Invented and reconstructed tradition
How calendars and practices get assembled, who assembled the ones in current use, and why a tradition's age is a fact about it rather than a verdict on it.
11 entries
- Beltane
The opening of summer in medieval Ireland, the one described rite among the four quarter-days, and why the maypole belongs to a different tradition.
- Imbolc
The thinnest attested of the four Gaelic quarter-days: a name, a season, ewes coming into milk, and no described rite anywhere in the early sources.
- Kupala and Koliada
Two well-recorded Slavic folk observances, their Christian calendar hosts, and why the eightfold Slavic wheels circulating online are recent compositions.
- Lughnasadh
The opening of harvest, the assembly at Tailtiu, and the one festival in Britain and Ireland with a serious documented case for long-term continuity.
- Mabon
The autumn equinox station of the modern eightfold year, named in 1974 after a Welsh literary figure who has no calendrical association of any kind.
- Midsummer and St John's Eve
The best-documented seasonal fire custom in Europe is medieval and Christian, attached to 23 June, and it drifts against the solstice it is named for.
- Ostara
A spring-equinox festival named in 1974 after a goddess inferred in 1835 from a month name recorded in 725. The three steps come apart cleanly.
- Samhain
The opening of winter in medieval Ireland, the royal assembly that met at it, and why the usual Halloween and All Saints story gets the chronology backwards.
- The maypole
An English and Germanic custom with several centuries of records, routinely filed under an Irish festival it has no attested connection to.
- The Wheel of the Year
The eight-festival cycle has three separate provenances, no historical community kept all eight, and it was assembled in Hertfordshire around 1958.
- Yule
A midwinter season rather than a solstice-day festival, and the reason the Christmas and Sol Invictus story is weaker than it is usually told.