The Wheel of the Year is an important construct in Wiccan practice and essentially it’s the liturgical calendar for our religion. However, while sticking to the original dates for the northern hemisphere folks is easy, the real problems come about for the southern hemisphere practitioners. Depending on where you live and your approach to your own, personalised practice, the dates for each of the Wheel’s celebrations may well be different. We’ve thus defaulted as a global Wiccan community into three main groups.

• Those who stick to, and follow, the northern hemisphere Wheel of the Year because they live there, because it’s simpler, or because they don’t know what else to do.
• Those who follow a completely revised southern Wheel of the Year which essentially is the opposite of the northern one.
• Those who follow a more organic calendar based on their local geography and ecology.

Now let me say at this point that none of these approaches are wrong and as a practitioner of a religion that expects you to take responsibility for your practice, it’s up to you to determine what will work for you. So many people are modifying their Wheel of the Year to reflect their own ecology and for many practitioners this has enabled them to feel much more in tune with their own, local natural world rather than one imposed on them by others.

It’s also not just as simple of swapping the seasons over either, oh that it was that easy! For example, the weather patterns in large continents like Australia and the Americas dictate that during summer, in some places it can be extremely hot and yet in others in the same country it can be quite mild. Alaska has a different summer weather pattern than does California. In Australia, Tasmania has a mild summer while Darwin suffers under oppressive heat in summer. So even in the same country, the weather patterns can be quite different.

To make matters even more complicated, while the northern Wheel of the Year says that summer is the time of life and natural abundance, in those very hot places rather than being the time of year when plant and animal life is thriving as it would be in the homeland of this religion we call Wicca, life is hibernating from the extreme heat. In the summers in the Nevada desert in the USA and the Simpson desert in Australia, plants are not growing gaily, harvests are not ripening and young animals and birds are not taking their first tentative steps or flights into the big wide world. So many Wiccan practitioners shy away from celebrating harvest festivals for instance and instead modify them to reflect what’s actually happening in their ecology. What’s the point in celebrating a harvest festival of summer when all the plant life is dried up, shrivelled or hibernating!

While all this is true, and indeed is an ever present problem for both northern and southern hemisphere Wiccans, we do have to follow something related to our Wheel of the Year or we wouldn’t be Wiccans anymore. I mean for example, if the Christians decided that Christmas didn’t fit anymore and they removed it entirely, it would probably be a big dent in the Christian liturgical calendar! So, I’ve offered here the two more traditional Wheels of the Year (northern and southern) so you at least have a framework from which to work. I’d encourage you to develop your own liturgical calendar if your local ecology doesn’t reflect either Wheel appropriately until you come up with something that suits your needs but remember always that the natural cycle of life around us probably needs to be hardwired into the God and Goddess stories in order to weld it within the Wiccan faith. We are after all celebrating a religion and without those mythical stories, you’re just celebrating nature, even if she is glorious in her own right.

Northern (and Original) Wiccan Wheel of the Year
2^nd February - Imbolg(also known as Candlemas)
21^st March - Spring Equinox (also known as Ostara)
1^st May - Beltaine
21^st June - Summer Solstice (also known as Midsummer)
31^st July – Lughnasadh(also known as Lammas)
21^st September – Autumn Equinox (also known as Mabon)
31^st October – Samhain(also known as All Hallows Eve)
22^nd December - Winter Solstice (also known as Yule)

Southern Wiccan Wheel of the Year
2^nd February - Lughnasadh(also known as Lammas)
21^st March - Autumn Equinox (also known as Mabon)
1^st May - Samhain(also known as All Hallows Eve)
21^st June - Winter Solstice (also known as Yule)
31^st July – Imbolg
21^st September – Spring Equinox (also known as Ostara)
31^st October – Beltaine
22^nd December - Summer Solstice (also known as Midsummer)

Smiles and blessings,
Amethyst