In Defense of Mabon: A Pagan Rant
For the uninitiated--take that literally if you want to—Mabon is the name commonly associated with the Fall (Autumnal) Equinox Sabbat (holiday) in neopagan practice. We can credit Aiden Kelly and the New Order of the Golden Dawn with dubbing the Equinox “Mabon” in the Wheel of the Year around1975. His naming of the ceremonies stuck and traveled with him as his Golden Dawn associates formed a witches Coven in California. (where else?)
There is a Welsh God of this name, Mabon (accent on the first syllable MAH-bon) with a fine story that goes along about finding the lost God who had been missing since he was 3 days old. Mabon is the only God who could help in one of a series of tasks set so that a Welsh hero could marry his lady love. Turns out Mabon was imprisoned in what is now Gloucester. They rescue him, he helps with the task, all is well. It’s in The Mabinogion. It is an important and well-known tale to Welsh people.
Because it is part of the Welsh culture and the story behind the name is largely unknown to the masses, some pagans have pressed for the abandonment of the name Mabon for the equinox since he has nothing to do with the turning of the seasons, harvest or any of the usual associations with autumn. I say good luck with that! I campaigned long and hard to get my own students to stop calling spring equinox Ostara for many of the same reasons though that Goddess is German not Welsh. I got exactly nowhere.
So today, I write this on the actual Autumnal Equinox. This morning, I joined a group online who were celebrating the sabbat and were kind enough to stream their meditation. One included 10 minutes of silence which was helpful for my busy mind. Guess who showed up? Mabon himself or perhaps a psychological projection of him from my mind. That’s a different discussion which we can winnow out another time. So, here’s what I learned, or taught myself.
True, Mabon has no Welsh cultural association with the holiday that carries his name. However, as a consciousness, divine or otherwise, he is not immutable. He grows and evolves as do all the Gods. If we are stuck thinking the myths and legends are the only things that are genuine about the Gods, and that would include the biblical ones as well, then we are trapped within a theology meant to control the magic and keep it thin rather than transformative. Their change and morphing can be infinitely varied. What is important in this holiday is the 100,000s of times the sabbat has been called by his name. That made him curious. He stopped in and watched. He heard what people said about harvests and thanksgivings and balance and thought “Yeah. I can do that!” so I don’t know when, but Mabon the divine embraced the Mabon sabbat. At least that’s what I understood today. That is a message similar to ones I’ve had before about other deities. They form and solidify with our interaction. Mabon’s association has been strengthened when circles call him by name to stand as the God in the ritual, which he is happy to do. We used to call him and his Great Mother Goddess Madrone in our Web rituals, as I did today.
This won’t, I am sure make the academics happy. Sadly, they want to be historically right and authoritative. There have been virtual reams written about why the Wheel of the Year isn’t ancient, why the Greenman was a decorative motif picked up by the Crusades instead of a god, why no maiden-mother-crone deity ever existed, why the ancient mother Goddess was not a universal deity in a fanciful matriarchal society, and on and on. But hear me clearly. None of that matters.
What? It has to matter! It’s University sanctioned. And did witches ever look to universities for their practices in the past? No. Did Universities ever support a woman centered spiritual practice? No. Did the Goddess ever appear, defended by male scholarship? No. Were feminist scholars encouraged or funded when seeking to uncover a Goddess tradition that gave us a divine focus we could relate to as mother, lover, sister, priestess and queen? No. In fact, the recognized academic structures trashed the works of Margaret Murray (God of the Witches 1931) and Marija Gimbutas
(Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 1974) among others. I mean trashed. They were not constructively critical. They were bent on career destruction. Subsequent study has begun to rebuild the reputations of these woman, but the initial criticism was scathing and relentless. Even among pagans the breath of Christianity contaminates efforts to hold on to reconstructed pagan practices because they aren’t deemed authentic. Neopagans use the wrong deities. They follow ideas made up in the New Forest in the 1950’s. They haven’t read the original texts in the original languages. Now let me pause here. I admire people who have learned ancient languages and can read the texts in the original. I think that is really cool. But all of that taken together does not negate personal experience. There is an acronym for that: UPG. Unverified Personal Gnosis.
And once again I say unto you IT DOES NOT MATTER! When a people repeatedly call on their Patrons, practice their rituals, and extend those practices over generations, then the deities and celebrations are real and powerful. They are woven of our collective intention. They are strengthened by the earth, elemental and celestial energies we bring to the ritual. And if we offer libations or plates food from our feasts to strengthen them, then they stand as real as you or I, although invisible. Reading ancient literature, digging for confirmation in archeology, interviewing country folk to see how far back their practices go (as if they would tell you Mr. University Man) does not get us closer to enlightenment. What makes ritual swirl the powers of life and death around a circle is the relationships among witches and their spirits. What creates magic to change the world is the crafting of a spell, the concentration and execution of it. We make ourselves poorer if we think only logic rules the world. Only history defines our boundaries. Only science makes things happen. I am no reactionary. I accept and study all that academic stuff, but I also know magic is only science we haven’t yet discovered. UPG Fantasy is history that went untold or archeology that is still buried.
So that’s my rant in support of Mabon. I’m going to keep calling on him at the Autumnal Equinox, and I am not going to explain myself every time I do it. I will ask Him to show up in your rituals and knock your socks off one of these days. And yeah, I’ll accept your calling of Ostara next spring if you insist. She probably developed the same affinity for your celebrations as Mabon has for mine. It bees that way sometimes.
Oh my, such a terrific Rant, friend Dorothy! Thanks for your explications and sharing your experience with Mabon on the September Equinox.......passing this along with admiration! (BTW, note that I'm now here on Substack and happily creating my new creative home-base.... :-) )