Mabon Challenge Day 2: A Harvest Moon Ritual

Try hosting your own private or group full moon ritual, focusing on cultivation and release.

Quick note: This a part of the Mabon Creativity + Ritual Challenge, and these posts are only emailed to Eco-Arts Sanctuary members. If you want to join and receive them and other eco-spiritual dispatches in your inbox, head over to inkroads.substack.com/account and toggle your Eco-Arts Sanctuary tab on.

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Hi everyone! I hope you enjoyed this Sunday’s sunlit challenge. I hope you’re drinking in the last droplets of summer’s nourishment, and I hope you’ve learned something new (or awoken something very, very ancient) from your time connecting with nature.

The Harvest Moon is tonight, swelling into wholeness on the knife’s edge of the equinox. In ancient Greece, the autumnal Eleusinian Mysteries are also believed to have started on this day. These began with a ritual bath in the sea, three days of walking, and a still-mysterious rite (you can read my full post about it here):

Tonight’s moon is also a lunar eclipse, making it even more emotionally charged and potentially revelatory. Both this moon and the Mysteries connect us more deeply with our inner duality, thereby connecting us to the wholeness that comes from embracing all of our aspects, both dark and light. If you channel their energy with love and care, these religious and astrological rites can all provide opportunities for transformation, healing, cleansing the past, and creating space for the new.

In that spirit, here’s today’s challenge:

Plan and create your own full moon ritual.

Maybe you already follow the moon religiously, or maybe you’ve never paid attention to it (though somehow I doubt that, given the nature of my extraordinary and very nature-attuned subscribers), but either way, I challenge you to design your own full moon ritual to honor the Harvest Moon tonight, which blooms into the sky at full-force at around 10:30PM EST.

Full moons typically symbolize awareness, completion, and receptivity, and so it’s quite perfect that this moon falls at the very end of the summer. Things can also feel emotionally intense during full moons and eclipses in particular, making this a great time to decompress through ritual and grounding practices. You can also use this moon take stock of where you’ve been.

However, since this is an eclipse, it is not the best time to manifest or set new intentions. (We’ll be doing plenty of that later in this challenge). Instead, you may want to focus on reflection, acceptance, and surrender with your practices tonight.

Above all, follow your intuition. I encourage you to research full moon rituals, or simply select practices that feel right for you. While moon worship has been going on for many thousands of years, there’s no right way or wrong to do it.

You might simply light a candle and say a prayer, or you might throw a full-on elaborate moon circle with incense and bowls overflowing with strawberries and honey. I’ve done both, and I love each of them in their own way.

The Harvest Moon falls at the end of the summer, when the majority of what’s been growing for the past six months is being reaped and stored and blessed and praised. So it’s a perfect time to take stock of how the summer went and what you’ve learned and how you’ve grown, while also preparing for the arrival of the more internal, meditative seasons.

This is a time of completion and actualization. It is a time of gathering, swelling, and ultimately, of releasing.

This particular eclipse occurs on the Virgo-Pisces axis, placing it squarely between the archetypes of emotion and organization. If you’re into astrology, it is also significant because it marks the beginning of a seven-part series of Virgo-Pisces eclipses that will continue into 2027. The last time we had a series like this was in 2015-2017, but this year’s eclipse will be the beginning of a time of reversing some of the themes that came up during those years.

So what old stories are re-emerging? What are you revisiting? What are you changing?

For me, I’ve been engaging with my deep creativity and inner wildness like I did in 2015-2017, but I am now doing it in a healthier way, reversing some destructive tortured-poet habits I adopted back then. It really actually does feel like the beginning of a new cycle for me, so I’m using the moon — and this ritual — to continue to build on that energy. I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about and how this full moon and new cycle are resonating with you.

No matter what, be gentle with yourself as you let the moon’s light into your heart tonight. See what is there without looking away, and offer love to it all.

Here’s a little full moon ritual for you to try.

You will need: