Where the Wheel of the Year came from

The short answer #

The Wheel of the Year joins two older sets of dates. One is the four turning points of the sun, the solstices and equinoxes. The other is four festivals about halfway between them, which come mainly from Ireland and the Gaelic world. Historians find both sets of dates in the past. They do not find anyone keeping all eight as a single cycle before the twentieth century.¹ The historian Ronald Hutton has been the main source for this account, in Stations of the Sun (1996) and The Triumph of the Moon (1999).²³

None of that makes the wheel fake. It means it is a modern religious calendar built from old materials, and it is best held that way.

The English year #

Our best early witness for the English is Bede, a Northumbrian monk who wrote about the calendar around 725. In his chapter on the English months he says the English once counted by the moon, and he lists their month names.⁴ Several are familiar from the wheel. Giuli, the source of Yule, was the name of the two months on either side of the day when the sun turns back, and he says the English began their year at what we call Christmas.⁵ Litha named the months around midsummer.⁶ He also names a goddess, Eostre, who had given her name to the month that the Christian English now used for the Paschal season, and a goddess Hreda for the month before.⁷⁸ The word ‘Easter’ comes from the month name.

This is not a festival calendar in the sense the wheel suggests. Bede lists months, and the feasts he mentions are a few, tied to months and not to the solstices and equinoxes as points. The English folk year of later centuries ran on the Christian calendar: May Day, Midsummer Day on 24 June, Lammas on 1 August, Michaelmas on 29 September, Hallowe’en and Christmas on 25 December.⁹ These are not the astronomical dates the wheel uses.

The Gaelic year #

The four cross-quarter festivals come from early Irish writing. Cormac’s Glossary, a dictionary of Irish words usually dated to the early tenth century, has entries for Beltaine and for Oímelc, which is Imbolc. For Beltaine it describes two fires that druids made with great incantations, between which cattle were driven as protection against disease in the coming year.¹⁰ The tale Tochmarc Emire (‘The Wooing of Emer’), in a version of about the tenth century, names Imbolc as one of four seasonal festivals and links it to the milking of ewes at the start of spring.¹¹ The four are Samhain on 1 November, Imbolc on 1 February, Beltane on 1 May and Lughnasadh on 1 August.¹²

They divided the year into a summer half and a winter half, and Samhain and Beltane were the two that mattered most.¹³ Much of what is said about their rites comes from late and sometimes unreliable sources, and the early texts say very little about how they were kept. The festival of Lughnasadh, by contrast, survived in Irish folk custom into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and was studied in detail by Máire MacNeill.¹⁴

They were Gaelic, which means Irish, Scottish and Manx. The Welsh had their own May Day. The idea that all the ‘Celts’ kept one four-part year is a modern simplification.

Frazer and Murray #

Two writers made the ground that the wheel grew in. James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) collected European seasonal fire festivals and argued that they were relics of pagan religion, and it made Beltane and Samhain look like the great Celtic feasts.¹⁵ In 1921 the Egyptologist Margaret Murray argued that medieval witches had met at four great festivals, which she took to be a surviving pagan religion.¹⁶ Her theory has not survived scrutiny, but it gave the first Wiccans a four-festival year to adopt.

Putting it together #

Gerald Gardner, who is usually called the founder of Wicca, published Witchcraft Today in 1954. His first publications give the four Gaelic festivals only in English dress, as May Eve, August Eve, November Eve and February Eve.¹⁷ The solstices and equinoxes were added by the Bricket Wood coven he led, apparently by 1958, according to Frederic Lamond, who belonged to it.¹⁸ At about the same time the poet Ross Nichols, who founded the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids in 1964, was working with a similar eight-part year, and the two men knew each other.¹⁹ Popular accounts say the two settled the matter during a naturist retreat, with Gardner favouring the solstices and Nichols the Gaelic festivals. That is a story, and I have not found a source for it that I would trust.²⁰

The phrase ‘Wheel of the Year’ was in use by the mid-1960s.²¹ The reasons for the eight-fold form seem to have been practical and aesthetic. It gave a celebration about every six weeks, and it made a balanced circle.²²

The names #

The names most people use for the wheel were also settled late. In 1974 the American Wiccan Aidan Kelly proposed Litha for midsummer, Ostara for the spring equinox and Mabon for the autumn equinox, and Timothy Zell’s magazine Green Egg helped them spread.²³ They were not in general use at once: Doreen Valiente’s Witchcraft for Tomorrow (1978) still calls them by their seasons.²⁴ Litha matches Bede’s name for the months round midsummer, and Ostara is a form of Eostre. Mabon is borrowed from a figure in Welsh myth, and as far as I know the figure has no connection with an autumn festival.²⁵

At a glance #

On a narrow screen, swipe the table sideways.

What this means for practice #

You can keep the wheel with a clear conscience if you know what it is. It is a modern way of marking the year, made by people in the twentieth century from older seasonal customs, and it has become a tradition in its own right in about seventy years. Many religions began more recently than that.

Some things follow from knowing the history. Be cautious of anyone who says the wheel is thousands of years old, or that your festival was kept unchanged by ancient Celts. If you use Gaelic festivals, it is worth learning what the Irish and Scottish sources actually say. If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, the wheel’s seasonal meanings have to be moved, and some people choose to keep the dates and others to follow their own seasons. The wheel page gives dates for both.

For the wider story, see the pagan revival timeline. For more, see the page on ethics and cautions, which covers judging claims about the past, and where to begin.