An Alternative Wheel

I’ve said in many places over a lot of years now that I do not like the focus on a simple, solar narrative of the wheel of the year. I have a lot of reasons for this.

1) It disregards local difference. There are a lot of variations in climate, timings and so forth and most Pagans do not live in the bit of Europe this originated from anyway.

2) It discourages Pagans from finding out what is actually happening around them and what is unique to where they live.

3) It disregards other stories, of which there are many. Not all of nature follows the pattern of sun and trees. Many humans resonate with other living things.

4) After you’ve celebrated a few rounds of the solar story, it gets tricky to find new ways of doing it without getting bored, and you start to realise just how much you aren’t getting to explore.

So, rather than just griping about it, I am dedicating to do a thing. I’m going to put up a blog post every month over here – http://witchesandpagans.com/Alternative-Wheel/Blogger/Listings/nimue-brown.html – exploring different stories about the wheel of the year. Each month I’ll reflect on things that are happening out there in nature, often with an eye to totally subverting how those things are normally expressed in the regular wheel of the year.

June’s post landed a little late, and was all about fledglings and leaving the nest (because new beginnings are supposed to happen in the spring.) This month’s blog is all about harvests, because while normally we Pagans celebrate that in the autumn, it has a much longer season. I’m wondering what to do for August already, but you can be confident it won’t have much to do with grain harvests or bread, because this certainly isn’t the only thing going on.

The ‘traditional’ eight festivals are a simplification of the agricultural and solar year. Yes, they do draw on historical festivals, but if you read Ronald Hutton’s Stations of the Sun (and you should…) you’ll notice that there are tons of festivals in the UK alone, all through the year. Local festivals for local people, celebrating specific things. The ‘traditional’ 8 give us an easy in, a shortcut to engaging with nature and the year that can be painfully superficial. There is so much more to nature, so much more nuance to the seasons, and so much going on where you live that does not fit neatly into the story. The standard 8 have some use for shared celebrations and getting people started, but we need to recognise that they really are just a jumping off point, not the be all and end all. From a teaching perspective, the 8 are a great place to start, giving people who do not have a relationship with the natural world a way to start engaging. We shouldn’t stop there.

I’m hoping this new blog series will encourage those people who have not moved beyond the big 8, to look more closely at what actually happens around them, and to start building wheel of the year stories that reflect life as lived, in the land lived in. Druidry needs to be local, rooted in the landscape, and engaging with the actual seasons, of the actual year, as it comes.