Between June and August, depending on the region, the wheat fields turn golden and the time for reaping arrives. For millennia it was the most important task of the farming year: the bread of all the following months depended on those days. Around the harvest there grew up rites, songs and beliefs of extraordinary richness. At their centre is an idea found in many cultures: grain is a living being that dies in order to nourish, and its death holds the promise of a new birth.
The corn spirit
At the end of the nineteenth century the Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer, in his celebrated The Golden Bough, collected extensive documentation on harvest customs in Europe. Many rural communities believed that a corn spirit dwelt in the field, called by different names: the corn mother, the old woman, the bride, sometimes an animal such as the hare or the wolf.
As the reapers advanced, the spirit was thought to retreat into the ears still standing, until it took refuge in the last strip of field. Frazer's interpretations are now partly disputed by scholars, but the customs he described are well documented and retain strong symbolic value.
The last sheaf
The moment most charged with meaning was the cutting of the last sheaf. In some communities nobody wanted to be the one to cut it, and the reapers threw their sickles from a distance so that the final blow belonged to everyone and no one. In others, by contrast, it was an honour reserved for the youngest or the oldest person.
From those last ears people made plaited figures, shaped like a woman, a cross or a knot, which were carried home with celebration and kept until the next sowing. Sometimes their grains were mixed with the seed for the new year.
The meaning is clear:
- the cut field is the necessary death of the plant;
- the last sheaf guards the life force that must not be lost;
- the plaited figure is a form of memory, the life of the harvest carried through winter;
- the grains mixed with the seed close the circle: death becomes a beginning.
Lammas: the bread of the first harvest
In the Anglo-Saxon world the first of August was celebrated as Lammas, a name from Old English meaning "loaf mass". On that day a loaf made from the newly reaped grain was brought to church as an offering of first fruits. In contemporary neopagan calendars the same date is also associated with the name Lughnasadh, a festival of the Irish world.
The offering of the first bread expresses a principle present in a great many religions: the first share of the harvest is not consumed but given back. It is a gesture of gratitude, but also an acknowledgement that abundance is not a possession.
The grain that dies
The most powerful symbol connected with grain is found in the Gospel of John: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." In a few words this sentence sums up the whole philosophy of reaping and sowing.
The grain does not bear fruit by keeping itself intact. It must be buried, it must come apart, it must lose its form to become an ear. In the inner reading this is the image of every true transformation: we do not grow by defending what we are, but by accepting that something comes to an end.
In the ancient mysteries connected with Demeter, too, grain played a central role, and an ear of wheat shown in silence has been described by some ancient sources as one of the culminating moments of the rites of Eleusis.
The sickle: a tool of harvest and of time
The sickle is the tool of reaping, but it is also one of the most ambivalent symbols in tradition. It is the attribute of Saturn, lord of time and sowing, and in later iconography it becomes the weapon of death. The same blade that kills the ear provides the bread.
This duality teaches us to look at endings without fear. What is cut at the proper time is not destroyed; it is harvested.
A practice for high summer
- Get a few ears of wheat, even dried ones, or a small bunch of grain.
- Plait them into a simple shape, a knot or a circle, dedicating each turn to a fruit your life has given you this year.
- Keep the plait at home until spring.
- At the spring equinox, crumble it into the soil of a pot or a garden, as a gesture of passage from harvest to new sowing.
In short
- The harvest was the heart of the farming year and a great symbol of death and rebirth.
- Many European communities believed in a corn spirit that took refuge in the last sheaf.
- Figures plaited from the last ears kept the strength of the harvest until sowing.
- Lammas, on the first of August, was the feast of bread offered from the new grain.
- The grain that dies to bear fruit is the image of every authentic transformation.
