Blessed Mabon

I met up with my local group of pagans and witches this week for a Mabon celebration. We meet at every one of the eight major festivals of the Wheel of the Year (I wrote about Mabon this time last year - see here).

 

While not being a practitioner myself - I've never claimed to be anything other than a folklorist and forager - I am fascinated by how the natural world helped to shape ancient belief systems and early Earth-based forms of religion. Even the so-called 'pagan calendar' - as represented above - is based on observation of the natural world as the four 'cross days' (at 12, 3, 6,and 9 o'clock positions) mark the equinoxes and solstices, and the four 'quarter days' mark the points where seasons begin to change. It makes a lot more sense to me than the traditional calendar where you have to sing a mnemonic rhyme to figure out how many days are in each month. The wheel of the Year was created by nature, not by the egos of various church leaders and Roman emperors.

I've recently been delivering a new talk at various events around the country called Do we need a new Witchcraft? The title is deliberately controversial but the subject matter is not. What I argue is that many of the so-called 'old ways' were the right ways for us to live and we have strayed too far from that path. 

One obvious example of this is our disassociation with the natural cycles and our separation from the interconnectedness that binds most species. If that sounds a bit woo woo or 'Use the Force, Luke!' let me explain with an example.

European settlers first moved into the Yellowstone caldera - the crater of a massive supervolcano that we now know as Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, over 100 years ago. They brought with them cattle, goats, sheep and horses. But when they saw how many grey wolves lived in the area, they decided to eliminate them as a threat and the wolves were mercilessly hunted down or trapped and killed. What they hadn't realised, however, was the devastating effect this would have on the Yellowstone biosphere. 

The extinction of the wolves led to a massive increase in the numbers of elk - their primary food species.  And as the elk flourished, their over-grazing of new willow, aspen, and cottonwood plants meant that beavers started to die off as they rely on willow to survive during the winter. Also the loss of so many plants meant that soils were not getting nutrients from the regular autumn leaf fall and the stability that comes from entangled root systems and mycellial networks. 

Meanwhile, riverbank erosion slowed because there were no more beaver dams. The beavers were responsible for causing rivers to meander, channels to deepen, and small pools to emerge. And without these pools and areas of slower water, salmon couldn't spawn and bears couldn't catch them. That affected bear populations and, because the animals would haul their catches into the woods to eat them, the insects and scavengers that fed on the fish carcasses were robbed of food. Also, the nutrients from the decomposing fish no longer went into the soil and, because the fish had been caught in huge numbers before, they had been a significant contributor to forest growth. And the forests fed and housed thousands of different species of animal, plant and fungi. 

Ultimately the entire area's geography and environment was changed - for the worse - by removing the wolves. 

And so, in 1995, scientists reintroduced the wolves. And, almost immediately, it resulted in something called a 'trophic cascade' through the entire ecosystem and the park began to heal itself. Species began to return to their natural population numbers. The forests became helathy again. The rivers began to meander as new beaver dams were built and the salmon and bears returned. Other keystone species numbers began to grow and, within a decade, the park was in a much better shape.

If there's one lesson we can learn from this story - and there are many other similar examples - it's that nature has evolved near-perfect systems over the course of the four billion years that life has been around. These systems are self-regulating and self-healing ... unless they are disrupted. And the only real disruption comes from human activity.

Just look at energy, as an example. We are surrounded by free, clean sources of power. We have wind, solar, tidal power. We have hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. And, below our feet, we have the Earth itself which, at its centre, is as hot as the surface of the sun. That heat is an inexaustible source of energy that we could be using to provide electricity. And do we use it? Hardly at all. Instead we dig up fossil fuels and burn them, poluting our atmosphere, wrecking the landscape and warming the planet. It's madness. 

Our ancestors got it right. We must work with nature, as a part of these systems. If we do, we have harmony. If we don't we risk ocological disaster and sow the seeds of our - and many other species' - demise.

A blessed Mabon to those of you who, like me, care about the Earth.