An esbat is a coven meeting other than one of the Sabbats within Wicca

Wicca

Wicca , is a modern Pagan religious movement. Developing in England in the first half of the 20th century, Wicca was popularised in the 1950s and early 1960s by a Wiccan High Priest named Gerald Gardner, who at the time called it the "witch cult" and "witchcraft," and its adherents "the Wica."...

 and other Wiccan-influenced forms of Neopaganism

Neopaganism

Neopaganism is an umbrella term used to identify a wide variety of modern religious movements, particularly those influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe...

. Janet

Janet Farrar

Janet Farrar is a British teacher and author of books on Wicca and Neopaganism. Along with her two husbands, Stewart Farrar and Gavin Bone, Farrar has published "some of the most influential books on modern Witchcraft to date." According to George Knowles, "some seventy five percent of Wiccans...

 and Stewart Farrar

Stewart Farrar

Frank Stewart Farrar , who always went by the name of Stewart Farrar, was an English screenwriter, novelist and prominent figure in the Neopagan religion of Wicca, which he devoted much of his later life to propagating with the aid of his seventh wife, Janet Farrar, and then his friend Gavin Bone...

 describe esbats as an opportunity for a "love feast, healing work, psychic training and all."

Many confuse the esbat with the ritual observance of the full moon

Full moon

Full moon lunar phase that occurs when the Moon is on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. More precisely, a full moon occurs when the geocentric apparent longitudes of the Sun and Moon differ by 180 degrees; the Moon is then in opposition with the Sun.Lunar eclipses can only occur at...

. While Doreen Valiente

Doreen Valiente

Doreen Edith Dominy Valiente , who also went under the craft name Ameth, was an influential English Wiccan who was involved in a number of different early traditions, including Gardnerianism, Cochrane's Craft and the Coven of Atho...

 writes that in Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches

Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches

Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches is a book composed by the American folklorist Charles Leland that was published in 1899. It contains what he believed was the religious text of a group of pagan witches in Tuscany, Italy that documented their beliefs and rituals, although various historians and...

 full moon rites were known as Esbats in the rest of Europe, she later finds it necessary to specify "full moon Esbat," to distinguish it from other esbat occasions.

The term esbat in this sense was described by Margaret Murray

Margaret Murray

Margaret Alice Murray was a prominent British Egyptologist and anthropologist. Primarily known for her work in Egyptology, which was "the core of her academic career," she is also known for her propagation of the Witch-cult hypothesis, the theory that the witch trials in the Early Modern period of...

.
Murray (1921) claimed that "The Esbat differed from the Sabbat by being primarily for business. ... very often the Esbat was for sheer enjoyment only". Murray used 16th to 17th century French sources on supposed Witches' Sabbaths in the context of the European witch trials to "reconstruct" a Witch Cult in Western Europe. The Old French

Old French

Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories that span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from the 9th century to the 14th century...

term esbat (Modern French ébat) meant amusement or diversion, with a connotation of frolicking.