Short Stuff: Mabon

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1:09Chuck Bryant:Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Jerry here, too, sitting in for Dave. And we're here to celebrate the pagan Thanksgiving that you never knew you needed.

1:22Josh Clark:Yeah, I don't remember if we mentioned this because we covered some stuff on Wiccans and other sort of pagan religions years ago, I feel like. Yeah. But the pagan Thanksgiving is Mabon, M-A-B-O-N, and it is one of many kind of fall harvest celebrations that have happened throughout history that celebrate the autumnal equinox.

1:45Chuck Bryant:Wow, way to go. Say it again. The autumnal equinox. Very nice. Yeah. But it's actually kind of new. Mabon is. Because ironically, the original pagans, like the Celts, for example, did not celebrate the autumnal equinox, which is evidenced by if you go to Stonehenge on the autumnal equinox, nothing happens. Nothing special. It's just like any other day. But like you said, cultures around the world have. And today, neo-pagans, druids, wiccans, etc. definitely celebrated as one of eight sabbats. Sabbats. Sabbats, I think, right? Like Sabbaths. And there are eight of them on the wheel of the year.

2:29Chuck Bryant:And in fact, Mabon is one of three harvest festivals that occur from August through October.

2:36Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, you probably heard us talk about Yule before in one of our Christmas episodes, probably. That is a Sabat. And we've also talked about Samhain, for sure, spelled Samhain.

2:48Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

2:49Josh Clark:Because that's the one associated with Halloween. So those are definitely much more well-known. But Mabon, we got to talk about Mabon a little bit. All right.

2:58Chuck Bryant:Well, first, let's talk about the first harvest festival, Lunasa. That takes place in early August, where I guess I don't know what you're picking then. Mabon is like the money harvest festival. Late September, that's when everything's ready to be picked, basically. And then Samhain is the third, the one in October. And the autumnal equinox, and this is a big part of Mabon in particular, is balance. The reason why there's a focus on balance is because the day and night are basically evenly split between 12 hours apiece on the autumnal equinox and the vernal equinox, the spring equinox. So that's a big theme in Mabon.

3:42Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. And one of the things that if you practice any kind of paganism and you want to celebrate Mabon, you want to maybe meditate on that balance in your own life, might be a thing to do.

3:52Chuck Bryant:For sure.

3:53Josh Clark:Another thing you mentioned earlier is that it's a newer thing. This term is only about 55 years old. The Mabon actually comes from a Welsh god, son of the Earth Mother Goddess. And there was a Welsh text, an old Welsh text called the Mabinagian.

4:14Chuck Bryant:Your guess is as good as mine.

4:16Josh Clark:Yeah, that looks about right. That has, it tells about like, you know, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and stuff like that. And one of the heroes of those stories is a god named Mabon, son of mother, who was held hostage as a baby. Yeah.

4:34Chuck Bryant:And as we'll see, the reason that Mabon was chosen to mark the autumnal equinox, despite the fact that the ancient druids and Celts did not, there was no recognition of Mabon or association with them. that's a modern thing, like we said, is that the guy who kind of helped write or put together the wheel of the year for modern paganisms, Aidan Kelly, back in the 60s and 70s, he did his research and he found out that in Greek lore and mythology, the goddess Demeter is celebrated on the autumnal equinox. And Demeter shares in common with Mabon that this idea that she was young and was rescued from the underworld, just like Mabon was.

5:24Chuck Bryant:So he's like, I think this is enough of an association to call this Mabon.

5:29Josh Clark:Yeah, it was kind of funny. Apparently he was looking for something Gaelic or Germanic, name-wise, on the pagan calendar based on the Solstices, and he couldn't find anything. So he was like, eh, maybe a stretch, but I'm just going to go with this one.

5:43Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that's not to say that, so Mabon seems to be the only one that they put into the wheel of the year. There are some really ancient Celtic festivals, including Samhain and Lunasa and one called Beltane and one called Imolc, which is spelled I-M-B-O-L-C. And I'm just so pleased as Punch that I pronounced it correctly.

6:05Josh Clark:Nice work.

6:05Chuck Bryant:But Mabon, they said, we're going to add this in because we feel like it's a big deal. And again, there's other cultures that celebrate this, like the Maltese, the Mayans. And then, Chuck, get this. The Pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza in Mexico. Did you look a picture of this up?

6:24Josh Clark:Yeah, amazing.

6:25Chuck Bryant:It is amazing. So the shadows fall on the pyramid, the steps of the pyramid. Technically, it's a ziggurat. And it looks like a serpent coming down the steps on the side on the autumnal equinox. It's nuts because it definitely looks like that.

6:44Josh Clark:Yeah, it's cool. It reminded me of when I lived in Los Angeles when Emily and I moved in together. We lived in the neighborhood of Eagle Rock. And Eagle Rock is so named because there's a big rock by the highway that has, it's not like hand carved. It's just a piece kind of nature carved out. And when the sun hits that at a certain time of the day, it looks like an eagle flying.

7:06Chuck Bryant:Oh, neat. Yeah. I'm sure it wasn't named after the band.

7:11Josh Clark:What, eagles?

7:12Chuck Bryant:Mm-hmm.

7:13Josh Clark:No, probably not.

7:13Chuck Bryant:because they do not rock.

7:15Josh Clark:Should we take a break?

7:16Chuck Bryant:Mm-hmm.

7:17Josh Clark:All right, we'll be right back.

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9:05Chuck Bryant:Okay, Chuck, I feel like it's high time that we explain to people what they can do to celebrate Mabon, even if you're not a pagan or a Wicca or a witch or have never owned a crystal. It doesn't matter. You can still observe Mabon. I should say also we based this short stuff on an article from How Stuff Works written by our own Dave Ruse. Dave Ruse is one of the most religiously tolerant people you will ever meet. And he definitely applied that to this. And I feel like we also need to shout out Dave's podcast, Biblical Time Machine, which is also very tolerant too.

9:45Josh Clark:Yeah, Dave's great. So is the podcast. I mentioned earlier in Act One that one thing you can do is reflect on the past year and talk about like balance. Also, obviously, things that you're thankful for, because again, this is around Thanksgiving. And something you can do in your house, if you want, is to have a cornucopia, like a little horn of plenty. That has roots in ancient Greece. Yeah. But if you have a centerpiece of a cornucopia in your home to celebrate fall or the autumnal equinox or Mabon, there are certainly worse ways to go about it than that. So it's a lovely thing to do.

10:22Chuck Bryant:And it is. It is like an iconic fall look, essentially. And it's just yet another thing that people do today and don't realize that it's an ancient pagan custom. I love that kind of stuff. Another thing you can do is reflect. There's a lot of time for reflecting over the course of a 12-hour day. And so because the energy is in balance between night and day on Mabon, it's the same on the vernal equinox too, Ostara. But with Ostara, you're thinking about like renewal and growth and awakening basically from the winter slumber. In autumn, you're kind of going the opposite way. You're talking about releasing stuff.