Lammas scented jar candle

How to Use It

Witchcraft & Folk Magick

• Sabbat altar: light the candle beside a loaf of homemade bread, a sheaf of wheat or a corn dolly and give thanks for what the year has already brought in.
• Harvest reckoning: as it burns, write down what you planted in spring (projects, money, promises) and what has come to fruit, then burn or bury the list.
• Over its three-and-a-half-day burn, relight it each evening of the Lammas tide and add a pinch of grain or a coin to the altar each night.

Ceremonial & Occult Magick

• Solar work: Lammas sits in the season of the Sun in Leo, and many ritualists use it to close the solar half of the year with a working for success and recognition.
• Rededication: use the candle while renewing vows, oaths or commitments made at Beltane, the opposite point on the wheel.

A Simple Working

• Bake or buy a small loaf of bread and set it on a plate beside the candle.
• Light the candle and break the bread into four pieces.
• Name one thing you are thankful for, one thing you have earned, one thing you still want to bring in, and one person you will share with.
• Eat one piece and leave the other three on the altar while the candle burns for an hour.
• Snuff the candle and lay the three pieces of bread outdoors for the birds.
• Relight the candle on each of the following evenings until it is spent.

Pairs Well With

• Lammas oil: to dress a petition paper or your own wrists for the sabbat.
• Wheat stalks: the traditional altar decoration for the first harvest.
• A corn dolly: to hold the spirit of the harvest until spring.
• Sunflower seeds: a solar offering for the height of the season.

What You Receive

One scented jar candle for Lammas, with a herb mixture in the wax; colours vary from candle to candle. Burns approximately 3 1/2 days.

Origin & Lore

Lammas falls on 1 August and marks the start of the grain harvest in the British Isles. In Anglo-Saxon England a loaf from the first sheaf was blessed at Mass, and in Ireland the same season was kept as Lughnasadh, with fairs, games, hill-top gatherings and the first meal of new potatoes or corn. Modern pagans keep it as one of the eight sabbats of the Wheel of the Year.

Lammas takes its name from the Old English hlafmaesse, “loaf-mass”: the day the first bread baked from the new wheat was carried into church to be blessed.

The Lughnasadh festival is tied in Irish tradition to the god Lugh, who was said to have founded the games at Tailtiu in honour of his foster-mother, who died clearing the plains of Ireland for farming. An Old English charm records hallowed Lammas bread being crumbled into the four corners of the barn to guard the stored grain. The Lammas sabbat in its modern form, with its own candles and oils, is a 20th-century Wiccan and neo-pagan revival built on these older harvest customs.