Mabona love letter for the turning toward dark

Late September has a smell to it. Fallen apples going soft and sweet in the grass. Woodsmoke from someone's first fire of the season. Damp leaves, cold stone, the faint mineral scent of rain on a field that has already been cut. The mornings arrive cool now, sometimes with a silver breath of mist over the low places, and the afternoons still hold a mellow, honeyed warmth that feels like a gift you know you cannot keep.

This is the autumn equinox, the second of the three harvests. On this day the sun crosses the celestial equator, and everywhere on earth day and night are very nearly the same length. For one day the light and the dark stand very nearly even, and then the scales begin to tip. From here until the winter solstice, the nights will grow longer than the days. If Lammas was the first bend in the road down from summer, the equinox is the moment you realize you are truly walking into autumn.

For one day the light and the dark stand very nearly even, and then the scales begin to tip.

Many modern pagans call this festival Mabon, and I do too, but I want to tell you honestly where the name comes from, because I think the truth is lovelier than a made-up antiquity. There was no ancient festival called Mabon. The name was chosen in the early 1970s by the American pagan writer Aidan Kelly, who was looking for evocative names for the sabbats that had none. He reached into Welsh tradition and found Mabon ap Modron, which means simply “Mabon, son of Modron,” or even more simply, “the Son, son of the Mother.”

Those names are old. Mabon seems to descend from Maponos, the divine youth, honored at Roman-era shrines in northern Britain, where inscriptions pair him with Apollo. Modron seems to descend from Matrona, the divine mother, whose name is also carried by the river Marne in France. So the name of this festival is new, but the figures it calls on are very old: a mother, a child, and a long separation. You will see why that matters in a little while.

The history they did not teach you

Long before anyone called it Mabon, people in the countryside marked the end of the harvest with feeling and with food. In England this was the harvest home, the night the last cart of grain came in from the fields, often decorated with green boughs and ridden by the reapers. A great supper followed, given by the farmer to everyone who had worked the harvest. In the north of England it was called the mell supper, and in many places there was singing, dancing, and a great deal of ale.

Eat a goose on Michaelmas Day, / Want not for money all the year.

Traditional English folk rhyme, recorded in several variants

The last sheaf of grain to be cut was treated with special care almost everywhere in Britain and Ireland. In Devon and Cornwall, reapers performed crying the neck, lifting the final handful of grain high and calling out across the fields so that every farm could hear that the harvest was done. In parts of Scotland the last sheaf was called the maiden or the cailleach, the old one, and was woven into a figure and kept through winter, sometimes given to the horses at the first ploughing of spring. The harvest's spirit was not left in the field. It was carried home and kept.

The church's own Harvest Festival, now so familiar in English villages, is younger than many people assume. It grew from a service the Reverend Robert Hawker held in Morwenstow, Cornwall, in 1843, when he invited his parishioners to receive bread made from the new corn. A week after the equinox comes Michaelmas, September 29, another quarter day for rents and hirings, and a feast of roast goose fattened on the stubble of the cut fields. An old English rhyme promised:

There was folk wisdom about the hedgerows too. In many parts of Britain people said you should not pick blackberries after Michaelmas, because the devil had spoiled them. It is a charming way of saying what any blackberry picker knows: by then the berries are watery and past their best. Even the warnings were about paying attention to the season.

The sacred descent

Autumn is the season of going down. The sap retreats into the roots, the seed falls into the soil, the light slips lower in the sky each day. Almost every tradition that has watched the year closely has a story about someone beloved who goes below, and the ones left behind who grieve and wait.

The most famous is the Greek story of Persephone, carried down into the underworld while her mother Demeter searches the whole earth for her. In her grief, Demeter lets nothing grow. When Persephone is at last returned, the world turns green again, but because she has tasted a pomegranate seed in the land below, she must go back for part of every year. The great Eleusinian Mysteries, which honored these two goddesses for perhaps a thousand years, were celebrated in the Athenian month of Boedromion, around our September. What exactly the initiates saw was never written down, and that silence is part of their power.

The Welsh story of Mabon is less well known but just as haunting. In the medieval tale Culhwch and Olwen, Mabon is taken from his mother Modron when he is only three nights old, and no one knows where he has gone. To find him, the heroes must ask the oldest animals in the world, one after another: the Blackbird, the Stag, the Owl, the Eagle, and at last the Salmon, who carries them on his back to the walls of Gloucester, where Mabon is being held. He is freed, and he rides out to help them.

What both stories teach is that descent is not the end. What goes down into the dark is held there, not lost. The child is found. The daughter returns. The seed that falls in autumn is the one that rises in spring.

What Mabon actually asks of us

Mabon first asks you to find your balance point. On the equinox, light and dark stand side by side as equals, and it is a beautiful day to take an honest look at the balances in your own life. Where are you giving more than you are receiving? Where are you resting less than you are working? Where have you been all light and no shadow, all doing and no stillness? You do not need to fix everything at once. Simply notice which way your own scales are tipped, and what one small adjustment might bring you closer to even.

It asks you to finish the gathering. This is the harvest home, the last cart coming in from the field. Look at the projects and intentions you carried through the bright half of the year and decide which ones are ready to be brought in and celebrated, and which ones can be left in the field to return to the soil. If it helps, keep something to carry you through winter, the way the old reapers kept their last sheaf: a dried bundle of grain or leaves on your altar, an apple from the market, a single word written on a card.

It asks you to set a thankful table. The harvest supper was a feast of gratitude shared with everyone who had worked the fields. Gather the people who have carried you this year, even if it is only one friend, and cook something from the season: squash, apples, root vegetables, good bread. Before you eat, go around the table and name one thing each of you is grateful for. If you are alone, set a place for yourself as carefully as you would for a guest.

And it asks you to make peace with the dark. On the evening of the equinox, step outside at dusk and watch the light go. If the harvest moon is near, the full moon closest to the equinox, let it rise for you. When you come back inside, light a candle, sit with it a while, and keep it company until you put it out. Let yourself welcome the long nights ahead instead of bracing against them.

A final reflection on Mabon

Mabon is the year's great exhale. The work of growing is done, the gathering is nearly done, and what remains is to give thanks, to store up what will sustain us, and to turn our faces calmly toward the dark. There is a deep, quiet trust in that turning.

If you are reading this in the Southern Hemisphere, your wheel is moving the other way. While the north holds its harvest home, you are celebrating Ostara, the spring equinox, when the same perfect balance of day and night tips toward the light instead. It is the same balance point, seen from the other side of the world: one half going down into the soil, the other rising out of it.

What I want you to know

I want you to know that the dark is not your enemy. So many of us are taught to fear the shortening days, to treat autumn as a loss and winter as something to be endured. But the dark is where seeds rest, where roots grow, where the earth gathers its strength. You are allowed to slow down with it. You are allowed to need more sleep, more quiet, more soup and blankets and early nights.

I want you to know that whatever part of you feels taken, lost, or locked away right now, it is not gone. Mabon was found. Persephone came home. The oldest creatures in the world remembered where the lost one was kept, and the way back was found. Sometimes we need to ask for help from what is oldest and wisest in us, and sometimes from each other.

And I want you to know that your harvest, however it looks, is enough to be thankful for. Gather it in. Share it. Keep a little of it close for the winter.

The scales are nearly even tonight. Rest in that balance, just for a moment, before the turning.

With love from the long golden evening, Kelli

Continue wandering, Kelli