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As summer ended, harvest festivals were held in Europe and the British Isles. The various
celebrations lasted until the beginning of winter. These festivals celebrated the end of the hard manual labor that
was required to bring in the crops. They celebrated the hope that there would be plenty of food to keep the people
alive until the next harvest. Many dieties were given honor in the belief that their favor caused the crops to grow.
Though the names were different depending on the locality, the harvest gods and goddesses shared similar aspects.
These pagan festivals were adopted by the church and renamed after various saints, replacing the
names of the old gods and goddesses. Many churches still show evidence of pagan art and customs, literally carved and
built into the church itself.
These harvest festivals and agrarian customs are still found today in places, sometimes in
disguised form and sometimes acknowledged openly.
On the subject of the forgotten origins of ancient festivals and
symbols, the Book of Codes says:
"Cultural groupings develop verbal, literary, and graphic shorthands
- ways of communicating ideas and sending messages often so deeply imbedded in a shared history that their origins may have
been forgotten, although their meaning lives on" (Lunde, 177).
One of the most ancient examples of a Harvest deity was the Egyptian god Osiris.
"The foregoing survey of the myth and ritual of Osiris may suffice to prove that in one of his aspects the god was
a personification of the corn, which may be said to die and come to life again every year."
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-349-00635-9_40
In Germany, the harvest idol
was called the corn dolly. There might be a corn man as well. These figures served as effigies in some of the rites
and dramas of the harvest. They were not toys although fashioned from the sheaves and straw of the harvested
crop.
Corn was a generic term for grain. Most often it was wheat or barley, but could
be a number of other grains that provided people with sustenance. Corn or maize came to Europe only after the
discovery of the New World.
The harvest figure was sometimes small and sometimes as large as a grown man or woman. This figure
could be a crude representation of a person or carefully crafted.
Because the meaning of the harvest figure was complicated with beliefs about gods and goddesses,
some of them having a familiar animal as their totem, corn was sometimes referred to by various animal names including
pig.
In parts of Europe, the wind moving in waves across the corn was referred to as "the corn mother
going through the corn". The last thresher to cut the last stalk was said to have "killed the corn man". The last handful
of cut corn was called "the knack (Cavendish, 456).
The wind and weather were also linked to a deities who were thought to have given fertility and
life to people and crops, as well as to any festival representations made by the harvesters.
Death is as much a part of life as life itself. This interest
in death is reflected in many of the old celebrations when, at the end of the celebration, the death of the symbolic figure
occured.
A single stalk of grain could be considered as a "man", and each
branch or ear on that stalk could be considered the same. In this way, standing before a field of ripe grain, it could appear
to be a field of men not yet cut down in battle or death. A host of symbolic and archetypical transactions were performed
in the events leading up and during to the harvest festivals with all its trappings.
In his book The Book of Days, Robert Chambers describes a harvest
festival:
"Sometimes, the image on the cart, instead of being a mere dressed
up bundle of grain, was a pretty girl of the reaping-band, crowned with flowers and hailed as the Maiden. Of this
we have a description in a ballad of Bloomfield's:
Home came the jovial Hockey load,
Last of the whole year's crop,
And Grace among the green boughs rode,
Right plump upon the top.
This way and that the wagon reeled,
And never Queen rode higher;
Her cheeks were coloured in the field,
And Ours before the fire" (Chambers, 377-379).
As with so many old agrarian customs, there was an even older basis
for the custom. A shaman in any culture will often go through an elaborate ceremony in order to allow gods and spirits to
enter his being, leading him to become the god incarnate. The spirits of the harvest could become incarnate at least symbolically
by having human beings represent them.
The Queen of the Harvest represented the mother goddess with all its implications of fertility.
She was the living symbol of the abundance of the harvest and the hope for plenty during the winter. The Corn Dolly
which was often a crude version of a goddess displayed for ritual purposes at the end of the harvest.
In modern times, there is a vestige
of this theme in all social events where a Queen is named and crowned. The Queen becomes a representative and symbol of the
festivity whether it be as Prom Queen, Rose Bowl Queen, Miss USA in the Miss America pageant or many other events in which
a woman becomes the highlight or pinnacle of an event, considered as an example of the best qualities valued by that society. The
qualifications for this role are usually physical beauty, talent, and sometimes particular skills. It is doubtful that many
people think of themselves as participating in a communal selection process where these ancient themes are played out.
Like the Harvest Queen, there is a yearly renewal process for modern day queens, replacing her each year with a new queen,
so that as the years go by the Queen is always youthful, fresh, and beautiful. In this sense, she is immortal.
This goddess had a myriad
of other names as goddesses in other parts of the world, and her devotees would pray to her for a plentiful harvest
as well as other connected themes such as fertility for man and beast as well as crops, concerns with the hearth and hearth
fire, and some types of illnesses.
Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar Vol. 2 by Robert Chambers
Folk Song "Good Luck To The Barley Mow"
The Virginia Reel
Did you ever see a lassie?
Even farther back when the runes were being developed and were used
for divination, there were several methods of divining using the runes. According to the book Magical Alphabets :
"Although it is possible to pull
a single rune stone out of a bag, or to draw a card from a rune card deck, it is preferable to conduct a rune-casting ceremony
if one is to be of the right frame of mind to benefit from a reading. The ceremonial method of casting runes is known as 'Raed
Waen'. Literally, this means 'riding the wagon' that is, placing oneself in the position of the diety on the sacred wagon
from which all things, past, present and future, may be viewed (Pennick,120).
The agricultural bundle of grain tied in the middle morphed into other
symbolic figures such as a sheaf of arrows tied in the middle. In 1554, a Charter of incorporation was granted to the town
of Sheffield, England. An official seal was at once drawn up with the motto "SIGILLUM VILLA SHEFFIELD, 1554, in the field
a sheaf of arrows tied in the center between two pheons" (sheaf of arrows tied in the middle).
"The word "sheaf" originally meant a bundle of arrows tied round at
the middle, and was applied to a similar bundle of wheat so tied, a "wheat sheaf". From this word spelt in Chaucer's time
"sheffe", the name of Sheffield (from sheff and held or hold) was, I have no doubt, given to the town
which has been, since the time of the Romans, famous for iron work, as applied to cutlery, arrows, and steel weapons of war,
and the arrows of which are Four arrows held as in a sheaf"(39).
English Roots: And the Derivation of Words from the Ancient Anglo-Saxon; Two by Edward
Newenham Hoare
"What is a group of arrows called?
Another name for a "quiver" of arrows is a "sheaf" of arrows, especially when referring to large
numbers of (more than one dozen) arrows. In Mediaeval times (i.e., the "Middle Ages"), particularly during the Hundred Years'
War between England and France (A.D. 1336-1453), military archers would carry bundles, or "sheafs", of arrows, consisting
of twenty-four (24) arrows per sheaf."
Pheon or Broad Arrow
Broad Arrow Marked
Modern novels can contain information about ancient pagan festivals.
Although the novel is fictional, many of the details correspond with actual customs. For instance, The Protectors War by
S. M. Stirling, gives this narrative:
"The wheat-straw figure she'd plaited was four feet from splayed feet
past swelling belly to rough-featured head, and crowned with poppies...Juniper bent her head and Melissa touched it with the
stalks; then both High Priestesses fell in behind the Queen Sheaf, leading the harvesters.." (Stirling, 432).
The Protector's War: A Novel of the Change
The scythe and sickle were hand-held instruments used to cut the stalks
of grain. The sickle had a curved shaped, looking somewhat like a sliver of moon. In the early agricultural days of America, The
Farmer's Almanac used the phases of the moon as a guide to planting which crops and when.
Curved Sickle
Farming by the Moon
page 331 Google Books Popular Mechanics August 1925:
"Corn-Shock Tightener
Binding corn shocks is easily done with a simple device of the kind shown in the
drawing. It consists of a broom handle, about 3 feet long and a length of sash cord provided with three steel hooks, as shown.
In use, the cord is whipped around the shock..."
Binding Shocks with Homemade Tightener
The pagan
Slavs had customs that resembled the Norse customs. They also had a god of seeds and fertility:
"SIMARGL
was a Slavic
deity. One of the gods mentioned in Kiev's Primary Chronicle as being worshipped officially by the Russians before
their conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy. Generally mentioned as the protector of seeds and new plant growth Simargl was depicted
as a winged lion (sometimes a winged dog); both his name and image suggest strongly that he was borrowed from the Scythians
or Sarmatians, who worshipped him as Simurgh, the divine gryphon of Persian mythology" (http://www.circe-argent.com/slavic_paganism.htm).
Slavic Paganism
An ancient harvest custom was called "crying the neck". In some places,
"neck" is replaced by the word "knack". This was a ceremony enacted by a specific set of actions.
"Another example
from the Cotswolds reports a similar ceremony:
When they have cut the corn, the reapers assemble together: "a knack" is
made, which one placed in the middle of the company holds up crying thrice "a knack" which all the rest repeat. The person
in the middle then says - "Well cut! Well bound! Well shocked! Well saved from the ground!" He afterwards cries "whoop" and
his companions hollow as loud as they can" (http://www.shadowplayzine.com/Articles/idols.htm).
"Threshing" and "thrashing" were interchangable words in some harvest
settings. In fact, during some threshing celebrations, a man was tied up in the woven figure of a corn idol and beaten.
The words thresh and thrash are sometimes confused.
The meaning of thresh is agricultural in nature. It means
to seperate the grain from the straw, but the definition is sometimes given as "To beat severely; thrash" (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/thresh).
A truly ancient source of information, the Bible, gives a clear picture
of how a tied sheaf of grain was a metaphor for a human being: "Bodies will be scattered across the fields like dung, or like bundles of grain after the
harvest" Jeremiah 9:22, New Living Translation The cutting instrument, the scythe, left the stalks of grain on the ground like soldiers felled
in battle to be gathered and bundled.
Crying the Knack
Hobby Horse
the Gingerbread Man
Guild of Straw Craftsmen, Crying the Neck
Museum of Folklore opens in Cornwall
Irish Straw Boys
Straw Boys at an Irish Wedding and a Funeral
Morris dancing is practiced as folk dancing in Britain today, but its
origins are ancient. It is most likely a remnant of ancient fertility festivals to ensure bountiful crops. If a bundle of
grain could be viewed as a pretty girl, then Morris dancers could be viewed as a crop or some other symbol of the harvest.
The real meaning of Morris Dancing
Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread
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