Wiccan Wheel of the Year

About

Every other app prints the same eight fixed dates. This one computes the instant the sun actually reaches each festival, for your year, your location and your hemisphere, and shows you both. The solstices and equinoxes are solved from the real solar position. So are the four Gaelic fire festivals, which nothing else computes. Imbolc is printed on 1 February and the sun reaches it on the 3rd or 4th. That gap is what this app is for. THE WHEEL The eight sabbats on a drawn gold wheel, each with an engraved sigil, a seasonal wash graduating round the ring, and a month ring placed by the sun's real longitude rather than by an even twelfth. An ornate hand points at where the sun stands today and advances just under a degree a day. Tap any festival for its conventional date, its computed astronomical instant, the drift between them and the countdown. Below the wheel, tonight's moon phase, today's day length, and how much light you have gained or lost since yesterday. THE SKY Sunrise, solar noon, sunset and day length for where you are. Solar declination and the sun's altitude at noon. A day length curve across the whole year with the eight festivals marked, today's place on it, and the days remaining until the light turns. Moon phase and illumination, the countdown to the next major phase, and the nearest full moon to the coming sabbat, which several traditions use to set the ritual date. THE ALMANAC Every sabbat computed for any year from 1900 to 2100, both date columns side by side with the drift shown wherever it exists. Search across festival names, alternate names, themes and correspondence values, so you can find every sabbat that carries rosemary or obsidian. THE TRADITIONS How different paths name and date the same eight points. Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca, Druidry, Norse and Anglo Saxon observance, secular seasonal practice, and Celtic Reconstructionism, which rejects the eight-fold wheel outright. A comparison table, the history of how the wheel was assembled, and how southern practitioners handle it. THE LORE Each festival is an illuminated page rather than a label. Pronunciation, alternate names, wheel position and deity cycle. Mythology from the medieval sources. Attested folklore, the customs that genuinely survive. Correspondences, colours, herbs, crystals and incense. Traditional foods, and what practitioners do. An essay in the register of a Book of Shadows, and the sources for every claim on the page. ASTRONOMY YOU CAN CHECK Solstices and equinoxes come from Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms, chapter 27, and land within about a minute of published values. The cross-quarter points have no published series, so the app solves directly for the sun's apparent longitude at 315, 45, 135 and 225 degrees, accurate to roughly a quarter of an hour. The app states that figure rather than hiding it. HONEST ABOUT ITS OWN HISTORY The eight-fold wheel is a twentieth-century synthesis, assembled through the 1950s and 1960s by Gerald Gardner and Ross Nichols from two older cycles. Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh are attested in medieval Irish literature. Litha, Ostara and Mabon were applied to the solar festivals by Aidan Kelly in 1974. The app says so, on the page, with the sources. Attested folklore and modern correspondence are each labelled for what they are. Nothing here is invented antiquity. ON YOUR HOME SCREEN A widget in two sizes carrying the next festival, its seasonal plate and the countdown, computed independently so it can never go stale. Optional reminders with your own lead time, from the day itself out to a fortnight ahead. PRIVACY No ads. No tracking. No analytics. No subscriptions. No in-app purchases. No network calls of any kind. Location is used only for your solar times and hemisphere, it never leaves your device, and you can decline it and enter a coordinate by hand instead. Buy it once. It works on a hillside with no signal. Eight festivals, one turning year.