Mabon

the autumn equinox; named for Mabon son of Modron

See it on the Wheel of the Sky

When it comes round

North of the equator: the September equinox, when the Sun reaches 0° Libra, on .

South of the equator, where the seasons are reversed, the Wheel of the Sky keeps Mabon in the same season, half a year later or earlier: the March equinox, when the Sun reaches 0° Aries, on .

The solstices and equinoxes are the Sun at 0° of a cardinal sign, so the festival is that moment itself. Worked out with the same Sun calculation as the calendar and the Wheel of the Sky.

The autumn equinox, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator going south; its name, given in 1974, comes from a figure in Welsh legend.

In history

At the September equinox the Sun crosses the celestial equator going south: the beginning of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere and of spring in the Southern (Britannica). Unlike the other festivals here, Mabon has no old festival of that name behind it; in the old English calendar Bede describes, September was called Halegmonath (Bede, The Reckoning of Time).

The name comes from the medieval Welsh tale Culhwch and Olwen. Mabon son of Modron is the one huntsman who can hunt with a certain hound, but he “was taken from his mother when three nights old, and it is not known where he now is, nor whether he is living or dead.” Arthur’s men ask the oldest creatures in turn, the Ousel of Cilgwri, the Stag of Redynvre, the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd and the Eagle of Gwern Abwy, until the Salmon of Llyn Llyw carries them up the river to his prison at Gloucester; while Arthur’s warriors attack the castle, Kai breaks through the wall and carries him out on his back (Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation).

In England the end of the harvest, in late September, was kept as Harvest Home, with singing and shouting and the village decked with boughs; the last sheaf of grain was made into a harvest doll and kept until the spring planting (Britannica).

In modern practice

Aidan Kelly named the autumn equinox Mabon in 1974, in a “Pagan-Craft” calendar. It “offended my aesthetic sensibilities,” he wrote, that the summer solstice and the autumn equinox had no Pagan names to match Yule or Beltane; he tied the equinox to the Eleusinian Mysteries and their story of the loss and recovery of Kore, looked for a northern European myth like it, and found Mabon, whose name he translates as “son of the mother” (Kelly, 2017). It is the sabbat of September 22 or 23 (Britannica, “Wicca”). The eight-festival Wheel of the Year itself is modern: Wicca, which emerged in England in the 1950s, typically keeps eight seasonal festivals, called sabbats, based on traditional celebrations drawn from different periods of British and Irish history, and many Wiccans in the Southern Hemisphere move them to fit their own seasons (Britannica, “Wicca”).

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