Lughnassadh (Loo-nahs-ah) is the first of the three harvest Sabbats - principally a grain festival sometimes called the Sabbat of First Fruits. Corn, wheat, and barley are harvested by August (February in Australia), as are many other northern hemisphere grains. Other names for this Sabbat are First Harvest, August Eve, and Lammas, an Anglo-Saxon word meaning "loaf-mass," the Sabbat's most commonly used name.

Lughnassadh (pronounced 'loo-nus-uh') means 'the commem-oration of Lugh'. In its simplified spelling, Lunasa, it is Irish Gaelic for the month of August. As Luanda or Lansdale ('Loo-nus-duh', '-dul'), it is Scottish Gaelic for Lammas, 1st August; and the Manx equivalent is Laa Luanys or Laa Lunys. In Scotland, the period from a fortnight before Lunasda to a fortnight after is known as Iuchar, while in the Dingle Penin-sula of County Kerry the second fortnight is known as An Lughna Dubh (the dark Lugh-festival)-suggesting "that they are echoes of a lunar reckoning whereby Lughnasa would have been celebrated in conjunction with a phase of the moon" (Máire MacNeill, The Festival of Lughnasa, p. 16).

Of the Lughnassadh survivals, Ireland supplies a veritable gold-mine, partly because in Ireland rural culture has been far less eroded by urban culture than elsewhere, but also because when the Catholic religion was proscribed or persecuted, the Irish peasantry, deprived of their buildings of worship, clung all the more fervently to the open-air holy places which were all that was left to them. So, obeying an urge far older than Christianity, priests and people together climbed the sacred heights or sought out the magical wells, to mark those turning-points in Mother Earth's year which were too important to them to be unacknow-ledged merely because their churches were roofless or requisi-tioned by an alien creed.

Who was Lugh? He was a fire- and light-god of the Baal/ Hercules type; his name may be from the same root as the Latin lux, meaning light (which also gives us Lucifer, 'the light- bringer'). He is really the same god as Baal/Beli/Balor, but a later and more sophisticated version of him. In mythology, the historical replacing of one god by a later form (following invasion, for example, or a revolutionary advance in tech-nology) is often remembered as the killing, blinding or emasculation of the older by the younger, while the essential continuity is acknowledged by making the younger into the son or grandson of the elder. (If the superseded deity is a goddess, she often reappears as the wife of the newcomer.) Thus Lugh, in Irish legend, was a leader of the Tuatha De Danann ('the peoples of the Goddess Dana'), the last-but-one conquerors of Ireland in the mythological cycle, while Balor was king of the Fomors, whom the Tuatha defeated; and in the battle Lugh blinded Balor. Yet according to most versions, Balor was his grandfather, and Dana/Danu was Balor's wife. (In this case, marriage demoted Balor, not Dana.)

Other versions make Lugh Balor's son. The folklore of our own village does, apparently; as Máire MacNeill (ibid., p. 408) records: "From Ballycroy in Mayo comes a saying proverbial in thunderstorms: 'Lugh Long-arm's wind is flying in the air tonight.' 'Yes, and the sparks of his father, Balor Bóimann.' Lugh, then, is Balor all over again-and certainly associated with a technological revolution. In the legend of the Tuatha De Danaans' victory, Lugh spares the life of Bres, a captured enemy leader, in exchange for advice on ploughing, sowing and reaping. "The story clearly contains a harvest myth in which the secret of agricultural prosperity is wrested from a powerful and reluctant god by Lugh" (MacNeill, ibid., p. 5).

Lugh's superior cleverness and versatility is indicated by his titles Lugh Lámhfhada (pronounced 'loo law-vawda') and Samhiolddnach ('sawvil-dawnoch', with the 'ch' as in 'loch'), "equally skilled in all the arts". His Welsh equivalent (grandson of Bell and Don) is Llew Llaw Gyffes, variously translated as "the lion with the steady hand" (Graves) and "the shining one with the skilful hand" (Gantz).

That Lugh is also a type of the god who undergoes death and rebirth in a sacrificial mating with the Goddess, is most clearly seen in the legend of his Welsh manifestation, Llew Llaw Gyffes. Because there is much more to be grown and harvested in the coming months, Lughnassadh is not wholly void of fertility imagery. Some covens perform the Great Rite at this Sabbat, preferably in a fertile field. The God-dess is honoured and thanked for bringing forth the first fruits. She is revered and treated with the respect and care shown to any new mother. Yet this Goddess is still pregnant with the future harvests of autumn and she is nur-tured as such. It is no accident that most of the first fruits of summer came to be revered as fertility plants. Corn, wheat, potatoes, turnips, summer squash, and oats are all used in magickal spells for fertility. Portions of this harvest were thrown back onto the still growing fields both as a sacrificial gesture and to induce the autumn crops to continue to thrive.

In some covens (and in synagogues and some churches) a part of the harvest is placed on the central altar as an offering of thanks to the bountiful deities. When the rites of thanksgiving are ended, the food is taken away and given to the poor.

Lughnassadh has always been a Sabbat where only grains and vegetables were sacrificed, as animal sacrifices were usually reserved for the autumn holidays. But in Romania's Transylvanian Alps, high in the dark Carpathian Mountains, there is a ritual enacted on the first Sunday of every August that has obvious pagan roots and does involve animal sacrifice. At daybreak, a procession of peasants takes a live sow up the steep slopes of Mt. Chefleau where it is ritually slain in thanks for the abundant harvest. The blood of the animal must be allowed to flow into the earth. Then the fingers of the right hand touch the blood on the ground and are used to mark the sign of the cross-for protection and self-blessing-on the forehead. For centuries the local priests in this deeply Catholic land have tried to no avail to put a stop put to this odd and ancient ritual. The peasantry, though they now offer their thanks and prayers to the Christian God, are convinced that their next har-vest would be blighted should this ritual ever be allowed to go unobserved.

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