The Wheel of the Year

The Tor is thirty minutes on a bike from where I grew up. In those days it might as well have been a different dimension.

Our house was a council terrace, square round a green where most of my childhood ran its course. From the corner diagonally opposite our front door I could see Glastonbury Tor on the horizon. It pulled at me from young. A mythical, magical thing on the skyline, calling something out of me that my home life could not. As soon as the training wheels came off the bike I was planning the journey.

They came in time. Friends and I cycled out, stopping at aunties' houses on the route, fuelled by orange squash fizzing with tartrazine and chocolate biscuits. We were on our way to fly gliders from the top. The gliders mattered for about ten minutes. The Tor took the rest. The ley lines, the alleys of Glastonbury, the most colourful characters I had met since summers in Ireland. This is where my personal deck began.

Closer to home, in my mother's well-tended front garden among the vintage hydrangeas and her beautiful roses, there was a tree. I would hang upside down from it. From there, the Tor sat inverted on the horizon and the rest of the world reorganised itself. Blood to my head, garden upturned, the council estate gone. It was my way out. The Hanged Man was already in my deck. Years later he finally spoke to me. I had been doing it since I was a child.

This page is the wheel of the year as I learned it. Not from a book. From the land it came out of, and a tree I hung upside down from. It is for anyone who finds themselves drawn to the turning of the seasons and wants to know what each turning point is actually for.

What the wheel is

The wheel of the year is eight festivals that mark the turning of the seasons. Four solar, four cross-quarter. Together they map the agricultural year of pre-Christian Britain and Ireland, with influences from Germanic and Norse traditions running alongside the Celtic.

The four solar festivals are tied to the sun. Yule at midwinter, Ostara at the spring equinox, Litha at midsummer, Mabon at the autumn equinox. These are astronomical moments, set to the second by celestial mechanics. They shift slightly each year because the Earth's orbit is not perfectly even.

The four cross-quarter festivals sit between the solar ones, marking the midpoints of the seasons. Imbolc, Beltane, Lammas, Samhain. These are calendar dates rather than astronomical events, usually celebrated on the first of February, May, August, and at the end of October. Some practitioners follow the astronomical midpoint instead, which can move the date by several days.

Both systems are valid. Most people pick one and stick with it. I work with the traditional fixed dates because they were the dates the land was working to long before anyone calculated the sun's exact position. The harvest came in when the wheat was ready, not when an almanac said so.

Cross-quarter days and quarter days

The four cross-quarter festivals (Imbolc, Beltane, Lammas, Samhain) are the Celtic festivals, sometimes called the greater sabbats. They mark the felt midpoints of the seasons. They are the festivals of the people who worked the land.

The four quarter festivals (Yule, Ostara, Litha, Mabon) are the solar festivals, sometimes called the lesser sabbats. They come from Germanic and Norse traditions and were less central to the original Celtic calendar. They were folded into the wheel of the year as we know it during the 20th century, largely through the work of Gerald Gardner and the modern Wiccan tradition.

The name Mabon for the autumn equinox is particularly recent. It was coined by Aidan Kelly in 1970. Before that, the autumn equinox went unnamed in most Wiccan practice. I mention this not to undermine the tradition but because the wheel of the year is a living thing, not a museum piece. It has been built up over decades and is still being built up. You are allowed to add to it.

The eight sabbats

Each festival below links to its own pillar page, where I write about its history, its meanings, how to mark it, and the tarot card that speaks for it.

The Wheel of the Year 2026

The Wheel of the Year 2027

The wheel in both hemispheres

The wheel turns with the seasons, which means it turns differently depending on where you stand. In the Northern Hemisphere, Samhain is October and Beltane is May. In the Southern Hemisphere it is the other way round. Samhain falls in April or May. Beltane in October or November. Yule is the longest night of the southern winter, which arrives in June.

This matters because the wheel is about the land, not about the calendar. The cross-quarter festivals are felt midpoints of the seasons where you live. If you are reading this from Sydney or Perth or Melbourne, the spring equinox is in September, the wheel runs six months offset, and the festivals carry the energy of your own season, not the one printed on a Wiccan calendar from California.

The Ten Pound Pom in our family came to this directly. My husband's sister emigrated to Australia in the 1960s on the assisted passage scheme. His family has been part of my life ever since we met. Visits, conversations about heat and distance and whether you ever stop being from somewhere else. His niece is passionate about crystals. We talk about energy and intuition the way some families talk about football.

What I learned from them is that the wheel works wherever you are. The dates shift. The land does not stop turning.

How to work with the wheel

You do not need a coven. You do not need any ritual equipment. The wheel is older than any of that. The wheel is what happens in the land.

The simplest practice is to mark the day when it comes. Pause in the morning. Acknowledge what the wheel has reached. Light a candle if you have one. Read about the sabbat. Notice what the season is asking of you.

For each sabbat there is something the land is doing and something the body is doing. Samhain is decay, descent, the gathering of stored things. The body responds with introspection, with the urge to rest, with shorter days that pull you inward. Imbolc is the first stirrings beneath the snow. The body responds with restlessness, with the first creative urges of the year. Beltane is fertility, the full opening of life. The body responds with vitality, sensuality, the urge to move.

If you want to go deeper, each sabbat above links to a pillar page where I write about that festival's history, its meanings, its rituals, its tarot correspondences, and the questions worth sitting with as the wheel turns through it.

The wheel keeps turning whether we notice it or not. The point of marking it is not to follow a tradition. The point is to pay attention to what the land is doing, what your body is doing, what the part of you that is older than your calendar is doing.

This is the wheel of the year as I have learned it. From the Tor on the horizon. From the alleys of Glastonbury. From a tree I hung upside down from. From the cards in my deck and the readers who came before me. From the land itself.

I will see you under the next moon.

Yours, Paul O'Mara