Merry Meet and Welcome, beautiful souls!!!!
It's time for the first of the three harvest festivals within the Northern Hemipshere's Wheel of the year, and it's Lughnasadh (also called Lammas). This festival celebrated around 1st August but I believe you can celebrate it within a week either side of the date itself. This would then give your whole family a chance to celebrate but it's okay if you're a solitary practicioner like me.
Lughnasadh is all about celebrating Lugh, the Celtic craftsman god of many skills. Lugh was honoured in various forms by people across the British Isles and Europe. This festival is also still celebrated across the world today.
This festival is about the harvest, cutting it down, separating the wheat from the chaff, and then grinding the wheat down to flour. While it might appear that Lughnasadh isn't as resonant with modern life, we forget the process behind making certain foods because we can easily just pop to a shop to buy a pre-packaged loaf of bread when we run out. It's that easy for us but our ancestors would have had to do the hard work themselves to feed themselves and their families. Tending to the crops was quite literally the difference between life or death, especially if the harvest wasn't done or the bread itself baked at the right time.
Celebrating Lughnasadh as a harvest festival can also be about honouring our ancestors and the effort they put in just to survive. We always have an abundant harvest every day but it sometimes feels like we take it for granted (especially with how much food is wasted and just thrown away).
But Lughnasad is also called Lammas, which deepens the connection to bread. Lammas comes from an Old English phrase, hlaf-maesse, which when translated gives us “loaf mass”. This was then adopted into the early Christian times when the first loaves of the season would be blessed by the church. Traditionally, the Lammas loaf would be made from the last sheaf of corn to be cut down and it was seen as sacred by the very early agricultural societies as containing the spirit of the corn.
Even today in rural places, some of the corn is woven into corn dolls, a symbol of the Earth Mother, and decorated with red ribbons in honour of the Norse Mother Goddess, Frigg. The dolls would then be hung over domestic hearths throughout winter. If the corn wasn't shaped into dolls, they would be in the shape of a Corn Mother or cornucopia (horn of plenty), or tied into knots that encapsulated power and protection.
There's a reason why a lot of craft, and even Renaissance, fairs happen at this time of year: Lugh is the Celtic craftsman god. It's the traditional time when skilled artisans would peddle their wares. Back in medieval Europe, organised guilds would arrange for members to set up stalls around a village green.
Some of the symbols of Lughnasadh (or Lammas) that could be used for altar decorations are: sickles/scythes, grapes/vines, dried grains (as a sheaf or just a bowl of them), corn dolls, early autumn vegetables, late summer fruits, and, of course, loaves of bread.
As has become a habit, I've chosen to do a collective reading around the energies of this time to help us all. I used a spread by Moon and Cactus as inspiration, and the Wild Unknown Animal Spirit oracle deck by Kim Krans. This deck is one of my bounties as it was gifted to me and I do love it.
How can we express more gratitude for the bounties in our (modern) lives?
Dragon
The Dragon comes to tell us that it sees everything and therefore so should we. We've been blind to the bounties and abundance of our lives because everything is so convenient and easy to access. So now is the time for us to truly open our eyes and see how good our lives are compared to our ancestors.
We've stopped thinking about how good life is now, how almost everything in life can be outsourced to other people. We get our milk, flour, vegetables and even fruit from farmers but we don't think about it because we barely have any contact with those growing the foods we consume.
So perhaps we need to reconnect with the people who ensure that we have as much as we want (more than we need) and tell them how grateful we are - and fairly compensate them for their hard work.
What do we need to sacrifice and let go of to see these bounties?
Beaver
The Beaver is synonymous with hard work as it creates dams so that it can look after and be loyal to its own family.
In today's society, we've become used to the idea of needing to be loyal but we've lost sight of who we should be loyal to, especially long-term. Now I'm not saying we should show loyalty to those who are not on the same vibration as us, but we can certainly find those who are.
We can sacrifice needing to have a job that isn't inspiring or mentally challenging so that we are happy workers with meaningful work.
Sometimes we can give so much to our employer out of a sense of misguided loyalty but we can always address this so that we stop feeling worn out, and we can provide a home and financial stability to those we love.
What have we sown in the past that we can now reap in celebration?
Black Egg
The Black Egg is all about the truth. So we have started the journey to seeing the truth but we've not quite gotten there (as shown by the Dragon).
Those we rely on to provide us with the truth aren't always servants to the truth themselves because they say things that others want to hear. They can "bend" the truth or even repeat conspiracy theories to justify not showing the actual truth.
As much as they can do all of that, so too can we try to convince ourselves that what we're being told is actually the truth. So we ourselves are part of this deception.
It's time for us to reconnect to the truth and seek it out from those who are living it (like the farmers who provide our foods). We can take this truth and do something about it so that it isn't hidden away again.
What do we still need to nurture before summer ends?
Unicorn
The Unicorn is all about going on a quest for answers, being curious, and reconnecting with a higher wisdom. All of these things are usually a part of myths and legends (like the Quest for the Holy Grail) so they have always been a part of our lives. But we've forgotten that they aren't just meant to be parts of stories and that we can apply them to our actual lives.
It's good to question the information we are presented with, especially if we have no part in collecting it or any kind of expertise within that subject.
So we need to nurture our curiosity to ask the right questions so that we can then nurture our ability to search out the absolute truth and know it when we encounter it. We also need to nurture the connection we have with the world.
Well, it seems that those Animal Spirits weren't holding back and just had to tell us where we have been neglecting our relationships. Personally, I follow a couple of farmers on social media but apart from their experiences and what they show to the world, I don't know anything about farming, the financial aspects of it (prices they pay compared to what I as a consumer pay), and I barely know anything about any of the other hardships they face.
I hope this hasn't been too hard-hitting but if you'd like a more personal look at the energies of Lughnasadh, my diary is open so you're welcome to contact me about setting something up.
Peace and love to all!!!!
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