Wheel of the Year… with 6 Seasons?
Friday February 1, 2019
So I’ve been semi working on creating my own wheel of the year, as neither the standard Northern or Southern Hemisphere wheel fits within the natural or agricultural cycles of my area.
My struggle is the number of sabbats. I liked the idea of keeping with the same dates (and some themes) from the traditional wheel, but while 8 is an excellent number within a cycle of 4 seasons, my area has 6 distinct seasons, and spreading 8 celebrations across 6 seasons wound up really uneven and odd.
Other Aussies following the Southern wheel will be celebrating Lammas, a harvest festival and the start of autumn. But this doesn’t sit right when our harvest finished in December, and it’s the start of our hottest summer season (Bunuru). It’s the season of bushfires and 40°C days (>100°F). Mabon (autumn equinox) comes just as we’re nearing our autumn season (Djeran).
The fact day those 8 points mark a random selection of seasonal points frustrates me, and makes it difficult to keep track of dates that don’t correspond to the cycles around me.
Sure, I could start completely I divide my seasons like the original sabbats, I wind up with 12 celebrations (1 per month), or I could just mark each season once (either the change or the mid-point), but I would need to decide which point to mark. Although I guess celebrating monthly isn’t too different to folks who celebrate each full moon?
Even just naming the solstices/equinoxes after the season feels odd, as summer solstice marks the very start of summer, winter solstice is when winter starts to kick into gear, autumnal equinox is just before autumn starts. Spring equinox is late in our first spring season, so that one actually is almost in the middle of spring, I guess it can stay.
It feels wrong to celebrate a natural cycle that doesn’t match up with what I’m living, but I’m too torn on how to fix it.