What's in a name?


Sabbat thoughts

I wasn't exactly without a computer, but I couldn't get to my current files. That made blogging a near impossibility until I could recover them.

In a way, it was an opportunity. To get away from my computer frustrations, I broke out my graph paper notepad and did some thinking.

For a few years now, I have not exactly been happy about using the "traditional" Neopagan names for the sabbats. Some like Lammas come from medieval Christian sources. As for the Gaelic, the fact that I don't speak the language means I am not honoring the tradition or the holiday, even if I am more CR than anything else.

The "traditional" meanings of the sabbats (and especially not the watered down versions usually published) don't match my meditations and understandings. I use Mike Nichols as my jumping off place, and try to match my celebrations to the solar year.

The names, now that is a challenge. Wintergate and Summergate are obvious, especially in terms of birth and passing. Greenmark and Redmark are less intuitive, but still make sense in context of initiation and sacrifice. Then things get a little stretched. Treecrest and Heartwell even work mostly. But I'm not real happy with the last two names.

As I write the descriptions this time around, I am focusing more on the Divine Journey.

Since my calendar files didn't completely make it through the data recovery, that's another reason to go through and rethink what the sabbats mean to me.

Posted: Mon - December 24, 2007 at 04:03 PM
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