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Before we get into this month’s question from a paid subscriber, a quick reminder that it’s that time of year again. I host a(n) (totally free) annual lunch hour Q&A exclusively for LGBTQIA+ writers, and I’m thrilled to announce that my rockstar (also queer) agent Dana Murphy of Trellis Literary will once again be joining me this Thursday, May 23rd at 12pm Eastern.
The event is totally free (and also free of a deck or sales pitch), but registration is required just so we have an estimate of how many folks to prepare for. Please note that this is exclusive to the LGBTQIA+ community, so that particular concerns we face in traditional publishing can be discussed. You can register here! Come hang, whether or not you have questions.
This week’s question was born out of a Discourse in the paid subscriber-only Discord.
Q: Thinking a lot about your comments about the wheel of the year being bullshit and I feel like there’s been light talk about why here and there, but I’d love to know more about it! I know you mentioned it being a relatively young concept held up as an older one too.
Whoo boy, the Wheel of the Year. Taking this question feels like lighting a match near a powder keg, although as the question asker notes, I’m very vocal about the Wheel in the [paid subscribers-only] astrology for writers Discord. I also want to preface that we all start somewhere, and this is not intended as a criticism of folks who are new. My hope is that in discussing the decidedly not historical origins of and colonial issues with the Wheel, folks who didn’t previously know can learn and make a more informed choice about the kinds of information you share and accept as Truth.
To be clear: the Wheel of the Year is a 20th century Wiccan intervention in the neopagan world.
An intervention, mind, not a reclamation or restoration. For those who don’t know, the Wheel of the Year is an artificially constructed group of eight ‘sabbats,’ consisting of a mash-up of four generalized solar holidays (equinoxes and solstices, widely recognized cross-culturally around the world) with the highly specific to Celtic (especially Irish) traditional cross-quarter celebrations. In other news, Wicca is Euro-centric.
The Wheel’s construction was influenced by books like The Golden Bough by James George Frazer (1890) and the long-since disproven The Witch-Cult in Western Europe by Margaret Murray (1921), but it didn’t really come into use until the 1950s with Wiccan covens in England led by people like Gerald Gardner and Ross Nichols. (I should say, sometimes they are called “British Neopagans,” which is true, but a lot of this happened under the organizational auspices of Wicca, hence my use of that religion’s name.)
This is what I want to stress: the Wheel is not a recovered practice, nor even a holistically reconstructed one. It is, rather, part reconstruction and part invention by 20th century academics. Most of the Wheel’s name for solstices and equinoxes — Ostara for the spring equinox, Litha for the summer solstice, and Mabon for the fall equinox — are not recovered names from old traditions, but were, rather, quite literally created in 1974 (whenever I’m reading historical fiction set in the distant past with witchy characters and see them reference Litha or some such, I cringe). To dig into Ostara (equated with the spring equinox), for example:
The term is derived from a reconstruction produced by linguist Jacob Grimm of an Old High German form of the Old English Ēostre, a proposed Anglo-Saxon goddess for whom, according to Bede, feasts were held in her eponymous month, which he equated to April in the Julian calendar. (quote from Wikipedia; source on Bede here)
Yule, for the winter solstice, is sort of an exception. Unlike the other three solar festivals in the Wheel, there were ancient celebrations called Yule among Germanic and Norse peoples, but those festivals were not explicitly tied to the winter solstice, and they likely occurred in January.
So historical accuracy is one issue. While it is impossible to faithfully recreate any ancient traditions — and also, spirituality is a living thing! that develops and shifts and changes with time! so do we NEED to do exactly what people did thousands of years ago? — it is also notable that Wicca smushed together solar festivals with some very, very specific mid-season Celtic traditions. The cross-quarter days specifically (Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa, Samhain) are Celtic in nature, most often associated with traditions that come from Ireland, as well as some of Scotland and the Brythonic (e.g. Wales).
Listen, syncretism is a time-honored tradition. Syncretism helps faiths and religions thrive under oppression; for a European example, we can straight-up see examples like how the Tuatha de Danaan goddess Brigid became St. Brigid under Catholic occupation. Imbolc, even, became Candlemas. These traditions are living and fluid.
But.
I remain bothered by how many new and New Age practitioners replicate, share, and say that they honor the Wheel of the Year without even knowing the origins of the Wheel itself — especially the cross quarter days. I crave more intellectual rigor and curiosity in the occult sphere, where so many people share an Instagram story just because it seems “witchy.” The Celtic cross quarter days, which are also called fire festivals, are themselves quite specific and tied to specific deities. Belenus for Beltane, Lugh for Lughnasa, and Bridgid for Imbolc. We don’t have any sources suggesting that Samhain is explicitly dedicated to the Morrigan, but there are many mythic connections between the two; the Cath Maige Tuired, or Battle of the Plain of Pillars, which is one of the most important myths of the Tuatha Dé Danann and which the Morrigan plays a vital role in, occurs around Samhain (read Morgan Daimler on it here).
With this in mind, I wonder why a purportedly witchy Millennial woman who has no relationship whatsoever with the deities/Spirits of the Tuatha would celebrate Lughnasa or Imbolc?
Sometimes, I wonder if it’s just the part of me that grew up so rigidly fundamentalist that chafes against the cherry picking syncretism of so much New Age and neopagan spirituality. But my frustration goes deeper, to what that kind of cherry picking suggests. It’s not that I’m a dedicated practitioner engaging with the Irish Reconstruction who’s trying to mark my territory; far from it. (Though I have danced with the Morrigan for a year here, a year there. She comes and goes on her raven wings.)
My frustration with the Wheel, rather, is ultimately a frustration with the lack of intellectual rigor that too often accompanies spiritual spaces. Everything I’ve just written is very, very easy to find on the internet. It’s not hidden in difficult-to-read textbooks. Hell, talking about the historical realities of worship of the Tuatha (many details of which we don’t know, as the Celts passed their traditions down orally) is the brilliant Morgan Daimler’s whole deal!
It’s not that I think the Wheel itself is doing harm, per se; yes, it is intellectually lazy and speaks to a short-cutting of Spirit that I abhor. The harm in the Wheel, rather, is more insidious: it was born of, and continues to be perpetuated by, a handful of key underlying beliefs and practices, ultimately rooted in white supremacy.
A lack of intellectual rigor in occult spaces results in witch-curious people (largely white women, let’s be real) sharing and perpetuating a wholly fictional calendar that ultimately suggests that this vaguely white, faux-historical thing is The Way, The Truth, and the Life — to the detriment of respect for other spiritual traditions throughout the world.
The Wheel’s very existence, blending the traditions of so many disparate and, historically, wildly different Indigenous peoples of what is now Europe, suggests that whiteness is an ahistorical category, that the Norse and Gauls and incredibly varied tribes of Celts somehow had similar pre-Christian practices that any white person now living can tap into. In collapsing so many traditions together, the Wheel elides how whiteness is a historical construction and is very much a violent, colonial force dedicated to eradicating diversity — even amongst so-called white people. It says so much, doesn’t it, that almost all of the surviving sources we have today about Irish Celtic practices — like the fire festivals themselves — come secondhand, recorded by the monks who were proselytizing them?
Whether the Wheel or Wicca or British neopagans or whoever intend to suggest these things about the violence of whiteness is not the point, frankly. Intention and impact are two very, very different things. And isn’t it uniquely bad if they did not intend any of this at all? That’s how white supremacy survives generation to generation, after all: bobbing and weaving through the subtext and rituals, perpetually affirming itself as The Standard.
When other white people (especially my fellow white Americans) talk about the Wheel and assume that “our” traditions have been “saved” throughout time, they reveal that they do not know how Whiteness was Made. Why do we joke about white people having “no culture”? I don’t want this to turn elegiac, but isn’t that purported lack of culture ultimately a lack of differentiation? A collapsing of the many into The Dominant Caste? The Indigenous tribes and cultures of what is now called Europe were colonized — so long ago, now, that the epigenetic memory of colonization is long gone. You either die a hero, or you live long enough to become the villain.
Before I come to a close here, I feel it is important to explicitly state that I’m not saying someone cannot mindfully observe, for example, both Norse and Irish traditions, that you cannot work with both Odin and The Dagda. I am not railing against multiplicity and polytheism; that would be a willful misunderstanding.
I am, here, taking a strong stance against the lack of intellectual rigor in witchy and occult spaces that ultimately leads to the perpetuation of harmful ideology. I grew up in evangelical Christianity, and getting out was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done — but it required a deconstruction of what I believed and why in a way that few, spiritually speaking, go through. In discovering spiritual practices outside of Christianity, I have been mindful. I have researched. I have not taken a popular Instagram meme as fact. And, above all else, I have listened: to the song of the land and the Spirits around me. I know that perpetuating something because it is “seemingly” traditional or “seemingly” historical is so much less important than in building a practice you as a person are deeply, profoundly emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually connected to.
Which is the whole issue with the Wheel, really. It suggests that there is a shortcut to a spiritual life. It’s very capitalism-friendly in its straightforwardness: Follow this calendar. Make this offering. Bam! You’re a witch.
But being in relationship with Spirit is not so straightforward. Not so linear. Not so clear-cut. It is ongoing. It is living and breathing. And it really isn’t something that can be condensed into an Instagram post.
Agree? Disagree? Get in the comments. And if you enjoyed this newsletter, please do share with your friends, on social media, and elsewhere!
I really appreciate the call-out here of anti-intellectualism in neo-paganism. I live in the kind of town that LOVES a good cross-quarter day, and I have certainly participated in a fair amount of that sort of thing over the years (though the Quaker in me has always resisted all the pomp and circumstance of it all. Just shut up and listen, already! How will you hear the still, small Voice in the middle of all this bad-skit night nonsense? I'll confess I found myself thinking over and over. Yes, I'm kind of a cranky asshole.)
I also was an organic farmer for nearly a decade, though, and I'll say that the solar festivals and *certain* of the cross-quarter days, to the extent that they connect to the actual seasons happening outside, came to have a deep meaning for me. I don't really give a shit about Imbolc per se, for instance, but I appreciate the prompting to think about life stirring underground in the midst of a cold, (increasingly less) snowy Upstate Winter. And I don't really know anything about Lugh, so Lughnasa is kind of like... whatever? But thinking about celebrating the harvest sometime between early August and late September just makes sense here.
All this to say, I'm no Wiccan, but being connected to the land in the Northern Hemisphere, the Wheel was a useful prompt to think deeply about the actually turning of the seasons and what a sacred, embodied calendar related to that might be for me.
YOU'RE RIGHT AND YOU SHOULD SAY IT!! Big agree with everything you've said here. I began my witchy polytheist journey celebrating the Wheel and over time, as I learned more, came to similar conclusions. Boy, the whiteness part though! Something to really, really chew on.