Mabon: A Medieval Name on a Modern Wheel

September 22, 2026

Mabon has a problem. It sounds ancient. The word sits comfortably beside Samhain, Beltane and Lughnasadh, as though people have been gathering beneath the September sun and calling the autumn equinox Mabon for centuries. It feels like the sort of name that ought to have been scratched into manuscripts, carried through oral tradition and recovered from somewhere half-forgotten.

It wasn't.

Mabon, as a name for the autumn equinox, is younger than colour television.

That does not make the season it marks any less old tough. The sun still crosses the celestial equator. Days shorten, fruit ripens, fields empty, leaves begin turning and the year continues its movement towards winter. Harvest celebrations existed long before anyone attached the name Mabon to this particular point on the calendar.

The interesting part is that, in this case, we actually know who did. For once, we do not have to search through centuries of missing records and half-remembered folklore. We can follow the name almost from the moment it appeared.

A Festival Named in the 1970s

In 1974, American Pagan writer Aidan Kelly was putting together what he described as a “Pagan-Craft” calendar. The four Gaelic seasonal festivals already had familiar names: Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh and Samhain. Yule was well established for the winter solstice, while Ostara had become associated with the spring equinox.

That left the summer solstice and autumn equinox without equivalent Pagan names. Kelly decided to supply them.

For autumn, he looked for a myth that he felt could be connected with the season and settled on Mabon ap Modron, a figure from medieval Welsh literature. Kelly later wrote that he was interested in stories involving the rescue of a young person and saw a possible parallel between Mabon and myths elsewhere in Europe that he associated with the autumn equinox.

He called the festival Mabon, sent his calendar to other people in the Pagan community, and the name spread. There was no recovered Celtic festival called Mabon. No surviving medieval Welsh text tells us that Mabon was celebrated at the equinox, and the name was not handed down as an old September feast. It was deliberately added to a modern Pagan calendar in the 1970s.

Within a few decades, it sounded as though it had always been there.

The Man Behind the Name

Mabon himself is considerably older than the festival now carrying his name. He appears in Culhwch and Olwen, a medieval Welsh tale in which Culhwch must complete a series of impossible tasks before he can marry Olwen.

One of those tasks eventually requires Mabon son of Modron, who was taken from his mother when he was only three nights old. Nobody knows where he is.

Arthur's men begin searching, but Mabon has been missing for so long that ordinary human memory is useless. They have to ask creatures whose memories stretch further back than their own.

They begin with the Blackbird of Cilgwri. The blackbird remembers a smith's anvil that it has worn away with its beak over an immense stretch of time, but it knows nothing of Mabon. It directs them to the Stag of Rhedynfre, who remembers an oak growing from a sapling into a great tree and eventually disappearing.

The search continues to the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd, old enough to have watched forests come and go, and then to the Eagle of Gwernabwy. The eagle remembers a great salmon it once tried, unsuccessfully, to catch and suggests that something so ancient might know more.

It does.

The Salmon of Llyn Llyw tells them that, with every tide, it swims up the river towards Gloucester. There, from inside a stone prison, it has heard someone lamenting. Two of Arthur's men travel on the salmon's back to investigate.

The prisoner is Mabon.

Time works differently in this part of the tale. Nobody counts years. Age is measured in an anvil worn away by a beak, an oak that has grown and vanished, forests that have disappeared and returned. The older the search becomes, the less human its sense of time feels. By the time they reach the salmon, they are asking the landscape itself to remember.

What the Story Does Not Say

There is one rather important detail missing from all of this: autumn.

The surviving story does not place Mabon's abduction, imprisonment or rescue at the equinox. There are no apples, no harvest feast and no ritual balancing of light and darkness. Those associations belong to the modern festival, not the medieval tale.

Kelly knew he was choosing a name. His own explanation is quite clear about that. He was not claiming to have rediscovered a forgotten festival called Mabon; he was trying to fill an empty space in the modern Pagan calendar.

The distinction became blurrier later, which happens often with folklore. A modern practice is repeated often enough that its origin drops out of the telling. A contemporary interpretation gets attached to an older story. Someone writes that “the Celts believed” something, another writer repeats it, and eventually the statement acquires the appearance of age simply because nobody remembers where it started.

Real traditions are rarely that tidy. Customs are borrowed, revived, abandoned, renamed and altered. Religious observances become folk customs. Folk customs acquire new religious meanings. Old stories are retold for audiences that understand them differently from the people who first told them.

Mabon is unusual because we can see that process happening almost from the beginning. An old name was taken from one context, placed into another and, through repetition, became part of a new tradition.

The Equinox Itself

The autumn equinox is much older than any name given to it. In 2026 it falls on 23 September, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator and astronomical autumn begins in the Northern Hemisphere.

It is usually described as the point when day and night are equal, although the reality is slightly less neat. Atmospheric refraction and the way sunrise and sunset are measured mean that there is generally still a little more than twelve hours of daylight on the equinox itself. The date on which day and night come closest to equality, sometimes called the equilux, varies according to latitude.

By late September, though, nobody needs an astronomer to tell them that something has changed. The sun is lower. Shadows stretch further. Morning arrives later. Berries, hips, nuts and seedheads have replaced much of the flowering growth of summer. There are still warm afternoons that feel like summer, but the mornings have started telling a different story.

The frantic green expansion of spring and early summer is largely over. Plants are setting seed, fruit is ripening and the season has begun turning towards whatever can survive the colder months.

September Was Never One Harvest Day

The modern Wheel of the Year often calls Mabon the “second harvest”, but historically the season was not divided quite so neatly. Lughnasadh belonged earlier, around the beginning of August, while Harvest Home was celebrated in England whenever the local harvest was actually finished. By the end of September came Michaelmas, another familiar marker in the agricultural year. Weather, crop and place mattered more than an exact date on a calendar.

September was therefore less a single harvest festival than a stretch of gathering, processing and preparing. Grain had to be dried and threshed. Fruit had to be eaten, stored or preserved. Seeds intended for the following year had to survive until spring.

Much of traditional making follows the same pattern: the material gathered is rarely the finished thing. Flax becomes linen. Fleece becomes yarn. Individual rings become chainmaille. A strand of beads becomes a pattern. Materials pass through hands, tools and time before taking on a new form or purpose.

At Blood & Daisies, established crafts are used in much the same way. Chainmaille, beadwork, crochet and electroforming are combined and adapted into handmade jewellery, fibre art and mixed-media pieces rather than historical reproductions. Traditional techniques become the starting point for wearable art, sculptural pieces and one-of-a-kind work shaped by the imagined worlds behind each collection.

Keeping a Little of the Season

With electroforming, that transformation can be quite literal. A leaf that would normally dry, brown and eventually crumble is sealed, made conductive and slowly covered in copper. Its veins, torn edges and natural shape remain underneath, but the material itself becomes something new. The same process appears throughout our electroformed copper jewellery and specimen pieces, where organic material becomes part of a finished piece without losing the form that made it worth picking up in the first place.

The Archive is full of pieces that began this way: leaves, ferns, seed forms and other fragments collected because something about their shape was worth keeping. The process does not make them perfect. Curling, tears and uneven edges remain part of the finished piece.

You can browse the full collection in The Archive.

Fern — Frond Study

Oak — Lobed Leaf Study

Maple — Seed Form Study

Mabon: An Old Name, a Modern Festival

Perhaps the strangest thing about Mabon is how quickly a new name can begin to feel old. Fifty years is not very long. It is comfortably within living memory, yet the festival is now regularly surrounded by claims about ancient Mabon rituals, Celtic equinox celebrations and symbols that were supposedly attached to it centuries ago.

None of that is necessary.

September already brings enough with it. Apples and pears. Nuts and berries. Colder mornings and suddenly noticeable evenings. That first time you leave the house without a coat and realise it was a mistake. Cobwebs appear silver with dew in the morning, mushrooms push through damp ground and the first copper-coloured leaves begin collecting along the edges of paths.

The equinox gives us a real astronomical marker in the middle of all of that. Older harvest customs give us centuries of history around the work taking place at this time of year. Culhwch and Olwen gives us a medieval story about a man lost for so long that only the oldest creatures in the landscape can find him. Modern Paganism gives that date the name Mabon.

The name is new; the turning it points to is not. The evenings are closing in, the last warmth still lingers in the afternoon and summer is starting to loosen its grip. Soon enough the woods will be full of wet leaves, fungi and bare branches, and we will be gathering entirely different things for the workbench.

For now, there are still leaves worth picking up.

From Moss & Oak Hollow

Pieces shaped by leaves, fungi, roots and the darker edges of the forest.