Lammas returns, and we celebrate the sacredness of bread

Saturday night, when we were blessing our Lammas bread, I started thinking about the fact that we are now at the point of the calendar that is exactly opposite to Imbolc. Every year at Imbolc, I make fresh butter for my coven's celebration.  For Lammas, of course I bake loaves of bread. So our year is anchored by the two bread-and-butter holidays.

At Imbolc, we celebrate the freshening of the cattle and the very first signs of new growth upon the land. At Lammas, the grain harvest is on our minds.  The underlying theme of both is that abundance returns in its appropriate seasons.  Yesterday when I was surfing around the web, I discovered that trees often undergo a second burst of growth at Lammas. This is, in fact, called the Lammas growth flush.  It's a second wind before Autumn arrives, probably a pretty good metaphor for human possibilities, too.

A debate is currently raging on one of the Pagan e-lists I read. Some members are critical of anyone who uses the term Lammas instead of Lughnasadh for this holiday. The rationale being that etymologically, Lammas means "loaf mass" and represents a Christianized shaping of an old Pagan event.  Aside from the fact that it's difficult to spell Lughnasadh, and for some, Lughnasadh is a difficult word to pronounce, I will always stick with Lammas for a different reason. It's because I grew up in a religious/cultural tradition in which things were blessed--i.e. deemed sacred--only by celibate males.

But the bread we celebrate at Lammas is the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands--both  farmers and  bakers. For that reason alone, the bread is already sacred in itself. When we blessed the bread Saturday night, we were simply remembering those who came before us, those who discovered  agriculture and that alchemy of fermentation that gives us both bread and beer. And of course we were honoring the abundance of the earth itself.  I rather like the idea of a "loaf mass" in which we are all the celebrants, and that which we consume needs no transformation by a priestly caste.

Several weeks ago, I was up in Washington State's Palouse country, a land of rolling hills and grain crops growing in rich loess soil. This is the where my Norwegian immigrant grandparents and my father were wheat farmers.  It's where they, quite literally, helped put bread on America's tables.  I stood on the edge of a wheat field and listened to and watched the breezes snake their way through the heavy grain heads. The wind made a soft sibilant sound as the heads waved to and fro.  Here's that field.

These truly are the golden waves of grain about which we sing.  The vision of the fruitful earth filled every frame I shot. The fields were molten gold in the late afternoon sunlight.

I brought home a big armful of Palouse wheat to use on the Lammas table. It's there still, in a big black Oaxacan pottery pitcher I bought in  Mexico years ago.

I found a very cool Pagan Lithuanian prayer that seemed appropriate for Lammas. I liked it so much that I copied out a section and put it on each of the Lammas candles I made for everyone to take home. The section I quoted was "That I may love and respect Bread. If a crumb should accidentally fall, I will lift it, kiss it, and apologize. If we all respect bread there will be no starvation or hardship."

My father is now old and frail, and lives in a nursing home. But when he was a teenager, he harnessed 24 mules up to the combine, and then drove them out into the fields. After the wheat was harvested, he had to bag it up in 80 lb. sacks that he had to sew shut by hand. Then he drove the bags of wheat down to the railroad siding where he had to toss the sacks into waiting boxcars. Here's a public domain photo of a combine in the old mule-powered days.

The work was so hard back then. My dad's traveled literally several million miles since his wheat-farming days, but he still remembers harvest as the time in his life when he worked the hardest. And so did my grandmother, who had to lay out the huge high-calorie meals to fuel the harvest crew. Imagine having to cook on a wood-burning stove a big harvest meal to feed the crew  every day in the heat of summer.

Every year the Lammas dinner I host is done in memory of those times. I always remember that the golden abundance is achieved only at the cost of hard physical labor. It's easy to forget that when our daily bread comes from the supermarket.

When I was preparing the Lammas dinner, I happened to look out the window and see someone busily embarked on a harvest of his own. It was a visiting goldfinch (Carduelis tristis) come to harvest the seeds of the Calliopsis (Coreopsis tinctoria). It appears that members of the bird kingdom must be holding their own Lammas celebration right about now, too.

Lammas blessings to all! May we  be righetous stewards of the earth so there will always be enough good food to feed everyone.
bread grain wheat harvest Palouse combine Lammas Lughnasadh Pagan Paganism

Comments

[Meredith Tising]

I'd never seen a field of wheat before. Thank you, Victoria!

--Meredith

[Dean Jones]

Victoria,

Thank you for a wonderfull evening, and a memorable Lammas Celebration. I feel honored to have shared that with you,and I was deeply touched.
(And the Meatballs were Good!!!)
Lammas Blessings
:)
Dean Jones

[T. Thorn Coyle]

Victoria,

thanks again for sharing the blessing of your bounty with us all!

I use both Lughnasah and Lammas and get tired of people squabbling about the splitting of religious hairs. Loaf Mass is a good thing - no matter who instituted it.

I mentioned your bread in my blog on Sunday. Yummmm!

- Thorn