The Blessings of Lammas and Bread

Corn Doll

Lammas, or Loaf Mass, is a feast I would hope to see grow in popularity as more and more people look for a way to connect the Christian Year (or, we might say for our neopagan brothers and sisters, the Sacred Year) with the agrarian year, a synergy once assumed but now almost entirely neglected. Celebrated on August 1st, Lammas marks the midpoint between St. John’s Day (June 24th) and Michaelmas (September 29th), which, as you can easily see, hover near the Summer Solstice and the Autumnal Equinox respectively. May Day (May 1st), All Saints/All Souls (November 1st/ 2nd) and Candlemas/St. Brigid’s Day (February 1st/ 2nd) complete the cycle of half-turnings. And they all should be observed.

Traditionally, Lammas was celebrated as a harvest festival to mark to first grinding of the new wheat, so it is no wonder that the ancients associated this event with Christ and the Eucharist. (You have to suspect that this was part of the inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lembas bread” in his mythopoesis). It is also the beginning of fair season—a tradition which persists in most rural areas to this day, though shorn of its sacred dimension. According to historian Ronald Hutton, in England the observation of the harvest season starting with Lammas was marked by “the crowning of girls as harvest queens by sets of reapers, the bringing home of the last load of corn covered in garlands, with loud acclamations, and the weaving of images from grain stalks.” [1] This season ended just before All Soul’s Day, after the surplus livestock were slaughtered and the meat salted for winter storage. Again, usually sans salting, this remains the practice in rural communities—I’ll be doing so myself this Fall with the surplus livestock on my farm. But, tragically, this moment in the cycle of life and sustenance is also deprived of its sacred dimension in almost all cases. This is something we should remedy.

You may have noticed something in my description of these mostly-vanished folk customs: they are incredibly sane and health-giving. I’ll take a harvest queen over the celebrated drag queens of our culture any day. Likewise, I’ll take bread and lamb from my farm over the diets of crickets and maggots being pushed by celebrities and the WEF. Because I’m not a fool.

Even the simple practice of making a corn dolly is a way to begin to resacralize our relationship to God, the Cosmos, and our food. Here at Stella Matutina Farm, we observe these practices and host a big and merry harvest festival at Michaelmas. The English folk tradition is rife with the remnants of such observations and practices. The ballad “John Barleycorn Must Die” is one iteration of this mythic and sacramental motif, but so is the tale of the Gingerbread Man. Put simply: something must die, that we might live. A basic lesson of life.

Steve Winwood deserves a round of applause.

According to T.F. Thiselton-Dyer in his magisterial British Popular Customs Present and Past (1876), another folk custom on Lammas was the visitation of sacred wells. I don’t know of any such wells nearby (though I plan on digging a well on my land for a hand pump very soon) but I know if I lived near a sacred well or spring… I’d be there! (Side note: I visited Chalice Well in Glastonbury many years ago and my eldest child was baptized with water I smuggled out of there. So arrest me.)

The Eucharistic connotations of Lammas bread, of course, are the most important: the magical act by which we eat the god who then inheres in us. Sir James Frazer in his classic text The Golden Bough, includes a section subtitled “Eating the God,” which is about the ritual eating of the divinity in contexts other than Christian, and he also associates it with first-fruits customs. “In these examples,” he writes, “the corn-spirit is represented and eaten in human shape [like a gingerbread man]. In other cases, though the new corn is not baked in loaves of human shape, still solemn ceremonies with which it is eaten suffice to indicate that it is partaken of sacramentally, that is, as the body of the corn-spirit.” [2]

Part of Frazer’s project, of course, was to show that Christianity’s god-eating was old news. But he didn’t really get it. What existed as a mythic imagination (though nonetheless very real) prior to Christ became historical and metaphysical reality through Christ’s institution of the Eucharist with the words “This is my body. This is my blood.”

They said therefore unto him, What sign shewest thou then, that we may see, and believe thee? what dost thou work?

Our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat. Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven.

For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world.

Then said they unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread.

And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst. (John 6:30-35)

What I am describing as an ideal here may strike some as quaint, or even a complete fantasy. I don’t think so. In fact, I think we are heading for what some have called a “New Middle Ages.” Those of us who survive the current chaos anyway. Rudolf Steiner, though he didn’t use that language, in his reimagination of the Christian year and festival life, certainly spoke to this, as did the Russian sophiologists Nikolai Berdyaev and Pavel Florensky. Florensky, surely one of the great polymaths of the twentieth century, put it this way:

“History has days and nights. Periods of night are dominated by the mystical element, noumenal will, susceptibility, femininity. Daytime periods of history are characterized by a more active, superficial interaction with the world, phenomenal will, masculinity. The Middle Ages were a period of night; the modern age is a daytime period. We are now at a threshold of a new Middle Ages. In its depths the Christian world-understanding is medieval. In the modern period the present world-understanding is useless. The present return to the Christian world-understanding shows us that we are at the threshold of a Middle Ages.” [3]

Actually, I think we are watching the desperation of the daytime period of the masculine in its death throes. The chaos in the Church, the machinations of the WEF & Co., the pathetic attempts by men to usurp the place of women and the feminine: these are symptoms of breakdown, not ascendancy. Their days are numbered.

And, as I often say, the way to realize the sophianic reality of the New Middle Ages is by embodying it. The things we do—the rituals we observe, the realities we celebrate, the communities we love, the foods we eat, the sacramentality of Things—make the Kingdom come to life.

So make the Kingdom come to life.

Alison Milbank on Lammas.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

1. Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford, 1994), 44.

2. Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged edition (New York, 1927), 480.

3. Pavel Florensky, At the Crossroads of Science & Mysticism, trans. Boris Jakim (Semantron Press, 2014), 7.

Vernacular Sacraments

As anyone familiar with my work would know, mine is an inherently sacramental worldview. That is, I see divinity as capable of disclosing itself and administering grace through the material elements of the cosmos. This disclosure comes by way of the natural world and its subsidiarities—the arts, liturgy, scripture, and so forth, and even the realms of speech and ideas. The disclosure, of course, is not assured, nor is it programmatic. It doesn’t happen in every circumstance. But we have all experienced it.

For sacramentally-minded Christians (I’m thinking primarily of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican iterations), the primary locus for such a phenomenon is the Eucharist, with Baptism and Chrismation /Confirmation standing in close proximity. So, possessing such a sensibility, I found myself very disturbed when bishops of every stripe denied the Eucharist to millions (perhaps billions) of Christians throughout a sizable amount of the past two years, even to the point of canceling masses, feast days—Christmas and Easter not the least of them—and removing the “Sunday obligation” and accompanying mortal sin that allegedly comes from skipping church. When the bishops finally decided the political coast was clear, they reinstated the Sunday obligation. But by then they’d lost me. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.

The madness even reached the point at which many Catholic parishes (and I’m sure the same is true with the Orthodox and Anglicans) unvaccinated parishioners were barred from the sacraments, in what seems to be the most blatantly unchristian move imaginable. The Vatican (not that I was surprised) even instated a vaccine mandate for all employees and visitors. I even know an Episcopalian priest who was denied a post as a pastor for being unjabbed.

Now that we know for certain (as many did much earlier, but were decried as “anti-science” or conspiracy theorists) that the vaccines are worthless at either preventing infection or spread (and that “it would have been much worse without” canard is absolutely risible if not contemptible)—and we know for certain they lead to harm or death for some people—such clerical moves prove themselves only to be tragic, but a tragedy that has devolved into farce. But no one has apologized from what I’ve noticed. No one.

Having been accompanied on most of my life as a Catholic Christian by the specter of child sex abuse (one of the pastors at my boyhood parish was one of the most notorious abusers in the history of American Catholicism) I am very familiar with the evils of clericalism and have for many years had some serious doubts about the fairytale that the Holy Spirit selects the bishops, cardinals, and popes. In fact, when my book Transfiguration was in production in 2018 and the McCarrick scandal erupted—a scandal Rod Dreher and my friend Larry Chapp had known and warned about for years but were ignored—I wanted to change the subtitle from “Notes Toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything,” so filled was I by outrage and shame. But I didn’t, alas. Then Notre Dame burned during Holy Week of 2019. And this was all before the world was turned upside-down in 2020.

After living in the shadows of a church gone mad in the midst of a society gone mad for nearly a year, having missed the celebration of Christmas and Easter by governmental decree greeted with clerical approval—and with school-age children still at home—I decided to take matters into my own hands: we started a house church, replete with the celebration of the Eucharist (and one baptism). This was nothing I ever imagined myself doing; it was not something I desired or sought. But I definitely felt the spirit of the Lord beckoning me to not let my children starve from the Eucharist due to the politics and fears of weak or malicious men.

It is my understanding that Ivan Illich thought this was where the Church was headed and that he thought it a welcome development. Illich speaks much about “vernacular” phenomena—in gender, work, and so forth—in his work and it made me start thinking about the notion of vernacular sacraments, which is what I see to be the issue here. But I don’t really feel the need for the rhetorical appeal to authority on this score. The children need to be fed.

Surreptitiously, this morning I found a Substack post by my friend, Tara Ann Thieke, in my junk folder (sorry, Tara! I don’t know what happened!) in which she shared these words of comfort on the Eucharist by our mutual friend, Rudolf Steiner: “An understanding of the world is only present today when a transubstantiation is carried out at an altar.” This line well-captures my gradual movement into the realm of house church: for I know this is the only way to understand the world, and I refuse to have my children denied it.

Of course, some may say that churches have stepped back from vaxx and mask mandates and requirements. Well, good for them. Still haven’t seen any apologies. I know a good number of my friends are disappointed in what I’ve been doing, but not one of them has said so to me personally. But when you know you know. But none of that concerns me now. Friendship has its place, but that doesn’t concern me now. What concerns me is standing in the light of God, dependent on His grace which is freely given and not dependent on a set of credentials or licensure. This may mean I’m excommunicated. But that doesn’t concern me now.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.