Wheel of the Year

Most Wiccans in the religion’s early decades, Britannica notes, accepted Margaret Murray’s idea that the people persecuted as witches had followed a pre-Christian religion. In The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) Murray argued that the witches of the trial records kept two chief festivals, May Eve and November Eve, and two lesser ones, Candlemas on 2 February and Lammas on 1 August, and that “the equinoxes were never observed in Britain”. Historians from the 1970s showed, as Ronald Hutton puts it, that the people accused of witchcraft had not practised a surviving pagan religion. Today’s wheel keeps Murray’s four days, under the Gaelic names Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh, and sets the solstices and equinoxes between them.

The Covenant of the Goddess tells the story in its own terms: many of the festival days coincide with Jewish and Christian holidays because they were community celebrations rededicated to the Christian God or a saint, so that “the names may have changed, but the old Pagan practices still show through”. Hutton’s study of modern Pagan festivals, as Nation.Cymru reports it, describes the wheel instead as a modern framework that brings together observances with different histories. Some of its names are very recent. The Wiccan Aidan Kelly has said that he supplied names for three of the solar festivals in 1974, Mabon for the autumn equinox among them, and sent his calendar to the Pagan magazine Green Egg.