridal time.”

So in Lughnasadh we have the autumn parallel to the Bealtaine sacrificial mating with the God of the Waxing Year. On the human level, it is interesting that the Bealtaine ’greenwood marriages’ were paralleled by the Lughnasadh ’Teltown marriages’ (i.e., Tailltean), trial marriages which could be dissolved after a year and a day by the couple returning to the place where the union was celebrated and walking away from each other to North and South. (Wiccan handfasting has the same provision: the couple can dissolve it after a year and a day by returning to the High Priestess who handfasted them and informing her.) Teltown (modern Irish Tailteann, old Irish Tailtiu) is a village in County Meath, where tradition remembers a ’Hillock of the Bride-Price” and a ’Marriage Hollow’. The Tailltean Fair seems in later centuries to have become a mere marriage-market, with boys and girls kept apart till contracts were signed; but its origins must have been very different.

It stemmed, in fact, from the óenach, or tribal gathering, of pagan times — of which the óenach of Tailtiu was the most important, being associated with the High King, whose royal seat of Tara is only 15 miles away. (MacNeill, ibid.) These gatherings were a mixture of tribal business, horse-racing, athletic contests and ritual to ensure good fortune; and Lughnasadh was a favourite time for them. The Leinster óenach of Carman, the Wexford goddess (MacNeill, ibid.), for example, was held on the banks of the River Barrow for the week beginning with the Lughnasadh feast, to secure for the tribe “corn and milk, mast and fish, and freedom from aggression by any outsider”. (Gearóid Mac Niocaill, Ireland Before the Vikings) “Such deep-rooted traditions could not be jettisoned and had perforce to be tolerated and as far as possible Christianized. Thus in 784 the óenach of Teltown (Tailtiu) was sanctified by the relics of Erc of Slane.” Mac Niocaill also says that Columcille — better known outside Ireland as St Columba — is credited with a bid to take over Lughnasadh “by converting it into a ’Feast of the Ploughmen’, not apparently with any great success”.

The ritual behaviour of the King, as the sacred personification of the tribe, was particularly important. At Lughnasadh, for example, the King of Tara’s diet had to include fish from the Boyne, venison from Luibnech, bilberries from Brí Léith near Ardagh, and other obligatory items (Mac Niocaill). (The bilberries are significant; see below.)

A formidable list of the taboos surrounding the Roman Sacred King, the Flamen Dialis, is given by Frazer (The Golden Bough). Graves (The White Goddess) points out what Frazer omits — that the Flamen, a Hercules-type figure, owed his position to his sacred marriage with the Flamenica; he could not divorce her, and if she died, he had to resign. It is the role of the Sacred King to bow to the Goddess-Queen.

This brings us straight back to Lughnasadh, for Graves goes on: “In Ireland this Hercules was named Cenn Cruaich, ’the Lord of the Mound’, but after his supersession by a more benignant sacred king was remembered as Cromm Cruaich (’The Bowed One of the Mound’).”

Crom Cruach (the usual modern spelling), also called Crom Dubh (’The Black Bowed One’), was a sacrificial god particularly associated with Lughnasadh; the last Sunday in July is still known as Domhnach Chrom Dubh (’Crom Dubh’s Sunday’) even though it has been Christianized. On that day every year, thousands of pilgrims climb Ireland’s holy mountain, whose summit can be seen through our study window — the 2,510-foot Croagh Patrick (Cruach Phádraig) in County Mayo, where St Patrick is said to have fasted for forty days and defeated a host of demons.² The observance used to be a three-day one, starting on Aoine Chrom Dubh, the Friday preceding. It is still Ireland’s most spectacular pilgrimage.

The Sacrifice of Crom himself seems to have been enacted in very ancient times by the sacrifice of human substitutes at a phallic stone surrounded by twelve other stones (the sacrificial hero-king’s traditional number of companions). The eleventh-century Book of Leinster says, with Christian distaste:

“In a rank stand

Twelve idols of stone;

Bitterly to enchant the people

The figure of the Cromm was of gold.”

This was at Magh Sléacht (The Plain of Adoration’), generally held to be around Killycluggin in County Cavan, where there is a stone circle and the shattered remains of a phallic stone carved with Iron Age decorations — in keeping with the tradition that St Patrick overthrew the Crom stone.

Later the sacrifice seems to have been that of a bull, of which there are many hints, though only one which can be specifically linked with Crom Dubh. That is from the north shore of Galway Bay. “It tells of the tradition that a beef-animal was skinned and roasted to ashes in honour of Crom Dubh on his festival day, and that this had to be done by every householder.” (MacNeill, ibid.) Many legends speak of the death and resuscitation of a sacred bull (ibid). And, accepting that Croagh Patrick must have been a sacrificial mountain long before St Patrick took it over, we cannot help wondering if there is significance in the fact that Westport, the town that commands its approaches, has for its Gaelic name Cathair na Mart, ’City of the Beeves’.

But underlying all the legends we have mentioned so far is an older fertility theme, which shines through many of the still-remembered festival customs. Balor, Bres and Crom Dubh are all forms of the Elder God, to whom belongs the power to produce. Along comes his son/other-self, the bright Young God, Horus to his Osiris — the many-gifted Lugh, who wrests from him the fruits of that power. Even the colourful St Patrick legends echo this victory. “Saint Patrick must be a latecomer to the mythological legends and must have displaced a former actor. If we restore Lugh to the role taken by Saint Patrick, the legends at once acquire new meaning.” (MacNeill, ibid.)

In the legends of this fertility-victory (and also doubtless, as Máire MacNeill points out, at one time in the enacted Lughnasadh ritual), Crom Dubh is often buried in the ground up to the neck for three days and then released once the harvest-fruits have been guaranteed.

A sign of the success of the rite is given by — of all things — the humble bilberry (whortle-berry, blaeberry). Domhnach Chrom Dubh has other names (including Garland Sunday and Garlic Sunday), and one of them is Fraughan Sunday, from the Gaelic fraochán or fraochóg for bilberry. On that day still, young people go picking bilberries, with various traditional jollifications, though the custom seems unfortunately to be waning. The forms of the tradition make it quite clear that the bilberries were regarded as a reciprocal gift from the God, a sign that the Lughnasadh ritual had succeeded; their plentifulness or otherwise was taken as a forecast of the size of the harvest. The fact that the two rituals are complementary is still underlined in our locality by the fact that, while adults climb Croagh Patrick on Domhnach Chrom Dubh, children are climbing the mountains of the Curraun peninsula, just across the bay, to pick bilberries.

Another Fraughan Sunday site is Carrigroe near Ferns in County Wexford, a 771-foot mountain on the flank of which our first Irish home stood. Within living memory, large crowds used to gather there for the picking, and flowers would be placed on the Giant’s Bed, a shelf in the rock which forms the summit. (Our Plate 11 was photographed on that rock.) The fertility association is specific in the joke made to us by more than one neighbour — that half the population of Ferns was conceived on the Giant’s Bed; though doubtless that particular ritual has become private rather than communal!

(Incidentally, folk-memories of the magical significance of that little mountain are enshrined in an unwritten local saying, passed to us independently by at least two neighbours, both of whom made it clear they were commenting on our presence there as witches: “As long as Carrigroe stands, there will be people who know.” We certainly found it magically supercharged.)

Throughout Britain and Ireland, Christianity notwithstanding, the May Eve greenwood lovemaking which so shocked the Puritans found its cheerful echo not only among the bilberries but in the Lammas (Lughnasadh) cornfields; on which theme, if you like songs at your Sabbats, Robert Burns’s It was upon a Lammas Night —

“Corn rigs, an’ barley rigs,

An’ corn rigs are bonnie;

I’ll ne’er forget that happy night,

Amang the rigs wi’ Annie”

— is both appropriate and delightful.

The Three Machas — the Triple Goddess in her battle aspect — appear as the triune patroness of the Lughnasadh festival, bringing us back to the sacrificial theme. Another hint is that it was at Lammas that King William Rufus fell to Sir Walter Tyrell’s ’accidental’ arrow in the New Forest in 1100 — a death which, as Margaret Murray and others have persuasively argued, was in fact his willing ritual sacrifice at the end of his term as Divine King and was so understood and honoured by his people. (The nursery rhyme ’Who Killed Cock Robin?’ is said to commemorate this event.)

But what of the sacrificial mating theme as a single concept, instead of as two separate ones of sacrifice and sexuality? Has this vanished altogether in Irish tradition?

Not quite. In the first place, that tradition as it has reached us is mainly a God-and-Hero one, though with the Goddess hovering powerfully in the background; and it has reached us largely through mediaeval Christian monks who wrote down a body of oral legend (albeit surprisingly sympathetically) — scribes whose conditioning perhaps made it difficult for them to recognize Goddess clues. But the clues are there — particularly in the recurrent theme of the rivalry of two heroes (gods) over a heroine (goddess). This theme is not confined to the Irish Celts; it appears, for example, in the legend of Jack the Tinkard, who can be regarded as a Cornish Lugh. And significantly — as with the Oak King and Holly King, these heroes are often alternately successful.

And what is Crom Dubh’s three-day burial up to the neck in Mother Earth, and his release when her fertility is assured, but a sacrificial mating and rebirth?

So, in our own Lughnasadh ritual, we have kept to that theme. When our coven first tried out the Love-Chase enactment of the Sacrificial Mating, at Bealtaine 1977, we found it very successful; it portrayed the theme vividly but without grimness. We saw no reason why it should not be repeated, with modifications appropriate to the harvest season, at Lughnasadh; and that is what we have done.

Because the High Priestess at Lughnasadh invokes the Goddess into herself and delays this invocation until after the ’death’ of the Holly King, we felt it more suitable in the Opening Ritual to have the High Priest deliver the Charge for her; he quotes the Goddess, instead of the High Priestess speaking as the Goddess.

Normally, we like to give an active role in the ritual to as many people as possible; but it will be noticed that in this Lughnasadh rite, the men (apart from the High Priest) have practically nothing to do between the Love Chase and the final ring dance. This is in keeping with the tradition surrounding the death of the Corn King; in many places it was a mystery between the women of the tribe and their solitary sacred victim, which no other man was allowed to witness. In our Sabbat, the men can always get their own back during the party-stage forfeits!

The High Priest’s declamation “I am a battle-waging spear …” is again from the Song of Amergin — this time according to Graves’s allocation for the second half of the year.

The Preparation

A small loaf is placed on the altar; most suitable is a soft roll or ’bap’.

A green scarf or piece of gauze at least a yard square is laid by the altar.

If cassette music is used, the High Priestess may wish to have one piece of music for the main ritual, plus another of an insistent — even primitive — rhythm for her Corn Dance since it, unlike the Midsummer Dance, is not accompanied by chanting.

The High Priest should have a crown of holly combined with ears of a grain crop. The women many wear grain-crop chaplets, perhaps interwoven with red poppies. Grain, poppies and bilberries, if available, are particularly suitable for the altar, with other seasonal flowers.

The cauldron, decorated with stems of grain, is by the East candle, the quarter of rebirth.

The Ritual

In the opening ritual, Drawing Down the Moon is omitted. The High Priest gives the High Priestess the Fivefold Kiss and then immediately himself delivers the Charge, substituting “she, her, hers” for “I, me, my, mine”.

After the Witches’ Rune, the coven spread themselves around the Circle and start a soft, rhythmic clapping.

The High Priest picks up the green scarf, gathers it lengthwise like a rope and holds it with one end in each hand. He starts to move towards the High Priestess, making as though to throw the scarf over her shoulders and pull her to him; but she backs away from him, tantalizingly.

While the coven continue their rhythmic clapping, the High Priestess continues to elude the pursuing High Priest. She beckons to him and teases him but always steps back before he can capture her with the scarf. She weaves in and out of the coven, and the other women step in the High Priest’s way to help her elude him.

After a while, say after two or three ’laps’ of the Circle, the High Priestess allows the High Priest to capture her by throwing the scarf over her head to behind her shoulders and pulling her to him. They kiss and separate, and the High Priest hands the scarf to another man.

The other man then pursues his partner, who eludes him, beckons to him and teases him in exactly the same way; the clapping goes on all the time. (See Plate 12.) After a while she, too, allows herself to be captured and kissed.

The man then hands the scarf to another man, and the pursuit-game continues until every couple in the room has taken part.

The last man hands the scarf back to the High Priest.

Once again the High Priest pursues the High Priestess; but this time the pace is much slower, almost stately, and her eluding and beckoning more solemn, as though she is tempting him into danger; and this time the others do not intervene. The pursuit continues until the High Priestess places herself facing the altar and two or three paces from it; the High Priest halts with his back to the altar and captures her with the scarf.

They embrace solemnly but wholeheartedly; but after a few seconds of the kiss, the High Priest lets the scarf fall from his hands, and the High Priestess releases him and takes a step backwards.

The High Priest drops to his knees, sits back on his heels and lowers his head, chin on chest.

The High Priestess spreads her arms, signalling for the clapping to stop. She then calls forward two women by name and places them one each side of the High Priest, facing inwards, so that the three of them tower over him. The High Priestess picks up the scarf, and the three of them spread it between them over the High Priest. They lower it slowly and then release it, so that it covers his head like a shroud.

The coven now spread themselves around the perimeter of the Circle, facing inwards.

The High Priestess may then, if she wishes, change the music-cassette to her chosen dance theme or signal someone else to do so.

She then picks up the small loaf from the altar and holds it for a moment just above the bowed head of the High Priest. She then goes to the middle of the Circle, holds the loaf up high in the direction of the altar and invokes:

“O Mighty Mother of us all, bringer of all fruitfulness, give us fruit and grain, flocks and herds, and children to the tribe, that we may be mighty. By the rose of thy love,³ do thou descend upon the body of thy servant and priestess here.”

After a moment’s pause, and gently at first, she starts her Corn Dance, all the time carrying the loaf as a sacred and magical object.⁴ (See Plate 13.)

She finishes her dance by standing facing the High Priest (who is still motionless and ’dead’) with the loaf in her two hands, and saying:

“Gather round, O Children of the Harvest!”

The rest of the coven gather round the High Priestess and the kneeling High Priest. (If the High Priestess and the Maiden do not know their words by heart, the Maiden may bring the script and one altar candle and stand beside the High Priestess where they both can read it, since the High Priestess’s hands are both occupied.)

The High Priestess says:

“Behold, the Holly King is dead — he who is also the Corn King. He has embraced the Great Mother, and died of his love; so has it been, year by year, since time began. But if the Holly King is dead — he who is the God of the Waning Year — all is dead; all that sleeps in my womb of Earth would sleep forever. What shall we do, therefore, that the Holly King may live again?”

The Maiden says:

“Give us to eat the bread of Life. Then shall sleep lead on to rebirth.”

The High Priestess says:

“So mote it be.”

(The Maiden may now replace the script and the altar candle and return to her place beside the High Priestess.)

The High Priestess breaks small pieces from the loaf and gives one piece to each witch, who eats it. She does not yet eat a piece herself but keeps enough in her hands for at least three more portions.

She summons the original two women to stand on either side of the High Priest. When they are in position, she gestures to them to lift the scarf from the High Priest’s head; they do so and lay it on the floor.

The High Priestess says:

“Come back to us, Holly King, that the land may be fruitful.” The High Priest rises, and says:

“I am a battle-waging spear;

I am a salmon in the pool;

I am a hill of poetry;

I am a ruthless boar;

I am a threatening noise of the sea;

I am a wave of the sea;

Who but I knows the secrets of the unhewn dolmen?”

The High Priestess then gives him a piece of the loaf and takes a piece herself; they both eat, and she replaces the last of the loaf on the altar. High Priestess and High Priest then lead a ring dance, building up the pace so that it becomes more and more joyous, until the High Priestess cries “Down!” and everybody sits.

The Great Rite is then enacted.

The remaining portion of the loaf, after the Circle has been banished, becomes part of the Earth-offering along with the last of the wine and cakes.