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Holy Days of the Farming Year

A Tribute to John Barleycorn

 by Barbara Bamberger Scott

John Barleycorn was a hero bold,

  Of noble enterprise,

For if you do but taste his blood,

  'Twill make your courage rise.

'Twill make a man forget his woe;

  'Twill heighten all his joy:

'Twill make the widow's heart to sing,

  Tho' the tear were in her eye.

It was early spring in southern England, cold as the dickens and unrelievedly damp. There seemed to be no remedy against the weather except to gather in a pub, sit next to a small blazing fire, and listen to folks sing the old songs. The uplifting tale of John Barleycorn, written by Scotland’s paramount folk poet,  Robert Burns, is typical of the deeply rooted culture of the British Isles. There, pagan rites and Christian ritual are mixed in a steamy compost with love of strong drink and a hearty appreciation of the natural cycles of the earth. People sing together, in public, without instruments and without embarrassment. It takes the chill off.

All over the world wherever people are still connected to the soil or where they have reconnected as best they can, the old holy agricultural days are celebrated or at least, acknowledged. Many have been co-opted by the church or the communists to suit their own purposes.

It was from Britain that we got the names of these sacred days, mysterious gems of language glimmering with arcane meaning that mark the turning of the earth through the cycle of the year: Yule, Imbolg, Equinox, Beltane, Samhain, Lammas.

Because the earth always finds its balance, summer in the north of the earth is mirrored by winter in the south. Our Vernal Equinox is South America’s Autumnal Equinox. Each seasonal celebration contains the potentiality of the next phase. To many, the Winter Solstice, when darkness prevails, is the dreariest time of the year, a time when people feel suicidal and struggle with SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). But to others it betides the joyful end of winter because from that day forward, light begins to return in minutely increasing  increments. Similarly, the end of October, known as the Harvest Festival or Lammas, is a time when plants have died; but is also a time when new growth begins as seeds are dispersed in the harvesting process.

I was studying bio-dynamic agriculture at Emerson College in Sussex that spring, when our teacher, a man not given to consulting with others, announced one Friday that we must all gather on Sunday morning – one of our few free times – to celebrate the Vernal Equinox. His ponderous announcement implied the capital letters:

“We’re a group concerned with the Seasons and the significance of the Phases of the Moon. We’re aligning ourselves with the Farming People of the World who have their own ways of knowing that the Equinox is coming, without recourse to calendars. We are obligated to take on the Sacred Duty of commemorating this day when Spring Begins and the Winter is finally Over.” Our teacher had a way of speaking in grand terms, bombastic some might say, but there was no room for refusal though several of us groaned. I might have been one of the groaners. Weekends were for family, not for school.

I lost. But I already knew not to grouse about these weird celebrations. The college had already opened my eyes to the meaning behind the cycles of the year. I had transplanted myself from my Carolina home, and was living now in a more ancient place where folklore spanned thousands of years. The lunar calendar of the Celts, for example, associated every month with a tree or flower, and with a sense/sacred principle:

 The Celtic Months:

For many of us, Spring denotes the beginning of the year, far more accurately than the calendar’s designation of January First. In Spring the sap rises, the pollen is released, and humans respond to the generative energy around them with decorative plantings and the creation of new beds for procreation of new species.  

May Day is a holiday that has been co-opted by the workers of the world, who unite in their refusal to work on May 1. It is connected to the ancient celebrations of Beltane, or the fire of Bel, when the goddesses vies playfully with the gods, symbolized by the Maypole. Do I need to draw a picture here? Remember the sweet young  girls bedecked in flowers, dancing around the, ahem, phallic Maypole? Beltane, like its calendar opposite, Samhain or Halloween, is a time out of time. It’s the earliest harbinger of summer fecundity, when the world of magic mystically permeates the world of nature and beings may be transformed. It’s a time when courting in the woods and ditches has traditionally been permitted.  

Beltane falls on the gibbous moon, when buds are forming, and farmers are in a highly ambitious frame of mind calculating the profits to come. The harvest is underground and we leave it to the dark feminine principle to heave the plants toward the potent masculine sun.

I was nowhere more impressed with Midsummer’s Night than in Sweden, many miles north of anywhere I’d ever been. In Sweden, where I journeyed to study folk fiddle and the melancholy music called the “polska,” I experienced winter even more stringently than in England. The day’s light lasted from just 10 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon. I survived SAD by taking regular saunas. Then came summer, with days that lasted until 10 pm and dawns that arrived at 4 in the morning. The bi-polar Swedes, who shut down and weep all winter, become extraverted heat-seekers in the summer, carousing without ceasing. Fiddlers conventions, known as “spelmanslag,” carry on all night.

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