Also called full-moon circle, esbat rite
A Wiccan working gathering held on the full moon, separate from the eight seasonal sabbats, for magic, healing work and honoring the Goddess.
Tonight's moon is read when the page loads.
Take care: Keep candles on stable holders, never leave flames unattended, and if wine is shared offer a non-alcoholic choice.
Murray borrowed the word from a French witch-trial record and used it for the small local meetings she believed witches held for business and magic, as distinct from the great Sabbaths. Her theory of a surviving pagan witch-cult has been rejected by historians, but the word stuck.
Valiente and others fixed the esbat on the full moon, giving thirteen meetings in most years alongside the eight sabbats. Coven esbats combine ritual, magical work, teaching and the cakes-and-wine meal.
Cunningham's widely read guide adapted the coven forms for people practicing alone. The full-moon rite became a short personal circle with a lunar invocation and a working, often just a candle and an intention.
The word esbat came into English through Margaret Murray, an Egyptologist, who in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) took it from a French trial source and suggested a link to Old French s'esbattre, to frolic. She described esbats as small local meetings of witches, as opposed to the large seasonal Sabbaths. Murray's evidence came mostly from witch-trial confessions, read very selectively.
Murray's history is discredited, but Gardner and Valiente adopted her vocabulary in the 1950s, and Wicca settled on the full moon as the esbat night. With the eight sabbats it forms the Wiccan ritual calendar. Solitary practice, popularized in the 1980s by Scott Cunningham, made the esbat a common personal ritual. Many covens today still meet monthly on or near the full moon.
A full-moon rite in which a priestess calls the Goddess of the moon into herself and speaks with her voice. Central to Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca, named after the old Thessalian witches' boast.
On first seeing the new crescent, turning over the coins in your pocket, and in some places bowing to the moon, so your money grows with it through the month.
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