08/01/2021
Today is Lammas. I celebrated this holiday for years inviting clients, students, family and friends for dinner. Here's is Momma DOnna weighing in on this ancient rite:
Today is Lammas, or midsummer. The halfway point of summer marks and celebrates the glorious bounty of the ripening season. Trees and vines, stems and stalks are hung heavy with the abundance of the Earth. Mushrooms push themselves up uninvited onto the musty floor of the dark forest. Animals, birds and fish, fat from their greedy feasts and lazy, all but offer themselves up to the hunters who are a step above them on the food chain. Summer crops are ready for the table and to be collected and prepared for the larder. But it is the growth of the grain that holds the strongest significance of the midsummer season in agrarian societies. Grain, the staple, the sustenance, the stuff, the staff of life.
The reaping of the first ripened grain was great cause for celebration in honor of the Great Grain Mother who feeds us all. She has been known by many names: Astarte, Ashoreth, Isis, Demeter, Ceres, Op, Terre Mater, Tailltiu, Chicomecoatl, Green Corn Girl, Blue Corn Girl, Mother Quescapenek. The English word, "Lady" is derived from the Old English, hlaf-dig. The root word, hlaf means loaf and dig means knead. Used together, they have the connotation of woman, lady of the house, matriarch, as provider of nourishment, "giver of daily bread."
In gratitude, people made offerings of the first harvested ears of corn. Corn being the generic term for a multitude of grains: wheat, barley, millet, oats, rice, rye, spelt, kinoa, buckwheat, sorghum, as well as what we know as maize or Indian corn. Fresh cut sheaves were bundled and braided, decorated with ribbons and flowers and placed at the altars of the Grain Mother. Considered very potent, the first corn was also held to be an effective love charm, symbolizing as it did, fertility, prosperity and growth. Throwing rice at the bride and groom after a wedding is a relic of this belief.
"The golden grain piles high in the yard.
Round, round wheat, better than pomegranate seeds.
Bite it with your teeth, it goes 'go-pou!'
The first pile of wheat is really lovely.
After we have dried it in the sun,
And cleaned it,
We will turn it into the public share."
- Li Chii , 20th Century Chinese
In pagan Europe, the first sheaths at midsummer and the last sheaths at the autumn harvest were twisted and shaped into corn dollies which were the embodiment of the harvest. She was called Corn Mother, Harvest Mother, Mother Sheaf, Old Woman, Queen, and was honored in different ways in different places. She was left in the fields. She was taken to dances. She was promenaded through the town. She was kept for good luck for one year. She was ceremonially cremated on a funeral pyre to be resurrected in the sowing of the spring seeds. What ever the occasion, she was always well dressed.
The summer cross-quarter day was celebrated by the Saxons as Hlaf Mass, "Feast of Bread," and by the Celts as Lughnasadh, "Commemoration of Lugh." Lugh was the grain god, son of Mother Earth. Every August he was sacrificed with the reaping of the corn only to be born again in the new shoots of spring exactly as the Egyptian, Osiris, had been. Loaf Mass and Lugh Mass evolved into Lammas, the Druid corn feast, one of the four cornerstone festivals around which their year revolved. When the Church adopted, co-opted, Lammas, it was referred to as Lamb's Mass in commemoration of St. Peter in Chains, and the practice of the offering of the first fruits on the altar remained exactly the same.
"Now Lammas comes in
Our harvest begins.
We have now to endeavor to get the corn in.
We reap and we mow And stoutly we blow
And cut down the corn that sweetly did grow."
- Traditional English Song
The midsummer cross-quarter day is the only one of the four seasonal midpoints that is not still actively celebrated in our contemporary culture. Midsummer is celebrated in Europe, but there it refers to June 21, the first day of summer and not the middle, at all. Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" actually takes place on the summer solstice. Many celebrations of the first corn were observed on August 1. Named for Juno Augusta of Rome, August was particularly sacred to the Goddess Who Gives All Life and Feeds It, Too. It was considered for this reason an especially propitious time to be born. To this day, when a Scot says that someone was born in August, it is a compliment in praise of skilled accomplishment, with absolutely no bearing on the person's actual birthday.
The only living vestige of Lammas in the United Stated is a rural holiday called Second Planting. But unless you read the Farmer's Almanac or belong to the Grange or 4H Clubs, you would have no reason to hear about it. It is celebrated exactly as midsummer has always been celebrated. The first grain is harvested, threshed, milled, baked into bread and cake, brewed into beer, and then shared in community. After a night of feasting and dancing, work starts again at first light planting the second crop of summer wheat that will the mature by the fall harvest.
How can we, separated from the agricultural process by city and century, appreciate the atmosphere of the season which surrounds us, but which we cannot see? What is the Goddess of Grain to us of the boulangerie? The patisserie?
We who buy our grain in bags, in boxes, premixed, premeasured, prepackaged, prepared; sown, grown, harvested, hulled, milled, by someone else, somewhere else. How can we identify with the Earth values taught by Terra Mater during this time of year from where we are held captive in the synthetic heart of the genetically modified Pop Tart culture, which claims us?
Well, we can behave, as they say, as if we were born in August. We can, in fact, become august - wise and generous and gloriously noble, each on our own chosen paths. We can hone our skills as the tenders of Mother Earth. We can hoe our row. We can carry our load. We can break bread together. We can feed the hungry.
We reap what we sow.
Blessings of bread,
To learn more about Midsummer and other holidays and holy days,
read my book:
Celestially Auspicious Occasions: Seasons, Cycles & Celebrations.
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