Lammas Blue Moon

The Celtic Holiday Of Lugh Under The Blue Moon

Tonight in the Northern Hemisphere many Pagans will be celebrating the 1st harvest festival of the season, Lughnasadh, also known as Lammas. In the Southern Hemisphere Pagans are celebrating Imbog.

This is an exciting time for Pagans. As the sun sets on July 31st Northern Pagans will honor the Sun and his blessings upon the gardens and fields.  Lughnasadh is known as a Fire Festival and celebrates the Celtic hero Lugh as the Sun God who saved Ireland from its oppressors. Freeing the people from slavery and ensuring the land would always be fertile and abundant.

In the Southern Hemisphere, Imbolg can be seen as a celebration of the return of the Sun or “the return of the light from the dark of winter”. It is also associated with the slow return of spring (in this case early spring), when new life is formed. This makes the holiday one of the Fertility festivals for the new season.

But tonight we complement these observances under a special event, the arrival of a Blue Moon!

A Blue Moon occurs when a full moon falls within a single month twice. For July 2015, the first full moon fell on July 1st. Today on July 31st, we’ll once again see the full moon in the evening sky. Technically the Moon hit its full phase at 6:46am eastern U.S. time. In the world of energy, the moon’s effects can be felt 3 days prior to its official phase and 3 days after. And of course the closer you are to the ‘official’ phase time, the stronger the energy will be.

Keep in mind however, that the ancients who lived by the moon didn’t have the luxury of Naval Observatory and precision clocks the way we do today. For them, the official time was sunset when Grandmother Moon bathed Mother Earth with her loving glow.

In some pagan traditions the phases of the moon represent the transition of knowledge within the Triple Goddess. The quarter moons representing the Maiden Goddess, the New Moon the Mother Goddess, the Full Moon the Grand Mother Goddess (which maybe one reason we refer to the moon as “Grandmother Moon”). The Blue Moon then is seen as the transition of the Grandmother or Crone to the Divine level of existence. She becomes an expression of the evolution of wisdom, as well as an example of the circle of life. She moves from a tangible wise old Crone to a spiritual energy within the Divine force of the universe. Continue reading →