Wow, where did the summer go??? August already. Well, as it turns out I've used Lammas (first of August) in a few books. It is a Pagan harvest festival. It can be seen other ways also. In To Speak of Things Unseen, it's mentioned but not important to the plot. It is more so in Sky Daughter.
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Nadine let out a breath. “I wonder...”
“Wonder what,
Nadine?” Maggie asked.
“Lammas Day.”
“More witchy stuff,
I’ll bet,” Jim snorted.
“It’s more than
that. Do you know what it is, Reuben?”
He shook his head.
“What about
Succoth?”
Reuben looked at
her with surprise. “How did you know I was Jewish? Did Maggie tell you? She
didn’t answer. “Succoth is offering of the first fruits,” he said after he
evidently decided she wouldn’t be answering.
“And the offering
had to be...”
“Without blemish...
What does this have to do with anything here?”
“It is also a
Sabbat. In the Celtic it would be called Lugnasadh, a feast to commemorate the
funeral games of the Irish sun-god Lugh.”
“You are as
confusing as ever, Nadine,” Jim protested. “Celebrating a death. How does that
fit with first fruits?”
“The god of light, Lugh, doesn’t really die.”
“Is any of this
supposed to make sense, woman?” Angus asked, exasperation in his voice.
“Well, I don’t
know,” she said, her own tone impatient. “But sometimes days mean something,
and when we’re dealing with Darren, I just realized that this one might.”
“Why?”
“It could be
considered a day of sacrifice. The God-King becomes a willing sacrifice for the
planting of the next year’s crop.”
Maggie let out a
breath. “A sacrifice?”
Nadine nodded. “It
is hard to explain, but somewhat simplified, before the time of the Equinox,
the Sun God is resurrected to become the Leader of the Wild Hunt and the Lord
of the Dead in the shadows of the Underworld.”
Maggie felt a cold
chill. That did sound like something that would play into Darren’s warped
thinking. A perfect sacrifice? She looked at Reuben and shuddered. Had Reuben
been marked not to identify him but as a sacrifice? She had to get to her
grandmother’s book, for help with a day only her grandmother might have seen
coming.
