The son taken into the dark, and the long asking that brought him back.

His name means Son, son of Mother. Culhwch and Olwen, one of the oldest Arthurian tales in Welsh, tells how he was taken from his mother's arms when he was three nights old, and no one living knew where. Arthur's men asked the oldest animals in the world in turn, the blackbird, the stag, the owl and the eagle, each older than the last, until the Salmon of Llyn Llyw carried two of them on its shoulders to the walls of Caer Loyw, where they heard him lamenting within. They broke him out, and he rode in the hunt of the great boar Twrch Trwyth. Behind him stands an older figure: Maponos, the Divine Son, honoured on Roman altars in the north of Britain beside Apollo and his lyre, whose mother Matrona became the Welsh Modron.

Drawn from Culhwch and Olwen and from the Roman altars raised to Maponos. These are living figures for many practitioners, and the entries speak of them with respect. The autumn equinox has carried his name only since the early 1970s, when the American writer Aidan Kelly gave it to a feast that had no old name of its own. Nothing in the medieval story ties him to the equinox. The name is a modern gift, and a fitting one for the season the light goes under.