The Wheel of the Year
debunking the myths
The Eightfold Wheel – the seasonal cycle of Wiccan festivals – did not spring fully formed, but were created over time by Gerald Gardner, the father of Wicca. The content of the festivals was originally skimpy. Doreen Valiente (one of Gardner’s high priestesses) wrote in her book Witchcraft for Tomorrow that the basic form of Gardnerian rituals were published in Gardner’s fictional work High Magic’s Aid and that rituals as used when she was initiated by Gardner were practically identical with these. She says that Gardner told her the rituals he recorded were fragmentary. The Eightfold Wheel itself is subdivided into the ‘greater’ festivals of Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh and Samhain, with the ‘lesser’ festivals of the solar year, the solstices and equinoxes, almost appearing to have been tacked on as an afterthought.
Valiente says of the festivals: “These are the natural divisions of the year, and all of them were celebrated by our pagan Celtic ancestors in Druidic times.” In his book Druid Mysteries, Philip Carr-Gomm states “Gerald Gardner, with the help of Ross [Nichols], had introduced ‘Traditional British Wicca’ to the public… Both men drew on folklore, mythology and the Western magical tradition to create new kinds of spiritual practice rooted in the pre-Christian traditions of the British Isles and Ireland.” Nichols (who used the name Nuinn as founder of the Druidic Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids) was a member of the Ancient Druid Order, as was Gardner. He joined Gardner’s Five Acres naturist club and helped edit Gardner’s book Witchcraft Today. It seems likely the two were friends during the late forties and Carr-Gomm credits Nichols and Gardner with joint responsibility for founding modern paganism. Nichols may have influenced Gardner in developing an existing prediliction towards the pre-Christian Celtic religion as a basis for the Eightfold Festivals. If so, he was already building on the works of Graves and Murray, which were so influential in the early years of Wicca and modern paganism.
picture: the Wheel of the Year painted by Vivienne Shanley, (photo by Midnightblue Owl, Wikimedia Commons)
Gardner acquired his home ‘‘Witches’ Cottage” around 1945/6 and sketched out rituals to run in it between about 1947 and 1948. These notes were later published as Ye Bok of Ye Art Magical. Apart from a basic ritual, his main concern were initiations. These were carried out a man, working alone, and draw heavily upon the ceremonial magic of the period. This left the development of other rituals, such as the seasonal rituals and the emergence of a woman as High Priestess, to the Book of Shadows, which was written and rewritten during the period 1949 to 1953. For these, Gardner used the ‘greater sabbats’ identified by Margaret Murray and drew on her work for content. Robert Graves’ poetic work The White Goddess was published in 1948, and Gardner may have relied on this for background. Later still, the Farrars developed rituals for the equinoxes and solstices.
Graves never claimed his work was factual, and Murray’s witch books were discredited by academics as bad research almost as soon as they were published. However, the ideas generated by both authors continue to influence popular paganism well into the 21st century. Back at the time Gardner was creating Wicca, there was no internet and far less academic research about pagan subjects. This article is about how far the eight festivals are based on anything historical.
Ostara
Ostara was invented in the 1970s to sell pagan calendars. I’m not joking. Oh, the spring equinox existed in the Wiccan Wheel, but it was called… the spring equinox. If you don’t believe me, check out this Gardnerian Book of Shadows on the Sacred Texts website. That BoS was released into the wild by a Wiccan by the name of Aidan Kelly, the guy who invented Ostara. If you want to read his admission, check out the link under Mabon, below. In it he says “The spring equinox was almost a nonissue. The Venerable Bede says that it was sacred to a Saxon Goddess, Ostara or Eostre, from whom we get the name “Easter,” which, almost everywhere else, is called something like “Pasch,” derived, of course, from Pesach.” Actually, he’s wrong about Ostara. Let’s go back to Bede.
Bede was a monk living in what is now Northumberland in northern England. Back then, before England existed, Northumberland was an influential borderland between Celtics Britons living in what is now Scotland and Cumbria to the north and west, and other early English kingdoms to the south. He wrote a book about time, in which he listed the pre-Christian lunar months used in the kingdoms before the adoption of the Roman Julian calendar. He says two of these months were named after goddesses: Hretha and Eostre. This is everything he says abut these goddesses:
The first month, which the Latins call January, is Giuli; February is called Solmonath; March Hrethmonath; April, Eosturmonath; May, Thrimilchi; June, Litha; July, also Litha; August, Weodmonath; September, Halegmonath; October, Winterfilleth; November, Blodmonath; December, Giuli, the same name by which January is called. ...
... Hrethmonath is named for their goddess Hretha, to whom they sacrificed at this time. Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated "Paschal month", and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.
image: The English kingdoms at the time of Bede (Mike Christie at English Wikipedia)
Notice that Bede doesn’t mention anyone named Ostara. That comes from Jacob Grimm, a thousand years later, in Germany. He was one of the famous Brothers Grimm, who collected fairy tales in 19th century. Jacob was a philologist who speculated there may have been a continental Germanic spring goddess similar to the Eostre mentioned by Bede, and that her name might have been ‘Ostara’ from the Germanic name for the month of April. Yes, that’s April, not March: Hretha was the goddess of the month of the spring equinox. Despite this, Kelly assigned Ostara as the name of the equinox and a festival (and goddess) was born.
“T’was on the May Day morning that we all got up at dark,
To welcome in the daybreak with a frolic in the park.
They told us that this was the point the god conceived a son
But the thing which just confused me was that dad and child were one.”
Beltane
The identification of witchcraft with four ‘greater sabbats’ was made by Murray in The Witch Cult in Western Europe and the later The God of the Witches. This identification came from a single deposition by an accused witch (Issobell Smyth) at Forfar in 1661. Murray synthesised ideas drawn from various cultures without attempting to separate the various strands or investigate the authenticity of their history. It was she who introduced the idea that this was all part and parcel of a single religion whose origins went back to the Stone Age; an idea later taken up by others, notably Doreen Valiente, and still believed by some pagans. In The Witches’ Bible, the Farrars were , in his popular work published in 1971 What Witches Do (1971), Stewart Farrar adopted Murray’s ideas wholesale, including the idea of a universal set of pre-Christian Celtic sabbats. However, by the time he and Janet published The Witches’ Bible, 20 years later, they were far more careful in their treatment of this theory and skirted both wholehearted espousal or outright denunciation. As there is no supporting evidence for the idea, they would have been better to junk it.
The claims for Beltane are that it was one of the two great fire festivals celebrated by the Celts and was a time of sexual games. Also, that its various elements – maypoles, fires, hobby horses etc - have survived Christianity and the pre-Christian Anglo Saxon religion in England.
In fact, the celebration of Beltane by fire and sexual games is not attested outside of Ireland and those parts of Western Scotland heavily influenced by Ireland. In their book A History of Pagan Europe, Pennick and Jones attempt to link Beltane to the Gauls through the Gaulish god Belenus, and to wider Celtic practice on the basis it is the only date mentioned in 9th-century Welsh texts. However, any connection with Belenus is unproven and simply made on the basis of both words containing the element ‘bel’ meaning ‘bright’ or ‘lucky’. In the case of Belenus, this indicates his relationship to the sun, whereas ‘beltane’ means bright fire or lucky fire, a reference to the two fires made through which cattle were driven to ward off illness after the winter.
picture: Beltane festival poster by Janice Duke on Deviant Art, creative commons licence.
In The Stations of the Sun, Hutton points out there is no evidence in Irish literature of any worship of the Gaulish god Belenus and only two slightly dubious dedications to him in Britain. The earliest Irish reference to Beltane is in a late 9th century Irish text, Sanas Chormaic, and there is evidence that the original name of this festival in Ireland may have been Cetshamaine. Apart from the reference by Cormac, there is a gap of any mention until the 17th century, and that may be reproducing Cormac and a later medieval legend. The Welsh references make no mention at all of anything we associate with Beltane.
That said, Hutton notes that by the early 19th century, there are records in Ireland of cows still being driven between two fires, as well as May Day rituals associated with fire in the Scottish Highlands and Islands during the 18th-century and in the Isle of Man during the 19th century. Within England, the small amount of such evidence is confined to Cumbria and Devon & Cornwall, both old Celtic areas. There are also a couple of references in the 19th century to similar ceremonies in parts of Anglicised Wales. One complication here is that a long history of spring fire festivals are heavily attested on the continent in those areas which were Germanic rather than Celtic. As to the legend that all fires in Ireland were extinguished at Beltane and lit from a single sacred fire at Tara, in The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles Hutton points out this came from the 7th-century Life of St Patrick to make the point that Patrick had a confrontation with the pagan priests over the episode by lighting his Easter fire. This would have been impossible as there is no way that Easter and Beltane can fall upon the same day (even using the old Celtic Christian method of calculating Easter).
picture: People dancing around a maypole in Sweden, 1996 by Mikael Häggström (Wikimedia Commons)
The maypole has a history stretching back at least as far as the 13th century. It was celebrated most in those areas of England which had been Anglo Saxon, though there is 14th-century evidence for one in Central Wales. This may be due to an association of the maypole with the Irmingsul (a sacred tree or pole) of the Germanic religion of Scandinavia, Germany and early England, though there is no evidence for this. Mazes appear to be a late Medieval creation to test the athletic skill of runners.
All of this seems to indicate that a celebration of May was common to both the Germanic and Celtic pre-Christian peoples, and that the ‘traditions’ pagans associate with Beltane draw partly upon a common base of ritual drawn from both religions, rather than being purely and universally Celtic in nature. Furthermore, the universality of some features may be more common outside of the Celtic tradition, and some may not draw upon pre-Christian Celtic ritual at all.
“T’was on the day of Lugh’s big feast we made a man of bread,
And they took a great big sword and then they poked him in the head.
They told us that the god had died to give us all our corn.
But if god was killed at Lughnasadh who died midsummer morn”
Lughnasadh/Lammas
In modern pagan rites this time of the year is associated with an ancient festival to the Celtic god Lugh. The references to a dying god, made popular by James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, are made explicit by the celebration of killing a god in the guise of John Barleycorn. In fact, The Golden Bough, together with the relevant works of Murray and Graves, has long since been regarded as academically unreliable, so we must look elsewhere for the history of this festival.
Pennick and Jones acknowledge a late introduction of this festival into Ireland. They relate the tale of its institution by Lugh to celebrate his foster mother Tailtiu. Hutton disposes of this legend with the comment that it was disproved in the 1950s and “it looks as if [Tailtiu] was herself an early medieval poetic invention.” In her popular book on the Celts, Nora Chadwick asserts a universality to this festival, on the continent as well as in Ireland, though this is not supported by either Aldhouse-Green or Hutton. Indeed, Hutton states that there is no evidence of dedications to Lugh from Gaul and that the character of the festival relies entirely upon Maire MacNeill’s work The Festival of Lughnasa, published in 1962, which draws upon late Irish folklore. Outside of Ireland, there seems to be some evidence for the presence of the festival in the Isle of Man and possibly in parts of Wales, but not in Scotland.
On the other hand, there is some evidence of the Christian Anglo Saxon harvest festival of Lammas (loaf mass), which is likely to have been built on a pre-existing end-of-harvest celebration. The Anglo Saxon name for the month of harvest was ‘Holy Month’, which may be a reference to the significance of the harvest to people’s well being and a chance to give thanks to the gods for their food. There is a character in ancient Germanic literaure (who appears as a king in the early English poem Beowulf) whose name means ‘sheaf’ and who had a son whose name means ‘barley’.
July was commonly the hardest month of the year for a pre-industrial farming economy and many of the poor, who could not afford to buy bread and had run through their own stocks, died during July. So the bringing in of the harvest during July and August was the first time in months that most people would have a good meal and drink. Hutton records innumerable examples of harvest rituals from all over the British Isles dating from the 16th century.
“T’was at Samhain the god went down to join the dead in Hel
And my brain went down along with him ‘cos far I could tell
The last time that we’d killed him was back three months or so
And I don’t know any mortal being that’d take so long to go.”
Samhain
Unlike the other festivals, there is a little evidence that this one was celebrated by the continental Celts or in Wales, and so it may have been a purely irish festival. Aldhouse-Green records this is when the legendary triple killing of Irish kings took place. It was also a time when the Sidhe opened their hills and lakes to ride out, as recounted in many songs and tales such as the Scottish ballad Tamlain. Although Hutton recounts that Irish sources speak of civil meetings, nothing is said about any religious rites.
Popular pagan mythology claims that the Christian church ‘stole’ Samhain by supplanting it with All Saints (1 November) and All Souls (2 November). The history of the Christian festivals doesn’t support this, whereas there is evidence that the modern pagan association of Samhain with the dead comes from the Christian festival.
picture: The Wild Hunt by Irenhorrors on Deviant Art. Creative Commons licence.
The original All Saints’ Day was celebrated by the Christian church at various times around Easter or Pentecost. Chruches in the Mediterranean region tended to hold a fest of the martyrs on 13th May, which coincided with the end of the ancient Roman festival of Lemuria, to the unquiet dead. This was formally endorsed by the pope in Rome in 609. However, by the 8th century, churches in England and Germany were holding their feast to the martyrs at on 1st November, as a rival for the Germanic pagan festival of Winter Nights. In the 8th century, Pope Gregory VI moved the festival of All Saints to 1st November for the whole Western church. Prior to that, the church in Ireland celebrated the feast of the martyrs on 20 April. In other words, the change in date had nothing to do with Samhain and everything to do with Winter Nights. (See R Hutton Stations of the Sun).
All Souls was dated as 2nd November from the 10th century, in line with All Saints, and this appears to have transferred the association with the dead from May to the beginning of November. Frazer and others, viewing things through the wrong end of the telescope in the 19th century, asserted that Samhain had been the Celtic festival for the dead, though there is no evidence for this.
Any association of fires with Samhain seems to be from the 16th century, and confined to Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man, rather than there being anything from Ireland. These appear to have been for the purposes of protection and purification, like the Beltane fires and those at midsummer (see ‘Solstices’ below).
“T’was on the summer solstice that the poor old oak king died.
And we all stood there and watched it while a number of us cried.
He gave up life for some reason I never really knew;
But they told me it was worthy and it looked convincing, too.
T’was at the Yule that I began to wonder what they’re on
When another bleedin’ king got killed while the goddess had a son.
And I couldn’t work out how it was that all the buggers said
That they believed in harming none while a third one lay there dead.”
The Solstices
This is the time when pagan imagery comes into its own. Not content with having a dying god at Lughnasadh and possibly Samhain, here we meet the Oak King/Holly King construct - although it might make more sense intuitively for two rulers over the two halves of the year to do battle at Beltane and Samhain, which would be in keeping with the two halves of the pre-Christian Celtic calendar. So, why the solstices?
Blame the Farrars. They drew heavily on Graves’ The White Goddess for their Oak/Holly King mythology. Graves drafted his book during January 1944 and developed it during 1945. He stated in his foreword that the book was not for anyone of a ‘rigidly scientific mind’, appealing to the poetry of the soul. Unfortunately, many pagans seem to have taken it as literal truth. Graves himself refers back to Frazer’s (discredited) The Golden Bough. The name of his book is a direct reference to the first story in it, about a ritually slain king or priest of Diana. Through a series of speculations, Frazer links this king with a ritual marriage to Diana and to the oak tree. Graves takes this a step further, and links Frazer’s Midsummer fire festivals with the tree and the killing of the king to produce an Oak King as the pre-eminent example of the ritually slain king. So, what about holly?
picture: Oak/Holly King by Altocello on deviant art
Graves says: “The Holly appears in the originally Irish Romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Green Knight is an immortal giant whose club is the holly bush. He and Sir Gawain… make a compact to behead one another at alternate New Years – meaning midsummer and midwinter – but, in effect, the Holly Knight spares the Oak Knight.” Graves links this with “the goddess Creiddylad for whom, in Welsh myth, the Oak Knight and the Holly Knight fought every first of May.” He also claims holly was not introduced into Britain until the 16th century and therefore the original ‘holly’ must have been the scarlet-oak, making the Oak and Holly Knights twins.
None of this is true. The Irish tale he refers to as the original - Briccriu’s Feast - bears only a slight resemblance to the English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, mainly as the theme of a challenge to a hero. In the Irish text, the battle takes place on two successive days; in Sir Gawain, both battles take place at New Year. Graves links Cuchulain in the Irish tale with Hercules because he links the oak with Hercules (as tenuously as ever). In the English tale, the Green Knight carries a bunch of holly. Graves turns this into a club – a weapon associated with Hercules, ignoring the Knight’s great axe, which he uses in the battles. Turning to Creiddylad, although she’s mentioned in the Mabinogi tale Kilhwch and Olwen, oak and holly are not mentioned but that doesn’t stop Graves from inventing their presence. And, of course, the fight in that tale takes places at the 1st May. Oh, and the holly is native to Britain.
Midwinter
Having disposed of the main theme of many modern pagan celebrations, what remains? Well, there’s a fair amount of evidence for the religious observance of midwinter (and especially midsummer) among the Germanic and Norse religions, denigrated by Murray as ‘solsticial invaders’. The early English luni-solar calendar had two months surrounding each solstice: ‘before Geola’ [Yule] and ‘after Geola’. at midwinter and ‘before Litha’ and ‘after Litha’ at midsummer. No other months in the calendar are named in the same way, which indicates the importance of these times of the year. According to Bede, Yule was the major festival celebrated by the pre-Christian Anglo Saxons, who called it Modraniht or Mother’s Night. This may be a reference to the continental worship of The Matronae, or an equivalent to the Scandinavian observance of disablot for either ancestral or supernatural female guardians. However, there is no evidence to support Bede’s assertion and by the time he was writing, Christmas Eve had become a celebration of the Virgin Mary. Despite this, the weight of continental evidence indicates Yule was an important festival among the Nordic, Germanic and - by extension - Anglo Saxon people. A hundred and fifty years after Bede died, King Alfred codified pre-existing laws among the English kingdoms and included a 12 day festival for Christmas, giving all freeman the right not to work. It seems entirely possibly that, like harvest, Christianity adopted an existing pattern of behaviour for its own festival.
We can’t leave midwinter without a note about mistletoe. These days, social media is fond of circulating a tale about it stemming from a Scandinavian myth about Balder and claiming that one variation has Frigg declaring mistletoe a symbol of love and vowing to plant a kiss on all those who passed beneath it. This addition is purely modern and not part of the original story, where mistletoe causes Balder’s death.
The strongest ancient link with the plant comes from Celtic druids. Indeed, the ‘golden bough’ in the title of Frazer’s book refers to the plant. Pliny the Elder, a 1st-century Roman naturalist, wrote “The Druids – for so they [the Celts] call their magi – hold nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and the tree on which it grows provided it is a robur [oak]…it is the notion with them that everything that grows on [the oak tree] has been sent immediately from heaven, and that the mistletoe upon it is a proof that the tree has been selected by God himself as an object of his especial favour. However, mistletoe is rarely found on the robur; and when it is, it is gathered …particularly on the sixth day of the moon, the day that begins their months and years… wearing a white robe, the priest climbs the tree and cuts the mistletoe with a golden sickle.” (Natural History, 16.95).
This sounds as though the ritual took place at the beginning of the year. However, the only Celtic calendar we have from this time is the Coligny calendar, which shows that the two halves of the year began in (roughly) May and November. ‘Roughly’ because our May and November are solar months and the calendar uses lunar months. So the winter half will have begun (taking Pliny’s timing) on the sixth moonrise after the new moon that occurred closest to the time of year we call November. So, at Samhain rather than midwinter.
picture: a fragment from the Gaulish Coligny calendar courtesy of Nantonos via Wikimedia Commons
Midsummer
Midsummer has a great deal more going for it as an ancient religious rite and a fire festival, not only among the continental Germanic and Scandinavian peoples but also among the Gauls. Hutton notes a 4th-century source about rolling a burning wheel downhill in Aquitane and reassembling the charred pieces in a pagan temple. Festive fires in France are recorded in the early 12th century. British sources begin in the 13th century, with carrying fire around cornfields on Midsummer Eve. Grimm quotes many continental references among the northerly Germanic peoples with dancing round and jumping over bonfires. In Ireland the records are from the 18th century, with the earliest in areas of English influence. In later records, the practice is common throughout Ireland and more popular than at Beltane, with jumping over fires again being prominent.
picture: Butser Ancient Farm’s Fire Festival 2019, with the Pentacle Drummers performing in front of the remains of the bonfire. (Wikimedia Commons)
Imbolc
“T’was in the February that they told me the goddess
Who’d had a babe at Yuletide was a virgin nonetheless.
Now I was a bloody Christian ‘til it all stuck in my craw
And this virgin mother business – well, I’ve heard it all before.”
This festival appears to be confined to Ireland, where it was overlaid by the celebration of St Bridget. Its origin seems to be pastoral, as its name means ‘ewe’s milk’ according to the Tochmarc Emire of the Ulster Cycle, and it would occur at about the time of first lambing. However, although this is the meaning assigned to it by Cormac in the 9th century, Hutton remarks that modern Celticists have claimed this is linguistically impossible.
At some time Imbolc was linked with Brigit, who was both one goddess and three (all of whom bore the same name). She was goddess of healing, smithwork and poetry as well as of fertility, as might be expected from a festival of lambing. Berresford Ellis and Aldhouse-Green both speculate on whether she can be linked with the goddess Brigantia, to whom dedications appear in Gaul, Scotland, England and Anglesey.
Most of the rest of any customs associated with this festival are late (18th century) and Christian.
picture: Saint Brigid's cross, made from rushes from County Down – courtesy of Culnacreann via Wikimedia Commons
“T’was at the autumn equinox we all joined hand in hand
And we formed a great big circle and we chanted and we sang.
As there’s nothing going on just now and no one has a clue
Of what it is we celebrate, but that’s what pagans do.”
Autumn Equinox
I’ll get on to ‘Mabon’ shortly. First, let’s look at what an equinox is. Put simply, it’s the red line in the diagram. It’s when the sun rises in the east and sets almost immediately opposite in the sky. It’s when night is the same length as day. ‘Equinox’ means ‘equal light’. Dark and light are in balance.
After the autumn equinox, the sun rises and sets a bit closer to north every day, and the light gets shorter, until it reaches its point furthest north at the winter solstice. The teal segment shows how narrow the space is between its rising point and where it sets in the UK. It’s different in other parts of the world. After the winter solstice it widens until it reaches the red line again at the spring equinox, and then widens out soutwards to its summer solstice rising and setting points (the yellow segment). Wherever we are in the UK, we’re the observer at the red dot. Once you’re aware that the sun changes where it rises and sets, you can map it out around where you live. The solstices and the equinoxes made me fascinated with this and I hope to start blogging about it. So, if you want to know more, you’ll know where to come.
picture: the angles of the sun through the year
OK, back to Mabon.
The god features in the Welsh poems Culhwch ac Olwen in the Mabinogi and Pa gur, which appears in the Black Book of Carmarthen. Both place him within Arthurian literature. His name means ‘ great son’ (Maponos in Gaulish), while his mother’s name - Madron - means mother. She may be the Gaulish great mother, Dea Matrona. And that’s more or less it.
The only date associated with Mabon occurs on the Coligny calendar, where the name Mapanos occurs besides the fifteenth day of Riuros or Rivros, which is occurs in July-August in our calendar.
When he was constructing a commercial pagan wheel of the year in the 1970s, Aidan Kelly used names of months in the Heathen/Asatru Germanic calendar for midsummer and the spring equinox, but he couldn’t find anything for the autumn equinox. He found the Eleusinian mysteries in ancient Greece had been tied to that time of the year. They centre around Demeter’s search for her daughter Kore or Persephone, and he felt he found a rough comparison with Mabon son of the Mother, who was (according to the tale in the Mabinogi) stolen from her. So, he used the name for his calendar. You can read his full explanation here.
Conclusion
The greater sabbats were not universally celebrated throughout the pre-Christian Celtic world and we don’t know much about how pagan Celts celebrate most of them. What evidence we have comes from well within the Christian period. As to the lesser sabbats, there is little evidence for the celebration of any of these by any pagan Celts, apart from midsummer. Despite this, unhistorical grandiose claims still circulate online.
The history of the festivals in the Eightfold Wheel as touted on many websites are modern myth constructed of – at best – fragments of contemporaneous evidence liberally mixed with later medieval folklore and wishful thinking that this connects us with the past. As with everything, it is important to see the difference between what there is evidence for, and what we choose to construct for ourselves. But let us not confuse the two.
Alexa Duir © 2003 updated 2024
Sources
P Berresford Ellis, The Ancient World of the Celts, Constable 1998
Philip Carr-Gomm Druid Mysteries, Rider Books 2002
Nora Chadwick, The Celts, Penguin 1971
Janet and Stewart Farrar, A Witches’ Bible, Phoenix 1996
James Frazer, The Golden Bough
Robert Graves, The White Goddess, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2000
Miranda J. Green, Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend, Thames & Hudson 1992
J L C Grimm Teutonic Mythology 1882-8, quoted in Gale R Owen Rites and Religions of the Anglo Saxons Barnes & Noble 1996
Ronald Hutton The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British, Isles Blackwell 1991
Ronald Hutton The Stations of The Sun, OUP 1996
Ronald Hutton Triumph of the Moon, OUP 1999
Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick A History of Pagan Europe, Routledge 1995
J Simpson and S Roud, A Dictionary of English Folklore, OUP 2000
Doreen Valiente Witchcraft for Tomorrow, Robert Hale 1978
poetry quotes from The Wheel of the Year, Alexa Duir, 2003