The search for the source of the ‘Feast of Epona’ on June 13th continues. The topic came up again on another mailing list I’m on. This lead to some more topic searches to try and track down the source.
I tried to find the source of this using both a Google and Amazon (‘Look Inside’) search. Of the two pages of hits on a search for ‘Feast of Epona’, none of them cited a source for the Feast of Epona. The majority of results were NeoPagan or Women’s spirituality books. The copyright dates on these books seem to start around the early 1990s.
The downfall of using the ‘Look Inside’ feature of Amazon’s search is that you can’t always see the bibliography nor the index. I’ve ordered a few of the books to see exactly what is said and which books are referenced.
The Religious Tolerance article on the Summer Solstice features a feast date for Epona of June 13.[1] No supporting evidence is cited. The text of this article has proliferated across quite a few web sites (most of those don’t state the source of the text either).
On a side note, one of the interesting feasts of Epona that I found was one in Michigan. Mackinac Island has a Feast of Epona every year around June 13th as part of the Lilac Festival.[2] This site also does not list a reference for the feast of Epona nor a clear date for when the feast of Epona was added to the Lilac Festival (which has been running for 58 years).
[1] Religious Tolerance summer solstice article:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/summer_solstice.htm
[2] Lilac Festival: http://www.mackinacisland.org/lilacfestival.html
