I don’t celebrate the “traditional” Wheel of the Year. Not that I need my practices to be justified by historicity, but the contemporary Wheel of the Year was established primarily by Wiccans and their adjacents in the 1960s, and I loudly and frequently have voiced my issues with Wicca as an institution, so this should come as no surprise to long-time readers.
My primary issue with the Wiccan Wheel of the Year is its lack of grounding in its practitioners’ actual lives. An agrarian society might have three harvest festivals, but Neowiccans in New York apartments have no attachment to the movements of the land in this way. My issue with treating the Wheel of the Year as the “pagan and witch default” is not just its erasure of other folk and historical traditions, but also the way that it discourages contemporary magicians from celebrating their authentically lived cycles.
When the neopagan milieu enforces the Wheel as the standard, it erases the cultural flexibility of historical pagan celebrations. It devalues deity-centered cult festivals, such as Veneralia, or saint- or folk hero-centered celebrations, such as the death date of Mountain Mary, which are the kind of thing that are historically embedded into local cultus. Consider that when neopagans rush to fold Saturnalia into Yule, for example, they devalue and erase the veneration of Saturn. Inversely, pushing names for the high solar days such as Lughnasadh privileges Gaelic deities (i.e., Lugh) over other deities that a neopagan might venerate.
Furthermore, I have yet to meet a neopagan who feels strongly about every Wheel sabbat. Anecdotally, I have found that Lughnasadh and Mabon, the first two harvest sabbats, often fall through the cracks, and rarely see much excitement for Imbolc or Ostara.
Consider an annual holy day calendar that emerges from a lived experience. Consider the cultural life cycles of a coastal fishing town, for example. If a town’s livelihood relies on, say, salmon, then the salmon seasons might be celebrated, with the return of the season in May and the end in November, and their life cycle venerated and their brooding areas protecting and held holy. For a more human-centric simple cultural example, consider a college town: Those who live in the town permanently will observe the ebb and flow of student life as businesses thrive and young adults overtake social life.
For those of us who are animist workers, we must ask ourselves: What are the seasons of the land we live on, and how does that affect us? What crops let our local societies thrive? When does it pour, and when does it dry up? How do native plants and animals move with us across time? How do we as humans move across these seasons? How do we work and think within these patterns?
When I was young and lived in the countryside, I used to celebrate the summer by the return of the red-winged blackbird. I was closer than I have ever been to the agrarian crop cycle, and observed not only the field growth but the alternating planting of corn and soy. Cornfields have a distinct feeling from soy fields; you can walk so deeply into them that they consume you. Dragonflies were more numerous than I’ve ever seen as an adult, in all different glittering colors, mostly blue and green and orange, and for three months I would try to catch them in nets. I learned to crave the summer storm season, because it represented a break in the relentless heat: It felt like the summer was “opening up.” The blackbird, the corn, the soy, the dragonfly, the storm: These were my summer saints. I was not observing a solar high day when, every year, I would go outside on the porch during the first storm, and feel the wind whip across my face and the thunder roll down into the hills. But it happened every year, and I was faithful about it.
This is the kind of holy day that naturally embedded itself inside me, not because of the solar calendar, but because of my own ecosystem reacting to it. Every locale has its own power, and it is part of the deep work to meet it on its own terms.
There are solar holy days, so-called “spokes on the Wheel” that I do observe, but I observe them outside of the Wiccan prescription, because of my own folk traditions. Pagans do not have a monopoly on celebrating the solstices or historical holy days. I sometimes find myself at odds with neopagans: Because I celebrate an annual holy day at the same time as Beltane, it is assumed that I must be observing a fertility or earth-venerating festival. This is the other outcome of the “standardization” of the Wheel: As with so many things, pagans like to say paganism is a “big tent” label, but they erase others’ traditions when they bring folk traditions into the fold.
For those pagans reflexively observing the Wheel, I would welcome you to start building local cultus by making observations about the local cycles of your ecosystem. Observe the coming and going of the birds, or the rise and fall of storm seasons. Celebrating the Wheel is not a bad thing, but if your local area is important to your practice, do not let it override your own connection to the world around you.
Featured image is detail from the “Four Seasons” mosaic at the Antakya Archaeological Museum.
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