Why This Witch Is Ditching the Wheel of the Year in 2023
Starting in August of last year, I began to celebrate neopagan holidays as a way to get in touch with my spirituality outside of a Christian context. This year, I’m throwing out the Gregorian calendar altogether.
For modern witches and pagans, the Wheel of the Year seems like an obvious alternative.
If you know anything about the instantiation of Wicca in the UK and the US, you’ll probably have heard of the Wheel of the Year. This neopagan calendar is comprised of eight holidays (or sabbats): four “quarter days” and four “cross-quarter days” that celebrate solstices, equinoxes, and changing seasons with ritualized feasts, community gathering, and work.
The Wheel of the Year is observed by many contemporary witches, druids, and pagans, thanks to the influences of modern witchcraft scholars and occultists like Gerald Gardner, Margaret Murray, and James George Frazer. So when I first started looking for non-Christian, less commercialized holidays to celebrate, the Wheel of the Year was an obvious starting point for a scholar and practitioner of witchcraft.
However, while I value celebrating changing seasons and solar events, the construction of the Wheel of the Year also presents some problems that I couldn’t quite reconcile with my personal practice and conception of time. And as this year’s spiritual theme is removing made-up rules from my life and stop seeking outside validation, I figured… why not modify the Wheel of the Year to be something that speaks to me?
My Problems with the Wheel of the Year
While others may feel just fine using the Wheel of the Year to guide their yearly celebrations, if I’m being honest with myself, it just doesn’t cut it for me. The following reasons prompted me to venture beyond the typical construction and reframe it for myself.
It Is Ahistorical & Problematic
First, it is culturally jumbled and ahistorical (as is common with contemporary witchcraft). While it is inspired by references to actual celebrations and festivals, it muddles Anglo-Saxon with Celtic practices and beliefs (Anglo-Saxons observed solar events like Yule while Celts centered changing of the seasons like Samhain).
This feels problematic for two reasons. Primarily, this is a problem because the Anglo-Saxons invaded the Celts in the fifth century CE, brutalizing them and seizing much of the land that had been left in Celtic control after Rome’s centuries-long conquest. It was not a friendly relationship, and to mash these two cultures together in this way erases that very important point.
Secondarily, creating an ahistorically homogenous umbrella culture of general western European spirituality feels uncomfortably white. Ignoring the conflicts, colonization, and Christianization that happened by and to various Indo-European groups during this period of history is to implicitly buy into dangerous narratives of white unity and supremacy.
It Is Mythologically Inconsistent in Practice
Another reason the Wheel of the Year feels “off” to me is that it also throws in references to gods that sound cool but don’t really factor into the celebrations at all (Lughnasadh or Lammas is named after Lugh, an Irish god, but Lugh is not a part of the actual festival). Worse, they co-opt random figures from other cultures for no particular reason (Mabon was named for a Welsh mythological character, Mabon ap Modron, but such a character is not acknowledged and Welsh culture is not actually incorporated explicitly into the holiday).
This kind of loose inspiration-drawing might be fine if you are using it to create a fantasy world for a novel or video game. But the deeper you get into any one of these extant mythologies, the more it feels surface-level, ignorant of the very worldviews it claims to celebrate. Personally, as I get more familiar with pre-Christian Irish mythology, it becomes clear that a more granular and nuanced view of the seasons is required.
It Feels Lopsided & Lacks Cohesion
Unsurprisingly, given the above, the Wheel of the Year feels lopsided to me. There is no symmetry or thematic cohesion held in the meanings of the holidays. Some feel very weighty (Samhain, Yule), while others don’t seem to pull their weight at all (Imbolc, Lammas). Of course, if you’re going to be celebrating solstices, equinoxes, lunar phases, and seasonal changes all at once, it’s going to feel a bit muddy.
What’s more, because of the Gregorian emphasis on individual days rather than whole seasons, these eight celebrations get rebranded as singular dates instead of an entire month and a half of time. For example, Yule is so closely corresponded with Christmas and Advent that we tend to forget that all of January is also Yule!
Finally, and this is primarily personal, I don’t conceptualize time as circular. I understand the significance of embracing the cyclical nature of the year and seeing it as some never-ending loop rather than a series of finish lines we must cross. But part of my practice is doing what I can with what I’ve got, and my year looks more linear. I value the feeling of moving forward, of making progress, and I’d like my calendar to capture that (ideally without the many-celled corporate nightmare spreadsheet that is the modern Gregorian calendar).
How I’m Recreating My Own 2023 Calendar
In a lecture on witchcraft by Dr. Tim Landry, he mentioned that Samhain was historically also called the Third Harvest, preceded by the First Harvest (Lammas — harvest of wheat) and Second Harvest (Mabon — harvest of fruit). The Third Harvest was actually a ritual animal slaughter to provide meat for the winter and make sure the remaining livestock could fit inside during the cold months. This concept of three harvests made a lot of sense to me, mirroring the waxing, full, and waning moon.
Meanwhile, I’d just completed my first all-night winter solstice vigil, during which time I welcomed the new year and kept a fire burning throughout the longest night as I waited for sunrise (and then slept most of the following day). Treating both the winter and summer solstice as a new and half-year high mark, with three plantings (spring) and three harvests (fall) between them felt cohesive and like they told a single story.
While completing a separate New Year’s ritual on the first of the year, I took some time to sketch out a version of my own calendar: a line from which grew eight tree trunks. The two largest were the winter and summer solstice (the new and half year marks). The three plantings and three harvests rose and fell in a sine wave: work, celebrate, rest, work, celebrate, rest. Across the top, the full and new moons were tabulated.
At the end of the project, I came away with something that I think is more intuitive, symmetrical, and less blatantly historically inaccurate or culturally appropriative. It’s also uniquely mine, something that I can feel pride and joy in every time I go back to it.
