Art by Gwen Davies. Click the image to visit her Etsy shop.
With the autumn equinox just a few days away (Sept. 22), and Halloween/Samhain not far off, I find myself in a familiar thought pattern. I often feel very separated from the cycles of the year that modern pagans follow, based on much older Irish practices. In part that’s because I do not live an agrarian life dictated closely by cycles of farming and livestock, and in part it’s because of the way the seasons work here in coastal Northern California.
There are three harvest festivals in the pagan calendar. They include Lughnasadh in early August, named after the Irish warrior-god Lugh (in the Irish language, August is called Lunasa); the autumn equinox; and Samhain, the official start to the “dark half of the year” in neopagan culture (even though that literally begins the day after the equinox, when the nights begin to be longer than the days). In Irish, September is called Meán Fómhair (or middle of harvest), October is Deireadh Fómhair (end of harvest), and November is Samhain.
To some extent, it’s true that these months are peak harvest season in California, too; the tomatoes, corn, stone fruits and figs are at their best in August and September. At the same time, summer is very much the dead season here. It’s hot and dry, the hillsides full of dead grasses and the air parched and stultifying. Wildfires come and renew the ground (and, unfortunately, destroy many homes and communities and threaten lives).
Here in San Francisco, September and October are our “summer” months, when the fog dissipates and we have gently sunny, warm days. There’s a reason our two biggest music festivals (Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and Outside Lands) are in the August-October months, and why the Blue Angels usually come here the first weekend of October.
But when the rains begin, northern California comes alive again. Our rolling hills are so green, they resemble landscapes in Ireland and rural England. It doesn’t snow close to the coast in California, and many of our trees are evergreen. The leaves don’t change color, and many never fall at all. And so winter, between late December and mid-March, is not a dead season for us. Yes, it’s colder and the days are more dark than light, but the Earth feels vibrantly alive as creeks and rivers fill with rainwater and new grasses grow. Oxalis and miner’s lettuce flourish, as do many “winter” crops, including kale and Brussels sprouts.
And so, I’ve never been able to figure out a “wheel of the year” type calendar that would work for coastal Northern California. Probably someone has. If so, I’d love to hear about it.
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Along with all this, as October draws near I find myself thinking about one of my favorite goddesses, Persephone. As the story goes, she was kidnapped by Hades, the king of the underworld/land of the dead, after he courted her for many months. They married and she became queen of the underworld (note that this is not the same thing as Hell; it’s the place where souls go after they die).
Her mother, Demeter, goddess of the crops, searched high and low, and eventually found Persephone in the underworld. She tried to get Persephone to come home, but Persephone had eaten the food of the dead, six pomegranate seeds, and thus couldn’t leave -- at least not permanently. Demeter and Hades agreed that Persephone would spend six months on the surface, and during those months, Demeter would help the crops grow (spring and summer). But when Persephone was with Hades, the fields would go fallow (autumn and winter).
Aside from my fondness for pomegranates and the underworld, I often wonder why I like Persephone so much. She’s very young, and has little agency of her own. She’s a pawn in the battle between Hades and Demeter. Her husband is a stern guy, not a lot of fun. She’s not powerful and independent like the goddesses Erishkigal or Hecate. I suppose the younger girl in me identifies with her in many ways, and I suspect she grew into her power as queen of the underworld (as the Orpheus and Eurydice story reveals). Whatever the reason, she’s often on my mind this time of year.