The Order keeps no calendar of observances. It has no festivals, no holy days, and no hours at which practice is required, and the reasons are given on the Practice page. But many practitioners of the left-hand path do keep a calendar, and a reader who meets their festivals in other books deserves to know where they come from.
This page describes the nights most often kept, with what is known of their history and what is only said about it. It ends with the Order's reasons for keeping none of them, and some suggestions for practitioners who want fixed points in the year of their own choosing.
Why Keep a Calendar
Practitioners who keep festivals give several reasons. A fixed night gives a year a rhythm, and a practice a reason to be renewed. Seasonal symbolism lends a working a meaning beyond the practitioner: a rite at midsummer is about light at its height and the beginning of its decline, whether or not the practitioner says so. Festivals bring scattered people together, in person or at a distance. And some groups hold that a working is stronger when many people perform it at once, so that the date itself becomes an instrument.
That last claim is a testable one, and it is discussed at the end of this page. The others are matters of preference, and the Order has no quarrel with any of them.
Walpurgis Night
The night of 30 April takes its name from an eighth-century English abbess who worked as a missionary in Germany and whose canonization was celebrated on the first of May. The saint has nothing to do with what the night became. In German folklore it was the night on which witches flew to the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz mountains, for their great sabbath, and villagers lit fires and made noise to drive them off. A great German verse drama of the early nineteenth century set a famous scene on the mountain that night, and fixed the image for every reader since.
The night is the counterpart of the Gaelic festival of the first of May, with its fires and its opening of summer. For a number of left-hand path covens it is the most sacred night of the year. The page The Witch describes the sabbath it commemorates, and how little evidence there is that one was ever held.
Midsummer
The summer solstice, on or about 21 June in the northern hemisphere, is the longest day of the year. It has been marked with fires across Europe for as long as there are records, and the Christian calendar placed the feast of a saint beside it, so that the fires of midsummer became the fires of his eve.
The left-hand reading of the solstice tends to dwell on its other face. The longest day is also the day on which the light begins to fail. Some covens treat the solstice as a sowing, and keep the weeks after it as a time of incubation, ending in a harvest rite at the end of July. They describe the interval as a lesson in patience: the work is done, and the result is not yet visible.
The Equinoxes
Twice a year, about 20 March and about 22 or 23 September, day and night are of nearly equal length. The word comes from the Latin for "equal night." Some practitioners mark the equinoxes as images of balance between light and dark, and some teachers of the present day make balance central to the path, holding that a practitioner who is all darkness has gone as far wrong as one who aspires to be all light.
The equinoxes were not among the seasonal festivals of the Gaelic calendar, and the names now commonly given to them in modern paganism date only from the later twentieth century. Accounts of ancient equinox sacrifices in the same tradition have no good source.
Samhain and All Hallows
Samhain was the Gaelic festival at the beginning of November, a name often glossed as "summer's end." It marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of the dark half of the year, when livestock that could not be fed through the winter were slaughtered. Medieval Irish tales describe the mounds of the otherworld standing open on that night, and its dead and its spirits abroad. The Christian feast of All Saints was later fixed on the first of November, and its vigil, All Hallows' Eve, gave the night its common English name. In Ireland and Scotland faces were carved in turnips and lit from within. The pumpkin is a North American substitution.
Two things often said about Samhain are not true. There was no god of the dead named Samhain; the idea is an error of an eighteenth-century antiquarian, repeated ever since in tracts warning against the holiday. And the phrase about the veil between the worlds growing thin is modern, though the idea of an open otherworld on that night is genuinely old.
For many practitioners of the left-hand path this is the most important night of the year, and many keep it as a night for the dead: a fire, the names of those who have died, and words spoken to them. The page Death and the Dead describes the practice.
Midwinter
The winter solstice, on or about 21 December in the northern hemisphere, is the longest night. In Alpine and German folklore the nights that follow it belong to the wild ride, to the spirits that travel in Perchta's train, and to every kind of thing that should not be met on the road. Practitioners keep it in two ways. Some honor the return of the light, and read the star that rises before the sun as the light-bearer's own. Others honor the dark itself, at its fullest, for one night before it begins to yield.
The Birthday
The carnal current holds that the highest holiday of the year is the practitioner's own birthday. The choice follows from the current's first principle: if the self is the proper center of a life, then the day of its beginning is the proper center of the year. It is the one festival on this page that belongs to no people and no hemisphere, and the Order observes that it is also the one most practitioners of every current already keep.
Dates From the Panic
Some groups keep festivals with names such as the Grand Climax, at the end of July, and the Marriage or Bride of the Beast, on 7 September, and assign to each date a required element, such as blood or sex. As far as can be determined, these names and dates first appeared in lists of supposed satanic holidays that circulated among police officers and churches during the panic of the 1980s. No earlier source for them is known. The same lists accused practitioners of ritual crimes on those dates, and investigation found no such crimes.
There is an irony here that the Order notes without contempt. A calendar written by accusers, to describe a religion that did not exist, is now kept by some people who sincerely practice the religion the accusers imagined. A practice may be taken from any source. It is worth knowing which source it was taken from.
Inversions
Some practitioners mark the feasts of the religion they left by turning them over: a mock communion at Easter, a mass said backward, a prayer reversed line by line. The inverted mass is known chiefly from accusations, from a notorious scandal at a seventeenth-century French court, and from the novels of the nineteenth century, and it was described many times before it was widely performed. As transgression it has its uses, which Venom and Remedy describes. As a calendar it has a limit, the one the Symbols page names for the inverted cross: an observance that only negates another remains dependent on it.
Why the Order Keeps None
The Order has four reasons, and offers them as reasons rather than rules.
- A calendar becomes an obligation. A festival kept by choice in its first year is kept from duty in its fifth, and a group that keeps festivals needs someone to say when and how. The Order has no one whose place that would be.
- The seasons are not the same everywhere. Walpurgis Night opens the summer in Germany and the winter in the southern hemisphere, and Samhain falls in the spring. An order open to everyone cannot fix the meaning of a date for everyone.
- A working needs a reason. The Order's practice holds that a working is done when the practitioner has a reason to do it. A date is a reason only if it is the practitioner's own.
- The claim about numbers has not been tested. Groups that hold a working stronger when many perform it together could find out. Each participant would write down, before the date, what they expected, and compare it afterward with what happened, and with what happened when the same working was done alone. The Order knows of no group that has done this, and it does not accept the claim until one has.
Choosing Your Own
Practitioners who want fixed points in the year are free to choose them, and many do. The most common choices among those who use the Order's texts are these.
- The anniversary of the first entry in the record, which is the natural day for the yearly review described in The Nightside Record.
- The day the question of the first coil was first asked in earnest, if the practitioner remembers it.
- The practitioner's own birthday.
- The night of 2 October, on which some read The Shed Skin, the founding statement of the Order.
- Any night of the seasonal year that means something to the practitioner where they live.
Whatever is chosen, it can be tested like everything else. Note in the record what was done on the day and what came of it, and see over the years whether the date adds anything a working on any other night would not.