On the occasion of Mabon

Mabon is a modern invention. As a harvest festival, at least. The name itself is old, of Celtic origin. And of course there have been Autumnal Equinoxes for as long as the Earth has gone around the Sun, though the Celts did not celebrate them. The first time the name and the occasion were put together seems to have been in the early 70s by that industrious reformer, Aidan Kelly.

Dr. Kelly, to the best of my knowledge, never really provided a mythopoetic explanation for linking the name of that particular figure from Celtic mythology and that particular seasonal transition*. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Arbitrary choices can produce meaningful patterns, too.

For example, Mabon is syncretically linked with the Greek God Apollo, who does a bit of seasonal wandering. Apollo is traditionally believed to spend the winter months far to the north of His Grecian homelands, past the lands of the Celts, in a country called Hyperborea. Since ancient times, the mythic Hyperborea has been connected with the historical Britain. So, if winter marks the epiphany of Apollo to the Hyperboreans/Britons, then Autumn could be seen as marking His procession through the Celtic domains. It would be possible, therefore, to cast Mabon as a celebration of Apollo’s travels. But that’s only one possible pattern, of course.

Another way to look at it is to parse the name’s etymology and literal meaning. “Mabon” is likely to have been derived from “Maponos” which means “Divine Child.” The Divine Child, like the Slain and Risen God, or the Horned God, is a recurring mytheme of the Divine Masculine principle. It can be found in the narratives of various historical Deities. Apollo, Hermes, Osiris, and even Zeus, have appeared in the aspect of the Divine Child. My favorite, of course, is Dionysos. Coincidentally, Dionysos also took over Apollo’s temple at Delphi each year while His brother was away in Hyperborea.

And Mabon is a great time of year to honor Dionysos. Here in North Carolina, the muscadine harvest is coming in, sending restless flutters through the hearts of amateur vintners like myself. For me, the second harvest is the wine (and cider) harvest. With Dionysos as the youthful Lord giving himself over as the sacrifice to the presses, it’s a poignant time of industry and reflection.

Regardless of what Myths or Deities we associate with it, Mabon is an excellent occasion to share a glass of wine and a grateful toast with friends and family. This is exactly how I spent my mine, and how I hope to spend many more.
*Apparently, he did. Here’s a blog Kelly wrote in 2017 that provides some insight into his reasoning for the names he chose.

The Wine God

Dionysos is the God of wine. He is God of many things, of course. He is a God of the epiphany, and of madness and liberation and of transformation and rebirth. But wine is what we think of first when we hear His name. There’s a good reason for that. Not only does wine tie all these diverse themes together, but the wine-making process can also be seen as a biography of the God as well. Especially His biography as the Orphics tell it.

In Orphic writings, we can read a sort of “secret origin” of Dionysos. The Orphic cults tell the story of Dionysos Zagreus, who existed before mankind. He was the child of Zeus by Persephone. Immediately upon His birth, He was set upon the throne of the Gods and declared their rightful king. His reign was destined to be short-lived, however. While still an infant, Zagreus was killed and dismembered by a gang of Titans. In some accounts these titans were meant to be caretakers of the young God, perhaps even His nurses. But the titans betray the trust given them, possibly at the urging of Hera. They kill the child and cut Him up in order to boil and roast the pieces before devouring them. Zeus smells the aroma and investigates. When He sees what the titans are up to He uses his lightning bolts to destroy the entire grisly scene, reducing nearly everything, titan and God alike, to soot and ash.

It is from this mixture of soot and ash that Zeus fashioned the first men. In this Orphic teaching we learn that mankind has two natures: the brutish and the transcendent. From our very origin, we have been creatures locked in internal conflict. Each of us carries in himself something Divine and Dionsysian, but also something titanic. We are an uneasy mix of the innocent victim and the very monsters who betrayed Him. Our job is to foster our Dionysian spirit and try to control our titanic tendencies.

So what does any of that have to do with wine?

One of Dionysos’s many epithets is Lenaeus, which means “of the wine-press.” While modern wine-presses use mechanical means to crush and press the juice from grapes, the earliest presses were little more than large tubs or pits with channels carved to let the juice flow into containers as grapes were crushed underfoot. Today a press can be operated by a single person, with the turn of a screw, or perhaps even the flip of a switch. But in ancient times, pressing grapes involved getting a whole gang together, preferably a gang of large, heavy people. Probably some of the same people who had been caring for the vines the grapes grew on. In a way, the grapes suffer a fate that is not unlike that of young Dionysos Zagreus, destroyed by the very hands that had cared for them.

Once the grapes are pressed, the juice and the skins (together called the “must”) are left to ferment. The fermenting process is really a matter of letting yeast convert the sugar in the must to alcohol. As this conversion takes place, particulates and impurities in the must settle down to the bottom of the container. These sediments are called the “lees” and the wine has to be drained away from the lees periodically or they will impart a bad taste to the finished product.

If we look at the wine as the spirit of Dionysos (why do you think they call alcohol “spirits” anyway?) and the lees as the influence of the titans, then the fermentation process works as a good metaphor for how our own internal struggle can be managed. It’s important for us to distance ourselves from the titan side of our nature if we want our Dionysian spirit to avoid being tainted.

Back in the myth, the only thing that survived Zeus’s wrathful destruction was Zagreus’s still beating heart, which Zeus sent Hermes to retrieve. From the heart Zeus makes a potion containing the essence of His son’s life. Years or centuries later, He gives the potion to Semele, a young princess of Thebes. Upon drinking it, Semele becomes pregnant with a new Dionysos. This child, though carried in a mortal womb, would not be a mere demigod or hero, but a true and wholly Divine heir to the throne of Olympus. Hera finds a way to interfere with this plan, too, though that’s a story for another day.

Maybe wine is the magic potion the myth is talking about. It might be the grape’s only way of living again; its new life played out in the effect its spirit has on us. Wine engenders in us the Dionysiac impluse, much like Zeus’s potion engendered Dionysos Himself in Semele. During fermentation the juice of the grape is transformed, rarified, clarified and separated from the impurity of its physical form. Lifted away from the must and the lees, the spirit of the vine becomes the Divine blood of Dionysos himself.

Wine is His perfect symbol, partly because its symbolism runs so deep. It is the spirit that rises from destruction. It has the power to dissolve social barriers, and it gives release from burdens of sorrow and painful memory. But with overuse wine can also dissolve the borders of identity and open us to madness, which lines up with the God’s darker aspects. While it would be an oversimplification to think that wine was the whole of Dionysos, it would also be a mistake to underestimate the lessons about Him that wine can teach us.