This festival is fortunate enough to have a massive tome dedicated entirely to it: the 700-page The Festival of Lughnasad: A Study of the Survival of the Celtic Festival of the Beginning of Harvest, by Máire MacNeill, first published in 1962. If you're lucky enough to find a copy that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, I highly recommend it. The reason it warrants such a weighty volume is that there are so many survivals not only in every part of Ireland but also in Scotland, Wales and England. It survived in so many places because the harvest was, for thousands of years, a pivotal point of the year on which survival depended. If the harvest failed, people and animals starved, therefore our ancestors took ceremonial action to ensure that the harvest was well and truly blessed. MacNeill concludes that the modern folk festival is a survival from an earlier pagan rite that included the following elements:
"[A] solemn cutting of the first of the corn of which an offering would be made to the deity by bringing it up to a high place and burying it; a meal of the new food and of bilberries of which everyone must partake; a sacrifice of a sacred bull, a feast of its flesh, with some ceremony involving its hide, and its replacement by a young bull; a ritual dance-play perhaps telling of a struggle for a goddess and a ritual fight; an installation of a head on top of the hill and a triumphing over it by an actor impersonating Lugh; another play representing the confinement by Lugh of the monster, blight or famine; a three-day celebration presided over by the brilliant young god or his human representative. Finally, a ceremony indicating that the interregnum was over, and the chief god in his right place again."
In the British Druid Order, we primarily know the festival by its Welsh name, Gwyl Awst, 'the August Feast.' It is centred on the traditional date of August 1st, by which time much of the harvest has these days been gathered in, providing for the feast. In our ceremonial cycle, drawn from the Fourth Branch of Y Mabinogi, that of Math, son of Mathonwy, Gwyl Awst sees the marriage of Lleu Llaw Gyffes, young lord of light, to the flower maiden, Blodeuwedd. He represents the fertilising rays of the Sun, she the burgeoning forth of vegetation from the Earth. Our ceremony includes the singing of that famed harvest song, John Barleycorn:
There were three men came out of the west,
their fortunes for to try
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn must die.
They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in
Threw clods upon his head,
And these three men made a solemn vow,
John Barleycorn was dead.
They let him lie for a very long time,
‘til the rains from heaven did fall
And little Sir John sprung up his head
and so amazed them all.
They let him stand ‘til Midsummer’s Day
‘til he looked both pale and wan,
And little Sir John’s grown a long long beard
and so become a man.
They hired men with their scythes so sharp
to cut him off at the knee,
They rolled him and tied him by the waist,
serving him most barbarously.
They hired men with their sharp pitchforks
who pricked him to the heart,
And the loader he has served him worse than that
For he’s bound him to a cart.
They wheeled him around and around a field
‘til they came onto a barn,
And there they made a solemn oath
on poor John Barleycorn.
They hired men with their crabtree sticks
to cut him skin from bone,
And the miller he served him worse than that
For he’s ground him between two stones.
And it’s little Sir John in the nut brown bowl
and it’s brandy in the glass,
And little Sir John in the nut brown bowl
proved the strongest man at last.
For the huntsman he can’t hunt the fox
nor so loudly to blow his horn
And the tinker he can’t mend kettle or pots
without a little barleycorn.
Just about every folk band in Britain has recorded a version of this at one time or another and many are available online. My favourite, and not just because it was the first I ever heard, is not by a folk band at all but by jazz-folk-rock fusion pioneers, Traffic, from their 1970 LP, John Barleycorn Must Die. Here it is in a stunningly brilliant live performance by the band featuring Steve Winwood on guitar and lead vocal, Jim Capaldi on tambourine and backing vocal and Chris Wood on flute:
May your harvest be blessed,
Greywolf /|\