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Holy Days of the Farming Year

A Tribute to John Barleycorn

 by Barbara Bamberger Scott (continued)

Midsummer’s Night was given a whole play by Shakespeare, who depicted it as a time when shapes change and sensual love is at its zenith. No wonder. It is celebrated under a full moon in combination with the longest period of sunlight in the year. June 21 is the most powerful day of the year, a time when green shows its many shades and tints and the soil smells of its barely restrained potency. John Barleycorn is at his prime: 

The sultry suns of Summer came,

  And he grew thick and strong,

His head weel arm'd wi' pointed spears,

  That no one should him wrong.

But there’s trouble on the way, with the coming of Lammastide, or “loaf mass” when grains are sacrificed to the harvester. Alas for John Barleycorn,

The sober Autumn enter'd mild,

  When he grew wan and pale;

His bending joints and drooping head

  Show'd he began to fail.

Late summer arrives with a sense of feverish haste to have fun fast before the year shuts off. Our society has thus linked Lammas with Labor Day, another time when the workers don’t work, everyone parties, and good times are stored up against the hard times on the way. For farmers and gardeners, it’s a dry season when the process of clearing begins, in a phase aptly known as the “disseminating moon.” It’s the Celtic “claim time” when workers were sought for the fall harvest season and others claimed their wages for the summer’s labor.

Emerson College put on a lengthy celebration in late September, combining the folk holiday of the Autumnal Equinox with the holy day of Michaelmas. Rudolf Steiner, the progenitor of bio-dynamic farming, set great store by the commemoration of Michaelmas, which had fallen by the wayside in most of Europe by the early 20^th Century. Steiner saw profound meaning in the story of Michael the Archangel who fought the legions of Satan. This battle between light and darkness is symbolically played out as the year dies and it seems that the sun will never return. Plants are dying and melting back into the earth.  The moon is in its ominous “last phase.” 

In England it was easy to imagine primitive people in their Anglo-Saxon caves and stick houses huddling together in fear and dread as the cold crept in. This sense of foreboding was offset by Michaelmas, highlighted by hearty food, an emphasis on abundant grains, and, at Emerson, mysterious dramas presented in Middle English (I particularly remember the word “whales” being pronounced “wallace”).  

In the United States we have another name for the Autumnal Equinox: Harvest Home. In Christian churches on Harvest Home Sunday, the stirring old hymn rings out:

Come ye thankful people, come...Raise the song of harvest home!
All is safely gathered in, Ere the winter storms begin;
God, our Maker, doth provide. For our wants to be supplied:
Come to God's own temple, come, Raise the song of harvest home.

We ourselves are God's own field, Fruit unto His praise to yield:
Wheat and tares together sown, Unto joy or sorrow grown;
First the blade, and then the ear, Then the full corn shall appear;
Lord of harvest! Grant that we. Wholesome grain and pure may be.

The Autumnal Equinox doesn’t precisely coincide with Michaelmas but combining the two provides an excuse for a walloping long party. Similarly, the pagan festival of Samhain links up roughly with the church’s appropriated holy day, All Saints Eve which gave way to the more enjoyable and more profane Halloween, October 31, and both blend nicely into the English Bonfire Night (Guy Fawkes Day), on November 1.

It is on Samhain, or Summer’s End, that the dead walk the earth. Pagans (really, just farmers and farm workers with a strong link to the soil and seasons) carried gourds elaborately carved with faces designed to scare away the demons of the night. They also left offerings of the grain harvest to placate evil spirits that roamed the darkness. Does any of that sound familiar? At the time of Samhain, the productive year falls away, and farmers batten down the doors of the granaries. And to preserve balance, the Celts celebrated Samhain as the beginning of the year rather than seeing it, as we tend to do, as nature’s last fiery gasp before the black night of winter.

Samhain coincides with the “balsamic” moon, signifying healing and emerging. The seeds of the dead harvest are secretly flying in the fire lit night. It’s chilly now, offering another excuse for a few more rounds of what’s-your-choice at the pub and a few more rounds of song. It was on Samhain that John Barleycorn was pronounced dead. Notice that in this song as in the hymn of Harvest Home, fruit and grain are anthropo-morphed: we are the fruits that God will use for his purpose; John Barleycorn is humanized as both the victim and the savior of the thirsty farmhand: 

 They took a plough and plough'd him down,

  Put clods upon his head,

And they have sworn a solemn oath

  John Barleycorn was dead.

The year edges into increasing darkness until December and Yuletide, or the Winter Solstice, when the longest night came to be associated with the brightest light, the birth of Jesus. We rational moderns know that Jesus couldn’t have been born in the cold of the year because no shepherd would have been caught out in that weather. But the church saw fit to align its favorite celebration with the pagan rites of burning the Yule log and rejoicing in the beginning of the end of the winter siege. The New Moon arrives in its pale splendor, promising regeneration. Sometime in the eighteenth century in Europe the whole thing snowballed into what we now call Christmas, (note the “mas” – it means “feast”).  To a farmer in the Southern Hemisphere, Christmas comes in the season of longest light and least rain, so there are few agrarian societies that still fear the Christmas threat of hunger, debilitation and death. However, in Iran, a place from which we sense another sort of threat, the solstice of winter is still commemorated as Yalda, when fires are lit and tended all night long. At the darkest time of the year, when the sun deserts us, we bring it to ourselves.

 
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