Sabbat
First loaf, first sheaf — the harvest opens, and none of the work is finished.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
Lughnasadh is Old Irish and genuinely attested: Lugnasad, named for the god Lug, tied to the great assembly at Tailtiu with its games, contracts and trial marriages. It marks the opening of the harvest rather than its close, which is the detail most often lost — the grain is coming in, and there are weeks of hard work still ahead.
Lammas, the name it usually travels with, is separately old and from a different tradition entirely. Old English hlāfmæsse means loaf-mass: bread baked from the first of the new grain and brought to be blessed on the first of August. Two harvest observances, two languages, two histories, later filed under one heading when the Wheel needed a slot filled. Both are real. Neither is the other.
Kept today it is a festival of taking stock in the middle of things. Practitioners bake, set out first fruits, name a skill they are actually working at, and count what is in hand without pretending the season is over. Southern-hemisphere practice moves it to the start of February.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890)
Frazer devotes a long stretch to the last sheaf — dressed, named, carried home, kept over the winter and worked back into the next sowing. He reads it as the harvest spirit being housed rather than killed, and notes that the reapers themselves usually described it as luck.
Carried forward
Common in contemporary practice
A loaf baked and shared, with the first piece given away rather than eaten. The rule most people keep is that the giving has to cost something, or the gesture goes hollow.
Credit what you carry. Much of this comes from living traditions, and some of it from traditions that are closed — held by particular peoples and not offered for general use. Where you know whose practice a reading came from, name them; where you don't, say that too.