Lugh's Day (my proposal)
Tuesday, July 26th, 2022 06:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudioSo, I mentioned Lugh's Loaf Mass in passing, in the last entry...
It's a reference to the fact that August 1st is a kind of lost holiday.
In ancient Celtic Culture, it was celebrated as, Lughnasadh... and later the Catholic church christianized it as Lammas, or loaf-mass.
Modern pagans now recognize Lugnasadh as one of the eight points of the year. The first four points are, of course, the summer & winter solstices, and the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. But the other four points are the midpoints between the first four.
Two of these midpoints still exist as western holidays. Groundhog's Day, February 2nd, is the midpoint between the northern hemisphere's winter solstice and spring equinox. And indeed, the whole, "six more weeks of winter," thing, still identifies this day as the midpoint that it is!
Halloween, October 31st, is the other one... halfway between the northern hemisphere's fall equinox, and winter solstice. And it too still sports all the trappings of that midpoint, with the harvest type stuff like pumpkins, and the dread of death... which is code for the dread of the coming winter, and the solstice, which is the sun's death, so does speak.
Modern Easter drifts between the spring equinox, and that mid-spring point, thanks to the meddling of the Catholic church.* But it was probably originally an eqinox celebration, and not a midpoint.
May Day, May 1st, is the actual midpoint between the equinox and the summer solstice but that date was appropriated in 1901 by the socialist movement, championed by Trotsky, who wished for it to be an energetic celebration of the 8-hour workday... which is fair...
But today it's only celebrated in communist dictatorships, such as China, North Korea, and formerly Soviet Russia. And it's not so much, energetic, as outright aggressive, with conspicuous military parades.
--<>--
And the final midpoint is August 1st, which... purportedly is hanging on in formerly Celtic parts of the UK, and is also celebrated by modern Wiccans, who number a few million worldwide. So it's not completely dead, but to most, it's completely unknown, or extremely obscure.
------------{=0=}------------
Of course, for me... August 1st is a big deal, because it's the beginning of the cricket season around here, and if you haven't figured it out yet, crickets are one of my special interests!
So for a few years now, I've been trying to figure out how I'd bring the lost August holiday back... hypothetically.
Nobody's going to care if I want to bring a holiday back, but if they did, how would I pitch it?
At first I thought, I'll just start recognizing August 1st as Lammas.
But then I thought, no... Lammas is a boring holiday about bread. What could be more boring than bread? And the word, Lammas, is literally, lame-ass. Lame ass, lammas!
Also, I'm not about helping the Catholic church get more clout for one of their bastardizations of a more ancient pagan tradition. Screw the Pope!
--<>--
Lugnasadh was definitely the way to go, but the name!
I'm sorry, but in America, nobody's gonna get behind a holiday with a name they can't spell, and also can't pronounce when they see the spelling.
I still have to look up the spelling of Lugnasadh. And it looks nothing like the pronunciation, which is (loo NAH sah) I think? Or is it (LOO nah sah)?
Trying to relaunch a lost holiday is hard enough, the effort's just not gonna survive that awkward spelling and pronunciation combo. Not in MERKA!
So my proposal is just to call it, Lugh's Day.
Lugh (Loog) is easy enough to read & pronounce, and (LOOGS day) rolls off the tongue okay.
Hell!.. it's even got that potential to morph into it's own word one day, like Halloween did!..
Over a few decades of Lugh's Day, Americans would start pronouncing it Lugsday, and a few decades after that, it'd turn into, Lugsdy... or Lugsby.. or even Bugsby!
And Lugh's Day is essentially what Lughnasadh, or, "Lugh's Assembly," means.
You could even argue that, assembly, is the same as, mass, so it could be Lughmas... but, mass, is Catholic, and... screw the pope!
------------{=0=}------------
There's a bit of a question here, about cultural appropriation, but... I mean, aren't all extinct pantheons fair game? Nobody's complaining about Marvel's adaptation of Thor.
I'm better than half Irish, so... I've got some kind of business rebranding Lugh, right?
He was already a pretty flexible god. He was the sun god, but also like, god of the harvest, and music, and sports, and hunting, and craftsmanship, and thunder, and scholarship, and, whatever... stamp collecting! Why not?
Even the images of Lugh are pretty random. He doesn't seem to have had a concrete likeness, you know, like yer Horus, or yer Zeus.
I found an image that I liked...
But the color scheme was not working. Red's taken! So I re-colored him, and threw in some crickets, to make a mock-up of the world's first Lugh's Day card, below...
I reenvisioned Lugh as a kind of, Summer Santa. He wear's green instead of red, because it's the height of summer... and he's showin' off those legs too!
Santa's old and fat, which is very winter, but Lugh is young and fit, which is very summer!
But I did give him a red beard because every guy with long hair and a dark beard looks like Jesus, and... screw the pope!
--<>--
The orange-red of his beard sets him apart, makes him recognizable, and complements the gold accents of his outfit.
Of course gold is where you go, to accent a green theme, especially with a sun god like Lugh, and the orange is a perfect third color to complete the scheme, with his beard, and the straps of his mighty spear & slingshot.
Very August... very sun god!
Now, while he's lighter skinned, because he's Celtic, I gave him brown hair and brown eyes, because... not only is Lugh not Jesus, but Lugh is NOT aryan! That was the Caucasus, Lugh is Ireland.
Lugh is not a fascist. Lugh is a good time! August is a good time! Mid-summer! Magic, music, campfires, swimming!
And, I'm sorry, but since I'm the PR guy here, I'm shoe-horning crickets into this!..
Cricket imagery belongs to Lugh's Day as much as bunnies do to Easter, goddamit!
So like, kids could leave grass clippings in the bread box for the Lugh's Day crickets... who would then come in the night to get the grass, and leave little presents in exchange!
They have to be plural... Lugh's Day crickets, cuz... nobody wants one gigantic, anthropomorphic insect coming in the house at night.
But, crickets already have a long established lore, from the British Isles, of being lucky, and magical and stuff. And they're actually noctournal, unlike rabbits.
So it would make sense to have an orchestra of crickets... that's the official group name for a bunch of crickets, yes!.. an orchestra of magical crickets come inside, eat the grass in the bread box, and conjure up a bunch of cheep plastic toys and candy!
The bread box, of course, is a nod to Lammas, the loaf mass.
And Dad's gonna have some grass clippings from mowing the lawn just before Lugh's Day.
So it all makes perfect sense!
------------{=0=}------------
Bringing my pitch to a close here, I did look at some different dates for Lugh's Day...
The actual midpoint between the summer solstice and the fall equinox is August 6th.
Alternately, if you wanted to have it exactly opposite Groundhog's Day, that would be August 3rd.
But since August first still is celebrated by some as Lammas, and others as Lughnasadh, I figured it was best just to stick with that date for Lugh's Day.
Okay, that's my pitch for Lugh's Day!
And this Sunday is Lugh's Day Eve, so... mow your lawn, I guess, if you have one!
°¦}
*The early church appropriated pagan Easter as the day Jesus rose from the dead, but because Jesus was Jewish, and killed during Passover, they had to tie Easter, on their luni-solar Roman calendar to Passover on the Hebrew lunar calendar.
So Easter was defined as the first Sunday, after the first full moon, after the spring equinox. That keeps it roughly in line with Passover, but it means Easter can range from March 22nd to April 25th.
So, while it does occasionally get close to that May 1st midpoint, more often it's closer to it's original date of the spring equinox.
https://soundcloud.com/snoozefestaudio
It's a reference to the fact that August 1st is a kind of lost holiday.
In ancient Celtic Culture, it was celebrated as, Lughnasadh... and later the Catholic church christianized it as Lammas, or loaf-mass.
Modern pagans now recognize Lugnasadh as one of the eight points of the year. The first four points are, of course, the summer & winter solstices, and the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. But the other four points are the midpoints between the first four.
Two of these midpoints still exist as western holidays. Groundhog's Day, February 2nd, is the midpoint between the northern hemisphere's winter solstice and spring equinox. And indeed, the whole, "six more weeks of winter," thing, still identifies this day as the midpoint that it is!
Halloween, October 31st, is the other one... halfway between the northern hemisphere's fall equinox, and winter solstice. And it too still sports all the trappings of that midpoint, with the harvest type stuff like pumpkins, and the dread of death... which is code for the dread of the coming winter, and the solstice, which is the sun's death, so does speak.
Modern Easter drifts between the spring equinox, and that mid-spring point, thanks to the meddling of the Catholic church.* But it was probably originally an eqinox celebration, and not a midpoint.
May Day, May 1st, is the actual midpoint between the equinox and the summer solstice but that date was appropriated in 1901 by the socialist movement, championed by Trotsky, who wished for it to be an energetic celebration of the 8-hour workday... which is fair...
But today it's only celebrated in communist dictatorships, such as China, North Korea, and formerly Soviet Russia. And it's not so much, energetic, as outright aggressive, with conspicuous military parades.
And the final midpoint is August 1st, which... purportedly is hanging on in formerly Celtic parts of the UK, and is also celebrated by modern Wiccans, who number a few million worldwide. So it's not completely dead, but to most, it's completely unknown, or extremely obscure.
Of course, for me... August 1st is a big deal, because it's the beginning of the cricket season around here, and if you haven't figured it out yet, crickets are one of my special interests!
So for a few years now, I've been trying to figure out how I'd bring the lost August holiday back... hypothetically.
Nobody's going to care if I want to bring a holiday back, but if they did, how would I pitch it?
At first I thought, I'll just start recognizing August 1st as Lammas.
But then I thought, no... Lammas is a boring holiday about bread. What could be more boring than bread? And the word, Lammas, is literally, lame-ass. Lame ass, lammas!
Also, I'm not about helping the Catholic church get more clout for one of their bastardizations of a more ancient pagan tradition. Screw the Pope!
Lugnasadh was definitely the way to go, but the name!
I'm sorry, but in America, nobody's gonna get behind a holiday with a name they can't spell, and also can't pronounce when they see the spelling.
I still have to look up the spelling of Lugnasadh. And it looks nothing like the pronunciation, which is (loo NAH sah) I think? Or is it (LOO nah sah)?
Trying to relaunch a lost holiday is hard enough, the effort's just not gonna survive that awkward spelling and pronunciation combo. Not in MERKA!
So my proposal is just to call it, Lugh's Day.
Lugh (Loog) is easy enough to read & pronounce, and (LOOGS day) rolls off the tongue okay.
Hell!.. it's even got that potential to morph into it's own word one day, like Halloween did!..
Over a few decades of Lugh's Day, Americans would start pronouncing it Lugsday, and a few decades after that, it'd turn into, Lugsdy... or Lugsby.. or even Bugsby!
And Lugh's Day is essentially what Lughnasadh, or, "Lugh's Assembly," means.
You could even argue that, assembly, is the same as, mass, so it could be Lughmas... but, mass, is Catholic, and... screw the pope!
There's a bit of a question here, about cultural appropriation, but... I mean, aren't all extinct pantheons fair game? Nobody's complaining about Marvel's adaptation of Thor.
I'm better than half Irish, so... I've got some kind of business rebranding Lugh, right?
He was already a pretty flexible god. He was the sun god, but also like, god of the harvest, and music, and sports, and hunting, and craftsmanship, and thunder, and scholarship, and, whatever... stamp collecting! Why not?
Even the images of Lugh are pretty random. He doesn't seem to have had a concrete likeness, you know, like yer Horus, or yer Zeus.
I found an image that I liked...
But the color scheme was not working. Red's taken! So I re-colored him, and threw in some crickets, to make a mock-up of the world's first Lugh's Day card, below...
I reenvisioned Lugh as a kind of, Summer Santa. He wear's green instead of red, because it's the height of summer... and he's showin' off those legs too!
Santa's old and fat, which is very winter, but Lugh is young and fit, which is very summer!
But I did give him a red beard because every guy with long hair and a dark beard looks like Jesus, and... screw the pope!
The orange-red of his beard sets him apart, makes him recognizable, and complements the gold accents of his outfit.
Of course gold is where you go, to accent a green theme, especially with a sun god like Lugh, and the orange is a perfect third color to complete the scheme, with his beard, and the straps of his mighty spear & slingshot.
Very August... very sun god!
Now, while he's lighter skinned, because he's Celtic, I gave him brown hair and brown eyes, because... not only is Lugh not Jesus, but Lugh is NOT aryan! That was the Caucasus, Lugh is Ireland.
Lugh is not a fascist. Lugh is a good time! August is a good time! Mid-summer! Magic, music, campfires, swimming!
And, I'm sorry, but since I'm the PR guy here, I'm shoe-horning crickets into this!..
Cricket imagery belongs to Lugh's Day as much as bunnies do to Easter, goddamit!
So like, kids could leave grass clippings in the bread box for the Lugh's Day crickets... who would then come in the night to get the grass, and leave little presents in exchange!
They have to be plural... Lugh's Day crickets, cuz... nobody wants one gigantic, anthropomorphic insect coming in the house at night.
But, crickets already have a long established lore, from the British Isles, of being lucky, and magical and stuff. And they're actually noctournal, unlike rabbits.
So it would make sense to have an orchestra of crickets... that's the official group name for a bunch of crickets, yes!.. an orchestra of magical crickets come inside, eat the grass in the bread box, and conjure up a bunch of cheep plastic toys and candy!
The bread box, of course, is a nod to Lammas, the loaf mass.
And Dad's gonna have some grass clippings from mowing the lawn just before Lugh's Day.
So it all makes perfect sense!
Bringing my pitch to a close here, I did look at some different dates for Lugh's Day...
The actual midpoint between the summer solstice and the fall equinox is August 6th.
Alternately, if you wanted to have it exactly opposite Groundhog's Day, that would be August 3rd.
But since August first still is celebrated by some as Lammas, and others as Lughnasadh, I figured it was best just to stick with that date for Lugh's Day.
Okay, that's my pitch for Lugh's Day!
And this Sunday is Lugh's Day Eve, so... mow your lawn, I guess, if you have one!
°¦}
*The early church appropriated pagan Easter as the day Jesus rose from the dead, but because Jesus was Jewish, and killed during Passover, they had to tie Easter, on their luni-solar Roman calendar to Passover on the Hebrew lunar calendar.
So Easter was defined as the first Sunday, after the first full moon, after the spring equinox. That keeps it roughly in line with Passover, but it means Easter can range from March 22nd to April 25th.
So, while it does occasionally get close to that May 1st midpoint, more often it's closer to it's original date of the spring equinox.
