The Faith of the First Fruits
Here in suburbia, it is "my Lughnasadh," and I've begun a 12-day devotional in honor of the Many-Skilled One. If anyone has ever spoken to me at great length about such things, you may have heard me called the Fire Festivals "portable." What I mean is that the solstice and equinoxes have fixed astronomical points, related to the Earth's orbit around the sun. The fire festivals (Samhain, Imbolc, Beltainne, and Lughnasadh) have been assigned points mid-way between them, but my own UPG is that this is a modern convenience, and the folklore surrounding them may indicate that events in the tribal pastoral/horticultural rhythms were indicators of the time for being festive. If you take, Imbolc, for example, one of the things surrounding Imbolc was the ewe's milk coming in, so a key indicator of by how much your heard may be increasing. Well, what if that doesn't happen on February 2? What if it happens on February 5 or January 27? What if we haven...