Lughnasa is the first harvest festival of the year when the grain is ready to reap. The strength of the sun is now starting to wane as summer’s end is in sight, its energy now in the fields. Lugh is the Celtic sun god, and today is a fire sabbat honoring the sun’s power. In Irish Gaelic, Lughnasa is the word for the month of August.
This is an especially potent time for vegans, as the grain harvest is the first of the year’s harvest and it is decidedly plant-based (the final harvest of the year, Samhain, is a blood harvest). We can practice gratitude for the sun that continues to share its energy and provide food for us all to grow–humans, animals, and plants–without shedding blood. Instead, Lughnasa honors the sacrifice of the grain, the killing of plants as necessary to sustain life, part of the great ebbing and flowing of nature.
Lughnasa is also sunflower season, and, of course, the sunflower with its vibrant energy and promise of new growth with its ample seeds, has been a long time symbol of veganism. Now is a good time to practice some sunflower magic by eating some seeds at sunset and making a wish.
Sadly, in rural Ireland, Lugh has become personified in a wild-caught goat who is held captive on a tall platform over the Lughnasa celebrations for three days. This goat, known as “King Puck,” must endure terrifying heights, carnival commotion, bright lights, and the general stress of capture. The Puck Fair dates back to colonial times and likely the goat is used to symbolize Irish resistance, not being an authentic representation of Celtic Lughnasa at all. The practice persists despite many years of activist protest.
Practicing vegan celebrations of the sun’s passage is an important resistance to these modern appropriations. We can reclaim the life-affirming traditions of this season and celebrate by baking, eating some good bread, or taking action for those who have no bread, the children of Gaza being especially on my mind. 🌾
If you want to learn more about nature-based ritual work for vegan self-care, check out my new book, Vegan Witchcraft which is now available for preorder and releases this August on the new moon. This book is my Lughnasa harvest, finally reaped after three years in the works!
Dr. Wrenn is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.
She is the author of A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave MacMillan 2016), Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (University of Michigan Press 2019), Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain’s First Colony (State University of New York Press 2021), and Vegan Witchcraft: Contemporary Magical Practice and Multispecies Social Change (Routledge 2026).
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