Happy Lughnasadh!
Today begins the Pagan holiday of Lughnasadh; some mark it as the last day of July while others see it as the first day of August, so I'll be doing my rituals around midnight tonight! As the stars would always have it, this holiday is in direct relation to my last post. Lughnasadh is a great period of rebirth and a time for harvest, planting new seeds to be nurtured throughout the coming year. It's sort of the Wiccan's Thanksgiving! Part of their ritual includes eating wheat or oat, apples or berries, and throwing them into the flames. Weaving God and Goddess dolls of corn is typical as well. And the colors representing the holiday are red and orange. (Notice the photo on the last post too! Strange! I guess I'll wear that shirt today.)
Lugh is the Celtic Sun God (remember the Meryl movie? "Dancing at Lughnasadh"?) and he is the God of enlightenment, knowledge and charging into new expansion and creation full force. Invoking him today and tomorrow is said to be a way of strengthening those qualities within ourselves. (And by that, I don't mean an all out ritual; you can always just acknowledge his existence and talk to him, ask him for a few things.) As the legend has it, Lughnasadh, also known as Lammas, is the celebration of this God's sacrifice, who died and became Lord of the Corn (harvest), so that humanity could live through the long, cold food-less winter. The harvest is a metaphor for our own lives right now. Harvest = Fertility = Birth/Rebirth. Take in all that you can, live every moment to the fullest and soak up the Sun. We'll need it for inevitably colder days ahead.
This holiday is also about getting to work! Harvesting takes time and a lot of effort, so to speak. Lugh was a carpenter, mason, smith, harper, poet, physician and goldsmith, the Lord of every skill -- and you thought you were busy! How many girl scout cookies will you sell today?
Because Lugh is the Celtic Sun God, we can weave Kabbalah into the holiday. Through the Sun connection, the archangel of the day would be Raphael, with his wands of magic and wisdom. The Sephirah associated with Sun Gods is the sixth Sephirah, Tiphareth, pronounced TIFF-uh-reth. Tiphareth lies at the center of the Tree of Life on the Middle Pillar (the column of Equilibrium) and receives the powers of all the other Sephiroth. Because of its position on the tree, it mirrors the purity of the first Sephirah, Crown (where God resides), but on a more manifested level. Gods are created here: Christ, Buddha, etc. That pureness is manifested into being here. And as a wise man once said, "We are all Gods with amnesia." So at Lughnasadh we connect with that God quality that is within ourselves. We connect with our pure essence, what our soul is made of, where we came from. Walk like a God today and treat people accordingly, with kindness and untainted love.
Tiphareth is referred to as the Sephirah of Beauty, which is created by the union of the Sephirot of Mercy and Justice. There's something to meditate on today: "Beauty is the union of mercy and justice." I'll have to think about what that means to me. What does it mean to you? Leave a comment!
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posted by Jason Sechrest | 6:56 AM
2 Comments:
So last night was the start of Lughnasadh and the holiday is all about rebirth and the harvest. Well when I was younger I got into some trouble with credit cards (as most youngsters do nowadays) and, thanks to credit counseling, I was able to pay everything off without having to declare bankruptcy. That was 7 years ago. Now my credit is spotless. Actually it's beyond spotless, it's nonexistent, which is actually not good if I want to get any kind of unsecured loan. I'm sorry for the long setup, I'll get to the point: Yesterday, on the start of Lughnasadh, I received in the mail, a brand new credit card from my credit union to help me establish good credit. Coincidence? As Sophia Petrillo would say, "There are no coincidences." One important thing to remember about the harvest is that the harvest (in addition to being a symbol of rebirth) is a symbol of prosperity. When the food was harvested it was either eaten or sold. So not only did I give birth to a brand new credit history, but the card has a financial value too, thus the prosperity tie-in. So last night I lit a Kabbalah candle and meditated, and I chose the Samech Aleph Lamed meditation, or "The Power Of Prosperity" (page 98 in the "72 Names Of God" book). Happy Lughnasadh!!!
Angel - I love that story! Doesn't surprise me at all! xo L, J.
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