Aidan Kelly, Walt Kelly, and the history of Mabon
In which we consider Pogo and the beauty of making shit up
Back in 1974, I was putting together a “Pagan-Craft” calendar—the first of its kind, as far as I know—listing the holidays, astrological aspects, and other stuff of interest to Pagans. We have Gaelic names for the four Celtic holidays. It offended my aesthetic sensibilities that there seemed to be no Pagan names for the summer solstice or the fall equinox equivalent to Yule or Beltane—so I decided to supply them.
—Aidan Kelly, “About Naming Ostara, Litha, and Mabon”
Neopaganism is an earth-based religion. Its celebrations follow the turning of the seasons and the festival of Mabon—celebrated at the autumn equinox—dates back to the early days of the modern Neopagan movement, when Aidan Kelly presented what we now know as the Wheel of the Year in Green Egg.
While Kelly has become a controversial figure in the history of American Wicca, all evidence suggests that he created the holidays known as Ostara, Litha, and Mabon. Ronald Hutton, a history professor at Bristol University and a well-regarded scholar of both pre-Christian religion in Britain and contemporary paganism, has this to say in an article called “Modern Pagan Festivals: A Study in the Nature of Tradition”:
He named his autumn equinox festival “Mabon,” which to British scholars might seem preposterously inappropriate. It is a proper name derived from the Welsh word mab/map “son” or “boy,” which hardly suits an autumnal festival. He got there by a route that is typical, and revealing, of American Pagan syncretism. His starting point was the greatest of all European myths that can be associated with autumn—the return of the goddess Kore, or Persephone, to the underworld for the darker half of the year. Her story therefore became the core of the ceremony that he composed for the festival. The name and the Welsh connection, however, seem to derive from the work of a Welsh scholar, W. J. Gruffydd, published as an article (Gruffydd 1912) and as a book (Gruffydd 1953). It emphasised the identity of Mabon, a character known from medieval Welsh literature, as a former pagan deity; an attribution that is possible, although arguably unproven. Gruffydd went further, to make Mabon into a young god born of a great goddess: a male divine parallel for the Greek Persephone. This was one of the last examples of the Victorian tradition, now almost completely abandoned in Britain, of interpreting medieval romances as echoes of lost pagan myth.
In addition to suggesting that Mabon was once a god and that his mother was a great goddess, Kelly says that this character serves his purposes because Mabon was rescued from the underworld by the trickster hero Gwydion. I am not an expert in the Mabinogion, but I am a pretty good researcher with access to a university library and I cannot find any evidence of this story in medieval Welsh literature.
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