It's Festival Time
AKA: Lughnasadh, Lúnasa, Lammas
August 1
Summer's over: Today is Lughna Day,
the night stretches
If you have ever heard of Lughnasa, you are either a student of
ancient Irish and Scottish customs, a fan of Tony-winning Broadway
plays, or a devoted member of a Celtic worship community. The average
person has probably never even heard the word Lughnasa, even in Ireland
where in modern Gaelic it is often called Lúnasa, meaning the month of
August.
One of the main reasons for Lughnasa's obscurity is the confusion
caused by its variety of names and the differing regional dates on which
it occurs. When the Gregorian system was adopted in Britain and
Ireland, eleven days had to be dropped to make the calendar
astronomically correct. This led to the festival being celebrated on
either the 1st or the 12th August, called respectively New Style and Old
Style Lughnasa. Relatively few of its customs were set down in oral
folklore or written historical record; all of what we know of Lughnasa
is confined to those rituals which have survived in specific localities
and cultures.
There are several clearly defined themes that underlie traditional
Lughnasa celebrations and rites. Lughnasa is a harvest festival, marking
the end of the period of summer growth and the beginning of the autumn
harvest. A popular misconception is that Lughnasa was a fire festival.
It was not. It was associated with water and earth, expressed in wells,
corn, flowers, and mountains. Fire played no substantial part unless you
count incidental fires to cook the feast and bring warmth on cool
summer nights. Fire is just as closely associated with the solstices and
equinoxes; the practice of calling the four Celtic cross-quarter
festivals 'the fire festivals' is a modern one.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 921 CE mentions Lughnasa as 'the feast
of first fruits'. In Britain it is also called Lammas, from the
Anglo-Saxon hlaef-mass meaning 'loaf-mass'. A special Eucharistic
thanksgiving for the first bread of the harvest was an extremely popular
Christian practice during the Middle Ages. The "first bread" is brought
forward with the offering, placed on the altar, blessed and broken, and
given to the people as the body of Christ. Though the first bread
blessing largely died out as a Christian ritual after the Reformation,
the custom is now being revived in places.
In parts of Ireland the nearest Sunday to Lughnasa was known as Cally
Sunday. It was the traditional day to lift the first new potatoes. The
man of the house would dig the first stalk while the woman of the house
would don a new white apron and cook them, covering the kitchen floor
with green rushes in their honor. The family would give thanks that the
'Hungry Month' of July was over and the harvest had begun. Though
initially the custom of first fruits usually applied to grain, in later
days, when grain crops were the province of large landowners, common
people had no grain of their own to offer. The first fruits custom was
then transferred to potatoes, an offering available to everyone with a
patch of ground, and widely grown as a subsistence crop.
Assemblies on hilltops are a traditional part of the proceedings. In
Ireland and the Isle of Man many of these hilltop gatherings have
survived to the present day. On the Isle of Man the inhabitants would
climb to the top of Snaefell on Lhuany's Day. A pilgrimage, often
barefoot, would often be followed by drinking, dancing, fighting, and
very unruly behavior. There is a legend that the custom of hilltop
pilgrimages died out when clergy started to take collections at the
summit.
For years archaeologists thought the massive man-made Silbury Hill,
130 feet high, must be a burial mound, but investigations have disproved
this. Turves were used to construct the inner part of the hill in the
Stone Age and remain within, with the grass and insects preserved. They
were cut at the beginning of the harvest, about the time of Lughnasa.
Then over a period of about 50 years blocks of chalk covered the turf.
There is some speculation that it is a harvest mound, representing
the pile of earth raised up over a seed to make it grow. The same idea
is echoed in burial mounds and even the great pyramids of Egypt—harvest
mounds bring the "dead" seed within to rebirth. Sil may be the name of a
sacrificed corn god. Possibly this is the same idea reflected in the
turf towers built in Britain and Ireland and whole idea of mountain
pilgrimages at Lughnasa. Festivities were held on Silbury Hill well into
the eighteenth century including horse races and bull baiting, after
which the bull was killed, roasted and eaten. A double sunrise effect
may be observed on Silbury Hill at Beltane and Lughnasa.
Lughnasa was celebrated from the summit of the earth to the depths.
In addition to climbing hills, Lughnasa was also a time for visiting
holy wells. Wells on the Isle of Man were said to be at the peak of
their healing powers at Lughnasa; St Maugold Well near Ramsey is reputed
to cure sterility if the sufferer throws a pin in the well or dips
their heel into it. Assemblies at wells would often be celebrated on the
feast day of local saints, but many of these gatherings were moved from
the saint's day to whenever Lughnasa was locally observed.
Flowers
are a prominent Lughnasa theme, and in English villages wells are
dressed with elaborate floral tributes on significant dates. Many sacred
pagan wells were renamed after Mary (and other female saints), and
floral arrangements were an important part of the August 15 feast of the
Assumption of Mary, or Marymass. In northern Scotland, where the
harvest naturally occurred later, Marymass eventually replaced Lammas as
the festival of the first harvest. This may explain medieval
associations of Mary with ears of corn. Mary's association with wells,
mid-August Lughnasa flowers, and other harvest corn customs could be
another example of the Christianization of pagan traditions and beliefs.
Late July and month of August are traditional times for fairs because
the weather is usually mild and the ground is suitable for traveling.
Many traditional Lammas/Lughnasa fairs are still celebrated today. The
Puck Fair, in Killorglin, County Kerry (Ireland) is one of the
best-known traditional fairs when a male goat is crowned as king for
three days and known as ' King Puck' (from the Gaelic puc, meaning
he-goat). At Lammas/Lughnasa fairs throughout Britain and Ireland
various other male animals were enthroned and other symbols were
displayed, such as a white glove, or the rods and wands of office
belonging to local sheriffs and bailiffs. At the St James's Fair in
Limerick, which lasted for a fortnight, a white glove was hung out at
the prison, and during this time no one could be arrested for debt.
Many traditional summer fairs are called 'wake fairs'. A wake is a
vigil kept in the presence of the body of a dead person in the period
between the death and the burial. Games, feasting and drinking play a
large part in the proceedings. It was also the custom to hold a wake,
with a vigil and prayers, on the eve of the feast day of the local saint
and follow it with a fair on the next day. Over a period of time the
religious element of the custom died out and all that remained was a
secular occasion with feasting and merrymaking. One pagan association
with Lughnasa is as an elaborate wake for the corn god who dies with the
cutting of the corn. A symbol of the corn god or other harvest god was
often symbolically placed in a graveyard. Another explanation for
mid-August Lughnasa as wake refers not to the death of a pagan god but
general mourning for the death of summer. Though warm weather obviously
continued after mid-August, this can be compared to the U.S. custom of
marking the first Monday of September as summer's end, complete with
elaborate cultural "mourning rituals" for the end of summer, even though
relatively warm weather goes on for weeks.
Telltown,
Teltown, or Tailtean Marriages were temporary unions entered into
during Lughnasa. Some would last only for a day, others as long as a
fortnight. At the eleven-day Lammas fair at Kirkwall in the Orkney
Islands off the coast of Scotland, taking a sexual partner for its
duration was a common practice. Such couples were known as 'Lammas
brothers and sisters'. For couples thinking of a longer term commitment
this was a traditional time for handfasting. Couples would join hands
through a hole in a stone, such as the ancient Stone of Odin at
Stenness, and plight their troth for a year and a day. Culturally
sanctioned temporary sexual unions may offend modern morality, but many
of these temporary unions were not momentary, impulsive, or casual
pairings. Rather, they were the first public commitment of serious
couples, later to become permanent arrangements and marriages.
The Battle of the Flowers is a longstanding mid-August Lughnasa
tradition. It takes place on Jersey, one of the Channel Islands. The
"battle" is between groups of islanders who compete to see who can make
the most original display using flowers. Since the nineteenth century
these have been paraded on flat trucks like carnival floats, but the
local tradition of making floral patterns and pictures is much earlier.
Exhibits can be up to forty-five feet long and contain a hundred
thousand or more blooms. Hundreds of volunteers spend all night cutting
heads off fresh flower stems and sticking them to the float framework.
The festival also features an illuminated moonlight parade consisting of
the massive floats accompanied by marching bands, and dancers. The
"Battle of Flowers Festival" attracts an audience in the region of forty
thousand people. In some areas with flower celebrations, the Sunday
closest to Lughnasa is called Garland Sunday.
Lughnasa Sunday is known as 'Bilberry Sunday" in many districts of
Ireland. It is traditional to climb the mountainsides to collect these
fruits for the first time on this day. This has given rise to a variety
of names for the festival- Blaeberry Sunday, Heatherberry Sunday, Whort
Sunday etc. The size and quantity of berries at Lughnasa was a sign of
whether the harvest as a whole would be good or not. Another example of
these fruit-gathering traditions used to take place in County Donegal.
On the first Sunday in August young people would set off after lunch to
pick bilberries and not return until nightfall. Often "bilberry
collecting" was only an excuse for young men and women to pair off for
the day. The boys would thread berries into bracelets for the girls,
competing to make the prettiest gifts for their partners.
There would be lots of singing and dancing. Before returning home the
girls removed their bracelets and left them on the hillside. After
climbing back down the hill the men indulged in sporting contests such
as horse racing, hurling and weight-throwing. Sports are a common
feature of modern Lughnasa festivals. The various Highland games are
probably a descendant of the Lughnasa games. Some are still held around
the traditional time of Lughnasa, but may be held at any time during the
summer or autumn. Ripening crops have to be protected from the forces
of blight and from the floods and winds associated with Lughnasa. Traces
of this conflict are seen in the battle imagery associated with the
festival, such as the Battle of the Flowers, faction fighting, and other
competitive sports.
At one time Lughnasa was widely celebrated in Ireland, Britain,
France and possibly Northern Spain. The oldest forms of the festival
included tribal assemblies and activities extending two to four weeks.
Many Lammas/Lughnasa festivities eventually became transferred to
Christian saints' days: late July celebrations to St. James the Greater
(July 25), mid-August celebrations to Marymass (August 15). The August
21 date often associated with Lughnasa in some modern Celtic art would
therefore have been an extremely late date according to most folklore
and surviving rituals.
