Also called cakes and wine, simple feast, the blessing of cakes and wine
Cakes and Ale is the part of a Wiccan ritual where food and drink are blessed, shared and partly offered back to the gods, usually near the end of an esbat or sabbat. It gives thanks and helps participants ground after magical work.
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Take care: Use juice or water if anyone present is under age, driving or avoiding alcohol. Leave only biodegradable offerings outdoors, and keep chocolate and raisins away from places dogs roam.
Early Gardnerian material describes consecrating cakes and wine, with the priestess holding the cup and the priest lowering the athame into it. 'Cakes and ale' became the more common name in later, wider Wiccan and pagan practice.
Sir Toby Belch asks the puritanical Malvolio whether, because he is virtuous, there will be no more cakes and ale. The phrase came to mean the simple pleasures of life and of festival. W. Somerset Maugham used it as a novel title in 1930.
The prophet Jeremiah condemns families who baked cakes and poured drink offerings to the 'Queen of Heaven'. Some modern pagans cite this as an ancient parallel for offering cakes to a goddess.
The phrase cakes and ale comes from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, written around 1601, where Sir Toby Belch defends revelry against Malvolio's sternness. Cakes and ale were festival food at Twelfth Night and church ales, and the phrase came to stand for life's ordinary joys. W. Somerset Maugham borrowed it for his 1930 novel. That spirit of thankful merriment suits the Wiccan rite that later took the name.
In Gardnerian Wicca, which Gerald Gardner made public in the 1950s, a blessing of cakes and wine follows the main ritual. It thanks the Goddess and God, symbolises their union, and helps people return to ordinary awareness by eating. As Wicca spread through the 1970s and 1980s, especially through solitary guides, 'cakes and ale' became the usual name, and juice or water often replaced alcohol. The exact point at which the Shakespeare phrase was attached to the rite is not documented in the sources checked.
The folk rites of the end of harvest: the last sheaf cut and woven into a corn dolly or neck, carried home with shouting, and kept until spring, followed by the harvest supper. Mabon is a modern Pagan name for the autumn equinox, coined around 1970.
On 1 August, the first bread baked from the new wheat was blessed, and an Anglo-Saxon charm book directed that it be broken into four pieces and laid in the four corners of the barn to protect the stored grain.
On Twelfth Night, villagers in the English cider country gather around the oldest apple tree, soak toast in cider for the robins, pour cider on the roots, sing to the tree and make a racket to drive off bad spirits so the orchard bears well.
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