The Irish name for Lammas is Lughnasadh (or Lunastal in Scottish Gaelic). This refers to the funerary games which we are told the god Lugh initiated to honour his foster mother, Tailtiu, who died after the labour of clearing the land around Telltown, County Meath, for agriculture. Telltown is said to take its name from Tailtiu, and gives its own name to Lammas fair customs like Telltown marriages, which were year-and-a-day trial marriages performed at fairs. Another tradition was that of young people agreeing to be sweethearts just for the duration of the fair period. These couples were then referred to as being Telltown brother and sister.  Since the quarter days were important in the Scottish legal calendar as starting and ending dates for legal contracts, it's natural that these informal romantic contracts would be struck at this time.

More generally, both folklore and neo-Pagan lore at this time of year is full of harvest customs, corn maidens, and fancy loaves of bread. Increasingly, I'm feeling a bit disaffected when it comes to this. The more I study human history, and the more I look at the mess our human sprawl has made of our home (planet Earth), the more I begin to regret that the human race chose to take up the plough in the first place. The taming of grain allowed humans to settle down and raise more children, who in turn raised even more children. All those children who grew up and needed more land to clear, conquer and plough for ever bigger fields of grain, and so the dominos began to topple. Forests, wildlife, indigenous people -- all stood in the way of this process we called progress. The progress that enabled us to build cities and sit still long enough to create the industrial revolution and the population explosion, which in turn influenced the tendency to factory farming and vast, destructive monoculture grain plantations.

Although I know we will never intentionally turn the clock back as far as I might wish, there is a part of me that feels reluctant to celebrate what my ancestors started. I've spent most of my life living in agricultural communities. It's not a distant, hazy dream for me. I understand its cycles of arable and stock rearing tasks and celebrations. I also love the deities of the Celts. They are my own deities, and  many of them are deeply bound up with agriculture, as is our neo-Pagan wheel of the year. I'm not going to throw that away. For one thing, it's reality. I still like to eat. I like to drink beer and whisky. Throwing John Barleycorn and The Corn Maiden out with the irrigation water seems a little ungrateful. However, at the same time I trust that the reasons for my current feelings are also valid, and like my ancestors before me, I'm not afraid to begin to look at things through a new lens, and place more weight on what is important now. And right now, preserving the unploughed natural world is more important to me than whether me and my tribe have enough to eat over the winter.

Lugh, we know, was not only a successful and clever warrior, but was known for his many skills. Skill at crafts and music,  at gaming and healing. After the second battle of Magh Tiuragh he and his wise men refused the offer of four grain harvests per year and cows that gave milk perpetually. Gifts offered by Bres, the defeated king who had taxed and worked his people into utter misery. This may have been Bres' idea of a good thing, but to the Tuatha De Danann is was unsuitable. They preferred to keep everything in its natural season.

Tailtiu, meanwhile, died in bondage after clearing the land for agriculture. I think it has long been the general assumption that she is honoured for having made a great sacrifice, and that is a reasonable reading of the myth, especially in a wider context. However, I see her also as representing the land put under the bondage of the plough, and of the loss of the hunting grounds which were destroyed in the process.

What will I be thinking of at Lughnasadh rituals this year? I'm not sure yet, but I have plenty to be going forward with. The making of experimental or short-term agreements, considering how best to use my skills, honouring the natural cycles of nature and not asking her to work overtime on my behalf, and supporting animal rights and wild nature. I will also be thankful and mindful of where and how my next bowl of porridge and bottle of beer will make their way to me.

The earliest sources we have for Celtic myths are manuscripts created from the 11th to 16th centuries. Most scholars are of the opinion, based on language and other clues, that the material in these old books is older than the books themselves. Some of it has the kind of errors which show that it was copied from another written source (now lost) and some of it shows the hallmarks of having been passed down orally for a long time, before it was finally written down.

And so , to the tales themselves.

The primary body of Welsh myth is The Mabinogi (or Mabinogion). It is divided into four "branches" or sections, which each stand on their own, but loosely relate to one another. Another handful of shorter stories are associated with the Mabinogi, because they were found in some of the same early manuscripts. Some of these will probably be included when you buy a translation of the Mabinogi in book form. The Welsh myths were written down later than the Irish material, the manuscripts are generally in better condition and the tales are much less like a jigsaw with its pieces scattered through many books. However, most scholars have a sense of missing material when they study the Mabinogi. This could be because the scribes recorded stories from people who only remembered parts of them, or perhaps the scribes didn't understand the tales very well, or tampered with them for religious reasons.

For someone who has divided their life between Scotland and the US, I spend an inexplicably large amount of time thinking about Morris dancing. I can't explain this. It just is -- and I don't even know when it started. I especially like the way Border morris has exploded in the past decade or so. It's vibrant, dark, edgy and sometimes overtly Pagan. I was pretty excited, then, to discover that someone who's been on the inside of Border morris, even in at the beginning of its revival, had written a book about it.

Turns out the book is pretty good. Rob Elliott is a witty writer, and he strikes a good balance here between serious thoughts and funny stories about morris dancers drinking too much. I like the way he acknowledges the scholarly work done by others, and knows the historical references, but isn't limited by them. He's willing to talk about what feels right, and what feels true, and that's important when working within a tradition that is also a living thing.