Fellowship of Shasta and Early Pagans Spiritualities of California
The Shasta Fellowship is an early influence on modern pagan practices in California.
Anyone who has visited Mount Shasta might be inspired to found a religion, and
Ella Young and her friends were no different. She adapted the rituals and regalia from
The Fellowship of the Four Jewels, founded on May 1, 1916, in memory of their friends who had died in The Rising only a few weeks before.
Subsequent scholars on the origins of modern pagan religions have traced
well-known practices in many pagan traditions in California to the Shasta Fellowship.
In particular, the adoption of a calendar with eight holidays, four solar observances of
solstice and equinox, and four “quarter days” celebrated between those solar events.
As historian Roland Hutton writes:
Thus, the quarter days, which have always been celebrated as important feasts in Gaelic areas of Britain and Ireland, were brought to California as the key festivals of an Irish mystical society founded in the early twentieth century. This was the Fellowship of Shasta, imported into America by one member whose followers remained active—although hardly noticed—until the 1960s.
Modern Pagan Festivals: A Study in the Nature of Tradition by Ronald Hutton
Early pagan liturgist Aidan Kelly wrote that it was Ella Young’s Irish occult traditions that were one of the many academic sources for neopagan practices in the Bay Area. He writes in Pathos:
The Fellowship of the Four Jewels was founded on May 1, 1916, by Ella Young, William Butler Yeats and his beloved Maeve (Maude Gonne), A.E., and others of the spiritual leaders of the movement for Irish freedom, in memory of those who had died in the Easter Sunday uprising only a few weeks before. The leaders had been summarily executed by the British; one of them was Major John McBride, Maude’s husband. …
I knew some about Ella Young; I had listened to her commentaries on the radical radio station KPFA when I was in high school. Now I learned that when she came to America, she brought the Fellowship of the Four Jewels with her, and here transmuted it into the Fellowship of Shasta, with the same four feasts to represent the Four Jewels of Irish myth: the Spear of Lugh, which ensured victory (Feb. 1); the Stone of Fal, which shrieked under the lawful king (May 1); the Sword of Nuada, from which none could escape (Aug. 1); and the Cauldron of the Dagda, from which none would come away unsatisfied.
Among these papers was a testament written by Gavin Arthur on the Feast of Brighid 1970. It said:
In a night-long conversation I had with Ella Young in her cottage in Oceano where she died a few weeks later, she asked me to carry on this Fellowship. . . She and I and others celebrated all four feasts in the dunes of Oceano, 1931 through 1935, and off and on thereafter until she died, July 23, 1956, in Oceano. Her ashes were scattered in the Lyman Canyon behind the Old Bail Mill between St. Helena and Calistoga, and there I started celebrations of the four Feasts from 1960 on.
Pathos, (October 2021) Before the Gardnerians: The Fellowship of the Four Jewels and the Church of Aphrodite.
The scattering of Ella Young’s ashes is described in an interview with her friend and executor, Jane Thompson. You can listen to her tell the story of that early occasion of California neo-pagan ritual in the interview by James Cain preserved on the Internet Archive. A transcript of this interview, and many others, is available in eBook and paperback in Ella Young Remembered.