Also called Mabon, autumn equinox, Harvest Home, corn dolly, kern baby, crying the neck, Alban Elfed
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.
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Take care: Dried straw is very flammable; hang the dolly away from candles, stoves and fairy lights. Burn it only in a proper fire.
The last handful of standing corn was plaited into a neck, raised by the oldest reaper, and greeted with the call of having the neck, answered by the whole field. It was hung in the farmhouse until the next harvest.
Frazer collected customs where the last sheaf was made into a doll called the Corn-mother or Old Woman, dressed, carried home on the last wagon and sometimes drenched with water to bring rain for next year. Near Danzig the person who cut the last ears made the doll. Saint Eligius in the 7th century already warned Flemish Christians against making such little old women.
Aidan Kelly named the autumn equinox Mabon around 1970 to 1974 after Mabon ap Modron, a figure in Welsh legend who has no known link to the equinox. Neo-Druids call it Alban Elfed. It is kept as a thanksgiving for the second harvest and a balance of light and dark.
Harvest customs across Europe gave special weight to the last sheaf. Some regions feared cutting it, others raced for it, and many dressed it as a figure called the Corn-mother, Old Woman, Maiden or Kern Baby. James Frazer read these as survivals of a corn spirit, a theory later folklorists treat with caution. Ronald Hutton describes the English versions, from Kern Babies in Northumberland to crying the neck in the south west, and the Harvest Home supper that followed.
The name Mabon is new. Aidan Kelly gave it to the Wiccan autumn equinox in the early 1970s, and it spread through Green Egg magazine and later books. Doreen Valiente did not use it in 1978. The Church of England meanwhile created the Harvest Festival service in 1843, when the Reverend Robert Hawker held one at Morwenstow in Cornwall, and it took over much of the old supper's role.
Tying a wish, a wind or a power into knots is one of the oldest binding methods. This version follows the feathered cord found in a Somerset attic and made famous in 1887, used here to bind a goal into nine knots.
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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