Here we are close to August 1st and time for the annual article about the Sabbat called Lughnassah, by those who can get their eyes around the spelling of the Irish, and Lammas by those who can’t.
Lughnassah or Lammas occurs on the first of August. This was the day on which the Christianized Saxons brought the first fruits of their fields to their landlords, the year's first harvest festival. This may have been the rent for some tenants, since this day was one of the four days when rent became due to landowners.
Apparently the word Lammas comes from the name of the festival in Old English during the Christian times. There "hlaf-maess," "loaf Mass" or "loaf feast," "Lammas" was the Mass at which the first loaves of new grain were blessed on the altar. As I have written many, many times, most of the current Church ritual days were based on covering up or taking over a sacred pagan occasion that the pagans wouldn’t give up.
The name Lughnassah comes from the name of the Irish god Lugh, named Llew in Wales. The name means ‘brightness’ or ‘light’ and is associated with the Sun gods of the Mediterranean. It is a celebration of the light that is still bright though the summer solstice is over and the days are becoming less long as Lugh or Llew approaches the day of his annual death at the autumn equinox.
Lughnassah is the day when the god of Light is thanked for the first harvest of summer, and his marriage is celebrated. There are some priestesses of the Old Ways who celebrate this day by marrying Lugh in the Inner Realms.
He died because the goddess of Spring loved someone else and brought about his death to marry his enemy. A pretty typical cosmic soap opera theme. Most gods of grain were resurrection gods and note that Lugh wedded the Goddess of the Land in August and she gave birth to summer, exactly nine months later at Beltane.
Lughnassah is the time when the first fruits are brought to another, a human landlord, or a divine god as a form of sacrifice that permits the rest of the harvest to be gathered without problems since the god got first pick. The landlord payment I mentioned probably just got stuck onto this donation to the deity; a product of peasant frugality and ingenuity, killing two birds with one stone.
Lugh is one of a long line of grain gods who die and are resurrected. Put Tammuz, the most ancient of such gods into the search box to see my other posts about such gods, including Jesus.
The grains of the gods vary according to geography. In northern Europe the grains were rye, barley and oats, check my article on ergot on the rye to see where the monsters of Hallowe’en came from.(Hallowe’en Monsters, Then and Now. 10/28/2006.) In the south the grains were usually rice, corn or millet, check the movie The Seven Samurai for which one was eaten by the poor. In areas between the grain was mainly wheat.
The Greek version of Tammuz was Adonis, the most handsome male human around. He managed to seduce the Greek love goddess Aphrodite (Venus) and Persephone, unwilling queen of the dead. The two goddesses battled bitterly over Him. Zeus solved the argument by making Adonis split his time between the summer world of Aphrodite and the dark underworld of Persephone, six months a year with each.
Remember that Persephone had eaten some pomegranate seeds during her involuntary stay in the realm of Hades after he kidnapped her, so she had to stay there six months of the year. That was fall and winter. The other six months she could be above ground, spring and summer. The Adonis story fitted into this more famous one about Demeter and Persephone.
Adonis, like the god man Tammuz, died from wounds inflicted by the tusks of a boar, the pig throughout the Mediterranean region being sacred to the Great Goddess. That’s why you have ham on certain ritual days of the year even now. The hot cross buns, Easter Bunny, Easter Eggs and ham are all phenomena that came directly into the Christian calendar because of the Sumerian Tammuz, not because of the Jewish Jesus. There’s no such thing as kosher pork. See my post “Taking Jesus OUT of Easter.” (3/18/2008)
Tammuz died in a conveniently positioned bed of lettuce, a plant the Greeks thought was to do with both the death of the body, and sterility, the death of fertility.
The Greek worshipers of Tammuz as Adonis used lettuce to celebrate his birth and death. They were mainly women, the courtesans and concubines, as his prowess at seduction was important to them. The women planted quick sprouting grains and lettuce on roof gardens when the sun was at its hottest. Overlooking the harvest was a statue of the god man. In the hot sun the plants shot up quickly and then quickly died. The withered plants and the statues were thrown into the sea and the women went into temporary mourning for the god.
The Welsh version of the story of Lugh is the story of Llew Llaw Gyffes. He was one of the twin sons of the goddess Arianrhod who was tricked into giving birth to twins, and thus proving in front of witnesses that she wasn’t a virgin, by the master magician and Druid of the gods, Gwydion. This was an ancient pattern. Gwydion was the brother of Arianrhod. Her sons were by him and were eventually named Llew…light or brightness and Dylan…darkness.
She was so angry at being humiliated that she initially refused to do the three things that a mother traditionally did for her son: give him a name, supply him with weapons and find him a bride.
Gwydion tricked her into doing the first two and found a magickal method around the third. It’s a great story and all to do with the cycle of the year. When the nameless kid was disguised as a young, very skilled shoemaker Gwydion tricked Arianrhod into visiting the shoemaker’s shop to get a perfect fit for her shoes. The young man killed a tiny wren on a twig with a small, hand-thrown, pebble.
Arianrhod witnessed this amazing feat of hand eye coordination and said that the fair haired young man was certainly Llew Llaw Gyffes, the Bright Lion with the Sure Hand. That became his name.
He also was given weapons by her when Gwydion enchanted Arianrhod’s dwelling and made her think she was under attack and needed to arm everyone inside for self defense.
The third thing was more difficult. The actual geis put on Llew was that he could have no human wife. Gwydion and his magickal mentor Math figured out a way round that and made Llew, the god of light, a magickal bride out of flowers and the nine elements. Her name was Blodeuwedd, Flower Face, obviously a symbol of Spring.
Llew became king and Blodeuwedd was his queen. After a while she became enamored of a dark being, Gronwy, the god of darkness. They plotted to get rid of Llew.
Their problem was that because of his lineage as a god child it was very hard to kill him. He could not be killed by night or day, on land or sea, indoors or outdoors, riding or walking, clothed or unclothed nor by any lawfully made weapon. And they didn’t know all these secret conditions. There was in fact also only one day in the year, and only one method on that day by which he could be killed.
Blodeuwedd knew about such things and guessed that there were some complex conditions to be met before she and her lover could cream Llew. So she played dumb blonde and and tricked Llew into telling her how impossibly unlikely the circumstances were that would bring about his death. Somewhat like Samson and Delilah and the secret of his super normal strength.
He told her that he could only be killed by a spear that took a year to make, at the moment when he was standing with one foot on the rim of a cauldron of water on a riverbank and the other on a billy goat, at twilight¸ wearing only a shift.
Blodeuwedd pointed out how impossible it was to produce all those circumstances at the same time. The naïve Llew produced all the artifacts and showed her. Gronwy jumped out of the gloom and threw his hand crafted magick spear at Llew, who changed to a badly wounded eagle and flew off. Gronwy took over the kingdom and the queen, as planned.
That’s the story. Disney could do a good job with the visuals. Let’s look between the lines as the bards would expect us to do, and as we MUST do with old stories to get their point.
Llew the Bright, who was named for the Lion (Leo), the sign of the Sun, was betrayed by Blodeuwedd ( Virgo), while balanced (Libra) on the Cauldron (Cancer) and the goat (Capricorn). When hit by the magick spear he transformed into an Eagle (Scorpio). The signs Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio are in the correct astrological order. The only place where he could be equally between Cancer and Capricorn is the mid point between the summer and winter solstices. The autumn equinox. This year it’s on September 23rd. The spear is the spear of sunlight.
The autumn equinox is the day at which the daylight hours begin to get less than the darkness hours. The first day on which the power of darkness, Gronwy, could get an even chance at the power of light as an equal.
Later Gwydion, following a clue produced by the sacred sow, found Llew as an eagle whose rotting flesh was continually dropping off of him. He cured Llew and restored him to human form.
Llew found Gronwy, who had been ruling in his place for the six months of fall and winter, and killed Gronwy with his own spear, in the place where he had himself been attacked before. Gronwy asked to be allowed to use a shield. Llew obliged, but the magic spear, now thrown by the Bright Lion of the Sure Hand went through both shield and Gronwy.
This was because Gronwy had to be killed six months after Llew, on the day when the hours of daylight began to be more than the hours of darkness, midway between winter and summer, at the vernal equinox. The same magick spear of sunlight had to be used.
Another god man dies around the vernal equinox. The first time light can overcome darkness. That was a man who called himself the Light of the World, a man called Jesus.
Gwydion then finds Blodeuwedd who flees for her life. He catches up and turns her into an owl, with a face like a flower of feathers. Blodeuwedd, now the bird of the darkness, starts as the goddess of life and light like Persephone and cycles into becoming a creature of death and darkness, in each case connected with the light of the Sun and the cycle of the year.
This cycle carries on every year. Llew rules for six months and then dies and resurrects to rule again next year. Light overcomes the darkness for a while and is then overcome by the darkness for a while. We live our lives amid cycles that were obvious to our ancestors. Now, thanks to electric light from Tesla and Edison, men who used to use machines as tools have become servants of machines that work 24/7 and we think we live in a straight line.
Llew’s goddess mother, Arianrhod is the ruler over Caer Arianrhod, the Castle of the Silver Wheel, the Milky Way, which sometimes symbolizes the Mill Wheel of Life and Death. In her Caer she is the goddess of death. Taliesin the Master Bard of Arthur Pendragon visited her there three times, according to his stories.
Llew Llaw is the Welsh form of the Irish Lugh, or Lug mac Ethne, whose Lughnassah festival as we certainly know by now occurs every August 1. Lugh like Llew was not brought up by his mother. He had a foster mother whose name was Tailtu. The name of the town where she was buried transformed to Telltown over the years. It’s on the famous river Boyne in Ireland.
The legend says that Lugh started Lughnassah as an annual fair in the town, in her memory. If you go to Telltown you may be shown the mound under which she is buried.
Lugh was definitely the most loved of the Celtic gods, if we go by the number of statues of him that have been found. To go into the many stories about him get on the Web and check anything by John or Caitlin Matthews, or the Faerie Magick expert R.J.Stewart whenever they write about the Celtic gods. And read between the lines as we did with the death of Llew story.
Don’t do a Disney on every piece of ancient wisdom.
Lugh was amazingly versatile. The Romans compared him to their most versatile god Mercury. In one story he tries to enter the royal hall of Tara, where only those with some great skill are allowed in. The gate keeper refuses him entry although he can claim expertise as, metal-worker, magician, warrior, bard, healer, wheelwright, cup-bearer and on and on, because there were people in Tara who already had those skills. When he pointed out that only he, in the whole of Ireland, knew and could practice all those skills, he was allowed in as a master of versatility.
I mentioned before that Lugh’s Welsh form of Llew was working as an expert cobbler and shoemaker when he deceived Arianrhod into giving him a name. As a bit of connected trivia there is an inscription from Roman times in Osma in Spain which notes that the Guild of Shoemakers has dedicated a statue to the Lugoves, a Celtic triple god version of Lugh.
Remember that the empire of the Celts was larger than that of the Roman empire. They turned up all over Europe and Asia.
You Grail people may recall the adventures of Peredur, the Celtic version of Parsifal, the Grail Knight. He found two people playing what was described as a game of chess for his soul. He threw the chess board and pieces out of the window and got into big trouble.
The two people concerned weren’t playing modern chess. They were using the Druid oracle gwyddbwyll, a board-based ritual with the name that now means chess in Welsh. (Maybe I shouldn’t complain about Irish so much.) Actually gwyddbwyll was a device to alter the future, not an oracle to foretell it. It’s a part of Druid magick in some lineages. Llew, or Lugh was said to have invented this game/device, and others.
Lugh of the Long Arm was one of his many names. This didn’t mean that he had long arms. It meant he had a long reach. He was a god of war among his many versatilities and an expert with the sling and the spear, both of which are capable of killing an adversary a great distance away. You had to be a very long way away before you were out of the reach of the Arm of Lugh.
We still use the ‘long arm of the law,’ to describe a similar situation. If you have ever used a powerful flashlight you have momentarily taken on the part of a god of light illuminating at a distance. The long arm of light.
Since Lugh died regularly to ensure your ancestors a good harvest of grain, and the next year’s summer, it might be a nice idea to add a special home cooked loaf, bun or even a cookie into any ritual you use during Lughnassah.. If you are a fine cook then invent your own item, name it after him, and eat it once a year at the beginning of August. And then some of you could make a special candle or incense in his honor. I’m sure he would approve. And what harm!
