Dancing at Lughnasa: Meet the women using the 3,000-year-old Celtic calendar to navigate modern life

For Doyle, from Gowran, Co Kilkenny, marking Lughnasa — which can be celebrated anytime in the first weeks of August — is all about singing, dancing and creating some space to literally sit with what you have harvested internally. “Last year, we had a women’s circle where we asked, ‘What are you proud of?’ For me, the main thing at Lughnasa is giving thanks. You could forage for wild berries or have friends over for dinner. Light a fire. Dance. It’s basically a celebration,” she adds.

For more than 30 years, Dolores Whelan has blazed a trail to provide a potent understanding of the value of ancient wisdom and ignite appreciation for Celtic spirituality and the waning traditions of indigenous Ireland. “My work is in recovery of the ancient spiritual traditions of this country. It wasn’t only Celtic — it’s older than the Celtic culture. What I’m interested in recovering is a world view that works better than the one we have,” she says.

While a move away from organised religion has left people without a solid framework to hold them up, people are hungry for a spiritual dimension in their lives, she believes. Whether we liked it or not, organised religion was a framework that held us in a relationship with the world we’re in, she says. “We know that that relationship wasn’t a healthy one but we knew who we were. It’s good that a lot of it has gone but now we’re in a complete abyss, and people don’t know who they are or where they’re going,” she says.

For Whelan, people have become much more exploratory in their lives and their thinking, and while we can’t go back, we can collect pieces from the past that provide meaning for our lives. “This country has always been a spiritual place. The land has an extraordinary energy. I’ve been bringing people on pilgrimage here for many years, and when you walk with an open heart and the intention to connect with the energies of the land, the landscape opens up and shares its energy with you,” she says.

Whether it’s bringing people to Slieve Gullion in South Armagh, to Slieve na Calliagh (the megalithic site at Lough Crew near Oldcastle in Co Meath), Croagh Patrick in Co Mayo, or Navan Fort/Emain Macha (one of the country’s most important archaeological sites), Whelan believes approaching these sacred places with the right frame of mind is what’s important. It’s the energy you bring that curates the experience, she says.

When it comes to Lughnasa, Whelan says you can’t speak about one festival unless you understand how the seasons flow. The Celtic calendar is at least 3,000 years old, linking the passage of time with the changing seasons of the natural world and the cosmological dimensions of the world through its relationship with the sun and the moon.

Whelan believes the Celtic calendar contains much wisdom for how we live our lives today. It highlights the changing nature of life and the rhythms and flow that create all seasons, each with their own gifts and challenges.

“For people who lived thousands of years ago, Lughnasa was incredibly important — if the harvest didn’t happen, people would have nothing to eat. It was a wonderful celebration of people on their land and it was also a way of consolidating the tribe. They got together for practical, spiritual and community reasons,” she says.

For the last 18 years, she and a group of friends have been marking this ancient festival in the garden of her home near Dundalk, Co Louth. And more and more people are interested in holding their own celebrations today, tapping into our tribal memory, she says. She explains that, typically, celebrating Lughnasa meant doing things differently, with ritual forming the physical enactment of the mythology of the season. Dancing, cutting the first sheaf of corn, gathering bilberries or making a garland of flowers are simple ways of incorporating the ancient ways into our lives, she says.

Growing up in rural Co Tipperary, Jenn Ryan never really felt she fit in. An only child, she felt connected to the animals on her family farm much as if they were her siblings. Bullied at school, she never felt lonely when she was out in nature or with her animals. She says she drifted aimlessly through her twenties, going to art college, working as a model in Milan, and travelling through India and Asia, arriving back in Ireland on the cusp of her thirties.

It was when she started working as a hairdresser and set up a small business called Velvet Moon, travelling the country selling gypsy-style wraps at festivals, that she began to feel like herself again. Her summers were spent living out of a tent close to the natural world, connecting with “kindred souls” and finding a purpose.

For as long as she can remember, 41-year-old Ryan wanted to buy a piece of land where she could live close to nature. By good luck, she found a site in Co Clare that she was able to buy and has lived in a yurt with her dog Lugha — named after the Celtic god Lugh from which Lughnasa takes its name — and a family of cats for the last three years. She describes it as her forever home, and even though she has no electricity and cooks from a gas ring, she feels there’s so much healing in this magical place for her.

“It’s not that new to me to live in a yurt, but I’m new in many ways to the practical side of living sustainably. I’m growing my own vegetables but I’ve had to ask for help and guidance. I’ve made a little shed and I’m not a builder. There are many things I don’t know yet, but you can learn the practical stuff,” she says.

Since she’s been in Co Clare, Ryan says she has thrown herself into the shamanic work she first started studying in her twenties. While there are many misconceptions about shamanism, she describes it as connecting with the elements and the seasons as well as the natural world and the spirit world. To make a living, she still cuts hair, taking trips to Dublin to see her clients, but her dream is to be able to share the things she’s learned with others and hold healing retreats on her land. She’d also love to have some more animals, maybe a few goats.

Lugha, her beloved dog, came into her life around the time of harvest and marked the start of a new chapter in her life. “Lughnasa is the time of abundance. Ritual and ceremonies during these sacred times are really important. I’ll be doing a little ceremony to call on that abundance and to honour it. I might spend some time with friends but I will definitely spend time on my own with this land,” she says.

Ten years ago, around the time that Kathy Scott set up The Trailblazery, which designs and produces live and virtual events, she started working with the Celtic Wheel of the Year in her own life. She describes how, at a time when people have become more relentlessly goal-driven, their lives dictated by the clock, the ancient calendar provides a place for us to explore what she calls a deeper time.

For Scott, the extraordinary thing about following the wheel of the year is beginning to understand there is a time for everything, including a time to die. “In my experience, it gets deeper every year. There is a revolution of people sea swimming and following the tides in this country. Anything that can tune us into the deep time and slow down our overactive nervous system and the collective overactive nervous system is a good thing,” she says.

Lughnasa, she says, was a time to dance. She was reminded of this when she went back to the film of Brian Friel’s play, Dancing at Lughnasa, which tells the story of the Mundy sisters in Donegal. “It was a time to celebrate the ripeness. I wonder do we do that enough? It’s a time to ask what’s ripe in our lives now? The pandemic asked us to slow down, to ask what are we harvesting in our lives and where do we source our joy?” she asks.

After finishing a degree in social anthropology and French, Belfast-born Lucy O’Hagan followed her passion for teaching. In 2015, she trained as a forest school practitioner and set up the Phoenix Forest School later that year. A life-long passion for the environment and for how our ancestors lived have influenced many of her life choices, including the setting up of her latest incarnation Wide Awake, which sees her run courses in ancestral skills and animal tracking.