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Welcome to Lammas, the season of the little harvest. If you are new to Hedge Mystic (thanks for subscribing; I’m delighted you’re here), you’ll quickly come to understand that following the season wheel is a foundational practice here.
If you’ve been reading for a while, you’re probably anticipating the next installment in The School of the Seasons. The School of the Seasons is a series of hidden pages on the Hedge Mystic website only for subscribers (free and paid). (For those who are paid subscribers, I’m deeply thankful for your continued financial support. It means the world to me.)
I began The School of the Seasons on Imbolc, 2024, at the first stirring of spring deep in the belly of the earth. Each season, I provide materials that comprise a personal, creative, and introspective at-home retreat to help you experience and explore the season.
You can find the School of the Seasons Lammas Exploration & Experience HERE.
In this installment, you get…
an introductory video
history and background of Lammas/Lughnasadh
gods and goddess mythology related to the season
folklore and customs
Lammas blessing ceremony [video]
creative invitations
journaling prompts
beautiful imagery and art examples
The Season of Lammas
Lammas (Lammas, Anglo-Saxon/Christian, and Lughnsadh, Celtic-Pagan) is a special time of the year for me. Lammas is the cross-quarter holy day on the wheel of the year that opens the harvest season. Falling midway between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox, its position in the seasonal sweep of the year honors a distinct shift in profound and subtle energy.
Solstices and equinoxes are celestial events that we can see and measure; in that sense, they are “fixed,” especially for us, as we have the technology to precisely measure and predict them. But even for our ancestors, with their technology of stone circles, monoliths, buildings, and structural alignments, measuring and predicting the solstices and equinoxes was possible with quite a bit of precision.
One gets the sense that the higher powers of the heavens ordain and fix the solstices and equinoxes in time and space, and we simply observe them.
The cross-quarter days, however, have a far more intimate and human origin.
Lammas is the “little harvest”. A foretaste of what is to come. The first fruit of Mother Earth is grain, and soon enough, the fruit and vegetable harvests will follow, and finally, the harvest will end just as frost tinges on the earth.
More than any other holiday on the Wheel of the Year, Lammas is in tune with the imperceptible and prescient movements of nature.
Lammas demonstrates and guide us in our own intuitive knowing. We sense the slight and subtle cues in nature that hint at the coming change of seasons.
The Earth Mother comes to us in many forms during the season of Lammas.
These late summer months belong to Our Lady, the Grain Mother, the Earth Mother, Demeter, and Ceres.
There’s a rich tradition honoring the goodness of the goddess in many forms from late July through the final harvest at Samhain.
Currently, I’m honoring her with flowers from the garden and field and delving into her Christian form using some ancient prayers to Our Lady, as well as the beautiful music of a medieval Lammas Mass offered to Her.
If you enjoy Medieval Music, the female vocal group Anonymous 4 has a beautiful Lammas Ladymass, 13th and 14th century English Chant and Polyphony. Listen on Amazon Music HERE
The Earth mother, in all of her many forms, knows her cycle.
The tree swallows know to gather, the underground world of the fungi know to emerge as mushrooms above ground, nuts know to ripen and fall from the trees, bears know to grow fat, and we know to turn our attention inward to our soul’s inner journey, embracing our wise crone.
Falling on August 1 and celebrated through September 1, Lammas may feel a little out of sync with the season.
August is still a “summer” month, and here in the northern hemisphere, we don’t really start thinking of harvest until October.
But Lammas takes note and honors the beginnings of what is surely coming, a harvest full and bountiful.
It is the first harvest, the beginning of an entirely new season in the cycle of life, and the opening of a doorway into a new energy.
Lammas is when you are invited to notice, honor, and celebrate the little harvest in your inner landscape right now.
I always greet Lammas with great joy, being an autumn person.
The season of ripening, abundance, bittersweet nostalgia, and, most importantly, the descent into the darkness of both the year and my inner world calls to me like a siren song each year.
The journey into the darkness of the inner world is irresistible.
Lammas marks the turn when the Earth Mother slowly begins to ripen into the Crone of Winter.
Every cool morning or chilly evening hints at the return of the Cailleach, who brings the winter storms.
But long before those storms arrive, the earth mellows and relaxes in the golden light of the late summer sun.
Lammas is sweet, soft, and fragrant.
This work of traveling the Wheel of the Year, looking for lessons from the Earth, takes you deeper, one layer, one small step at a time.
This is the month to celebrate all of the small victories, epiphanies, transformations, ideas, understandings, shifts, and movements your soul has experienced since the beginning of The Wheel last November 1.
Journal Your Lammas Experiences, explore visually or through writing
Questions for the Little Harvest
What insights and inner knowings are rising to meet you now in this season?
How do you sense yourself changing, expanding, and ripening in small “little harvest” ways?
What do you need in your life to continue to deepen your journey?
What will support an even bigger and continued harvest of wisdom as you move forward?
Lammas is a festival of regrets and farewells, as well as a celebration of the harvest.
The little harvest is the beginning of the process of scattering and harvesting seeds.
Flowers are spent, and trees are dropping fruit and nuts. We begin to walk the path toward the death and decay that will fuel next year’s renewal and growth.
Regrets and Farewells:
Think of the things you meant to do this summer or this year that are not coming to fruition.
What is passing from your life?
What is over? Say goodbye to it.
This Autumn, let something die.
A worry, a relationship, a project that has run its course.Let go of anxiety over the future.
Let go of guilt.
Let go of other people’s dreams for you.Let go of the fear that happiness or success
or love or joyousness somehow isn’t for you.
Let go of feeling unwanted.Go outside, can you feel how deeply
your presence is craved here?
Let go of the small and burdensome things.Gifts never opened. Keys without a lock.
Broken earrings, old love letters,
the ephemera on your fridge.
As David Whyte writes, “Anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.” This Autumn, let go of all the clothes, (and old selves), you have outgrown.
Let go of comparison.
Let go of doubt.
Let go of the feeling that you are somehow not good enough.
Because every imperfect apple that lays soft in your hands, and every ray of low Autumn sunlight that warms you through woolens will tell you a different story, a much truer story. The story that you are more, much more, than enough. That you bless this world simply by being alive.
~ Asia Suler
About the Cross Quarter Days of Lammas and Lughnasadh
Cross-quarter festivals on the Wheel of the Year are always complex, containing some of the energy of the previous season and some of the energy of the coming season. So it is with Lammas.
Lammas and Lughnasadh are different celebrations that both fall on August 1. Yet they both draw from the same swirling pool of mixed energies.
The energizing, catalyzing, manifesting energy of Summer Solstice and the slowing energy of ripening, completion, and harvest exist together during this season.
While the energies are the same as the “little harvest,” the first grain harvest of the year, their stories are different.
Lughnasadh celebrates the Celtic sun god Lugh (and a bit about his mother); Lammas is an Anglo-Saxon Christian celebration that consecrates the bread made with the first grain harvest.
Lammas feels more familiar to me, so I focus my attention there. I also appreciate the goddess as embodied in the earth, giving the fruits of her body to her children to bring them sustenance and joy.
Poetry
Lammas
Lammas
that strange season
so much of summer yet betrayed
by a single red leaf
and ripe berries
growth slows
and the fatness of the earth
splits its seams
and offers up gifts
She is golden,
sways and moves
with the breeze
an ocean of grain
we know the earth as mother
her grain becomes bread
consecrated to life
the food of our communion
gather what is good
bake your bread
and fortify our soul
rejoice now for the
night is coming
Lammas is a gentle season, yet it points to bigger changes that are coming just around the seasonal corner.
If you would like to explore where you are now in this season of your life, what from the past is still influencing you, and what may be in store as the autumn seasons unfold and the year winds down, I’d suggest a Tarot reading.
Beginning at this time of year and through Samhain, I typically get many requests for readings. The autumn seasons seem to be especially suited to working with the Tarot as a tool for self-reflection and gaining a deep intuitive understanding of your life’s journey. I think it has to do with the thinning of the veil as the year slowly moves towards a close and our desire to put into perspective what’s happened since the beginning of the year, allowing us to shift gears and make informed changes before the year runs out.
From Lammas, August 1, through the autumn equinox, September 23, 45 min., Celtic Cross Tarot Readings are $79 for all Hedge Mystic subscribers; paid subscribers receive an additional 15 minutes for a full hour reading.
Learn more about my approach to Tarot and book your reading HERE.
Remember to find the School of the Seasons Lammas Exploration & Experience HERE.
The comments section is a safe and welcoming space to share your insights and experiences.
Comments and conversation are always appreciated and enjoyed, so feel free to let your voice be heard. I read them all and try to respond to each one.
Thank you for reading Hedge Mystic and participating in this vibrant and growing community of creative, spiritual humans. You are always welcome here, appreciated, and loved.
I appreciate the depth and richness with which you live your life and that you give this freely. It means so much. I just found out that a nun I am close to, that holds catholic mysteries close and has been very mothering to me has aggressive lung cancer. That is all I can think of with fall and winter coming. I am grateful for the things she has taught me, being an unmothered child. That is also a harvest. But, I miss her already.
Blessings from the southern hemisphere