Lore and Magick of the Harvest
by Asherah
As a child, I found the only harvest celebration I knew about, Thanksgiving, pretty pallid. It didn't involve the provocative personae of Halloween; you could dress up, but you had to be an Indian or a Pilgrim, and you only dressed up at school, and that only if there were a pageant. There, it was more socially acceptable to be a Pilgrim than an Indian; the Indians provided the food, but the Pilgrims ran things. But the Pilgrims wore boring outfits. I had no use for the affair.
I did like the image of the cornucopia, always full of fruit or vegetables, though not being overfond of vegetables I preferred other items of the type, for example the fairy-tale purse that always held money. But the cornucopia was sort of a Thanksgiving tag-along; you always ended up drawing turkeys, or Pilgrim hats.
Little did I know the harvest pageantry that got suppressed before it reached the Kansas City, Missouri, school district. The earlier me would have thoroughly appreciated the harvest dances and rituals done by American and European pagans, many still extant in partial form. Often pagan harvest celebrations involved a whole series of festivities, of which I still generally approve, starting with a rite offering up the first fruits and culminating with a ritual centering around the final harvest. The Iroquois of the northeastern United States have a typical succession, beginning in June and lasting through early November, including feasts for the spirits of the strawberry, raspberry, bean, green corn and ripe corn and a final thanksgiving for all types of food.
The pinnacle of the harvest celebration depends on the nature of the local produce. The South American Mataco and Choroti Indians' rituals center around the algarroba harvest; Native Americans from the Andes to the northeastern United States build rituals around corn; Mediterranean peoples celebrate the vintage; Lithuanians celebrate the rye harvest. The timing of harvest celebrations also depends on geographical location. Corn ripens for the Native Americans of Mexico in June, for the Iroquois around September, and the corn harvest celebration follows accordingly.
Harvest celebrations often include secular or religious dances. Two forms of harvest dance recur: actual or symbolic skirmishes, and serpentine dances. In a serpentine dance, a human chain, linked by hands, follows a leader in zigzags, figure eights or spirals; the spiral dance of witches is serpentine. The serpentine crane dance of Greece, called geranos, may have come from the Cretan labyrinth; the mystai at Eleusis danced serpentine forms. Many Native American dances also follow serpentine courses, especially Cherokee dances. Both Native American and European serpentines are associated with the celebration of a fertile harvest and especially with hopes of future fertility.
Other harvest ceremonies include invocations, divination, human sacrifice, the use of emetics and purificatory bathing. One facet of harvest ceremonies is constant: The final thanksgiving always concludes with a feast on the fruit celebrated, often to the point of gorging, still a Thanksgiving tradition in the United States.
A harvest celebration of many different North and South American Indian tribes was the corn dance, in some areas still performed. Corn dances contrast with male-dominated dances of Native American hunting tribes in that they feature women as prominent actors, both within the dances themselves and in the underlying mythology. The Pueblo Indians of the U.S. Southwest probably brought the corn dance to its most elaborate development; as now performed, the Pueblo Green Corn Dance contains fragments of many major ceremonies, but the bulk of the ceremonies are now enacted in secret in underground enclosures known as kivas. Former Southwesterners, the Aztecs also performed corn harvest rites, including human sacrifice, serpentine dances and skirmishes by priestesses dedicated to corn and other agricultural deities.
The corn dances of the Shawnee, Cherokee, Creek, Yuchi and Iroquois Indians all have a family resemblance. For the Cherokee-Shawnee in Oklahoma, the Green Corn Dance is a thanksgiving for crops and a form of worship of Our Grandmother. Among the eastern Cherokee and Creek, however, the dance's significance as a vegetation rite has died out, but it is still performed as a curative ceremony, including animal and "social" dances and divination. The social dances usually have serpentine courses and include planting gestures. The Iroquois Green Corn Festival lasts four days in early September and includes various thanksgiving rites and dances, including the corn dance proper. This dance is addressed to the spirit of corn, the most important of the three life-sustaining sisters, corn, beans and squash.
European harvest rites often centered around the end of the grain harvest. In rural England, all who helped with the harvest celebrated the Harvest Home, observed on last day of bringing in the harvest. It was also called the Ingathering or Inning, and in Scotland Kern.
In the Harvest Home celebration, the last load of rye, beans, wheat or another crop was decked with ribbons, flowers or green boughs and was brought home by men, women and children singing and shouting. The Harvest Home song generally ran something like:
Harvest home, harvest home!
We've plowed, we've sowed
We've reaped, we've mowed
And brought safe home
Every load.
As part of the Harvest Home celebration, the Harvest Queen, a doll made of the last sheaf of the harvest, dressed in woman's clothing and decked in ribbons, was either carried home on the last wagon or high on a pole by a harvester. When the last harvest load was brought into the farmyard, onlookers often pelted it with apples and drenched the Harvest Queen and the reaper carrying her with buckets of water. The head reaper was garlanded, and a feast ended the day, complete with drinking, dance and song.
People in early European societies saw the Harvest Queen or harvest doll as the embodiment of the spirit of the crop. Keeping her safe over the winter ensured fertility for the following harvest, provided that some part of her was given to cattle or horses to eat, strewn on the fields or mixed with the next crop's seeds. However, over time, the belief in the doll as the spirit of the growing grain incarnate gave way to its being merely a symbol of abundance.
In their heyday, harvest dolls popped up all over Europe. In Brittany, the harvest doll was called the Mother Sheaf; in Wales, she was the hag or
wrach. In Pembrokeshire in Wales, she was carried home by one of the reapers, followed by the other reapers, who tried to snatch her away. If the man carrying her got her home safe, he kept her on his farm till the following year and, on the day of the first spring plowing, took whatever grain remained intact on her and fed it to his plow-horses or mixed it with the seed to be sown to ensure fertility.
In Scotland, the harvest doll was the carline wife, or in Gaelic the
cailleac, the old woman or hag. In the Scottish Isle of Lewis, the cailleac's apron was tied full of bread, cheese and a sickle. In some Scottish districts, the cailleac was passed from farm to farm: The man who finished reaping first made her, passed her to his neighbor, who finished and passed her to the next neighbor, the cailleac thus ending up with the farmer who was last to finish harvesting. In these districts, her presence reproached procrastination. In the Hebrides, the cailleac was taken at night and placed in the field of a slow or lazy farmer.
In Poland, the harvest doll was Baba, or Grandmother; in some localities, the woman who bound the last sheaf was herself called Baba. She was dressed in the last sheaf, carried home on the last wagon, drenched with water and generally treated as a representation of the grain spirit.
In Germany, the harvest doll was sometimes the Kornmutter, or corn-mother, and sometimes the Kornwolf, or corn-wolf, invoked to frighten children. Often, the reaper who reaped the last sheaf was called the Wolf and howled and bit accordingly. In some places, the wagon that brought home the last sheaf was called the Wolf. Most commonly, the last sheaf was made into the shape of a wolf, kept until threshing was finished and then became the center of festivities. Usually the old Wolf was "killed" at the end of the harvest to make way for the new, but in some places the old Wolf was kept on the farm to renew fertility in the spring.
A similar figure was the Bullkater, or tom-cat, of Silesian peasant belief. In this case, the reaper who cut the last sheaf of rye became the tom-cat. He dressed in rye stalks and acquired a long, braided green tail. He chased onlookers with a long stick and beat them when he caught them, by so doing chasing away the old Bullkater, who had possessed spectators while they watched the reaping.
I'm not 10 anymore, but I still like to imagine pagan corn cats, dolls and dances taking over the elementary schools, and any other institutions you can think of. I say give me a cailleac or a corn wolf over a Puritan any harvest you like, and pass the crayons.
