Staff of Life

[Earth Walker]

A Goddess Herstory Of Bread

Grain is the staple, the sustenance, the stuff, and the
staff of life; from grain comes bread, and bread making
is one of the oldest human arts. The calcified remains of
cakes made from coersely ground grain, dating back to the Stone Age, have been found in Swiss lake dwellings
at Wangen and Robenhausen.
How did the first person think of making bread? The
idea is clever and sophisticated--involving an alchemical
conversion of matter in concert with the elemental
forces of nature. Consider the process of producing
edible bread. In fields of wild flowers, tall grasses grow.
First green, then gold, they yield tiny compact kernels
that, if first stripped of their papery casings, then pounded into powder, can be mixed with water and
baked by fire to produce bread!
The hard seed pellets of wild and cultivated grasses need to be processed in a somewhat complicated manner in order to be palatable. The development of clay pots, and the kilns in which they were fired, suggested innovative ways of preparing grain for
consumption, revolutionizing for ever more the dietary
habits of the vast majority of people worldwide.
Bread in its endless unleavened varieties--flat bread,
fry bread, oat cake, Johnny cake, tortilla, pita, paratha,
papdam, naan, matzoh, blimi--as well as other cereal
stuffs--porridge, pozole, polenta, pone, poi, pilaf, pasta,
tsampa, tamale, conjee, kasha, cous cous, gruel, grits,
mush--soon replaced animal flesh as the sustainer of
life. This carbohydrate-concentrated fare was augmented with greens, gathered and grown, and
seasoned with the only the occasional portion of a feast
meat offering.
Bread has long been thought to be the essential food;
the bare necessity, along with water, for survival, the
sustenance of sinners and saints alike. In fact, bread
has come to symbolize food itself; which is clear from
such common expressions as, "earning one's bread,"
"taking the bread out of somebody's mouth," "knowing
which side one's bread is buttered on," and "thank you
for our daily bread."

Under the ashes which unmake themselves like a bed,
watch the round loaves and the square loaves puff up.
Feel their deep animal heat and the elusive heart
perfectly centered like a captive bird.
--Anne Hebert, 20th Century Canadian

Bread itself has long been held to have magical powers.
In Belgium, bread was placed in the cradle to protect the
baby from illness or harm. In Egypt, it was considered a
cure for indigestion. In Morocco, it was a specific against
stammering. And in certain backwoods communities of
the U.S., and Canada, bread was said to keep away the
ghosts when placed with coffee under a house. Saint
Hildegard, abbess of the Bingen convent in the twelfth
century, prescribed bread as a cure for loss of mind that
had been caused by a magic spell.
New houses were blessed, friendships sealed, contracts
concluded by eating bread and salt. The sharing of bread is associated with peace and the resolving of
differences; eating a meal together is the most prevalent way in which people admit a stranger into a
kinship relationship. A sacramental and physical union
of community is born of having the same food in your stomach as someone else has in hers/his.
Participation in such intimate accord creates an inviolate
sympathetic bond between fellow diners; it is unthinkable to engage in armed conflict with someone,
having once eaten together. The Egyptian hieroglyphic
for peace, hotep, is a loaf of bread resting on a reed mat. English girls used to appeal to the three goddesses
of fate by passing breadcrumbs three times through a
wedding ring, in order to be rewarded with a glimpse of
their future husbands. Bread has even been used as an
aphrodisiac--French brides used to arouse the passion
of their new husbands by sharing with them a sweet
baked loaf called "the bride's pasty," the forerunner of
our wedding cake.
The reaping of the first ripened grain was great cause
for celebration in honor of the Grain Mother. She has been known by many names: Astarte, Ashoreth, Isis,
Demeter, Ceres, Op, Terre Mater, Tailltiu, Chicomecoatl,
Green Corn Girl, Blue Corn Girl, Mother Quescapenek.
The English word "Lady" is derived from the Old English
hlafdig. The root word hlaf means loaf and dig means
knead. Used together, they have the connotation of woman, lady of the house, as provider, loaf-kneader, or
"giver of daily bread."

The golden grain piles high in the yard.
Round, round wheat,
better than pomegranate seeds.
Bite it with your teeth, it goes go-pow!
The first pile of wheat is really lovely.
After we have dried it in the sun,
And cleaned it,
We will turn it into the public share.
---Li Chii, 20th Century Chinese

In gratitude for the harvest, people made offerings of
the first reaped ears of corn. (Corn being the generic
term for a multitude of grains: wheat, barley, millet, oats, rice, rye, spelt, kinoa, buckwheat, sorghum, as well
as what we know as maize or Indian corn.) Fresh cut
sheaves were bundled and braided, decorated with ribbons and flowers and placed at the altars of the
Grain Mother. Considered very potent, the first corn was
also held to be an effective love charm, symbolizing
fertility, prosperity and growth. Throwing rice at the
bride and groom after a wedding is a relic of this belief.
In Pagan Europe, the first sheaths at the autumn harvest were twisted and shaped into corn dollies that were the embodiment of the harvest. She was called Corn Mother, Harvest Mother, Mother Sheaf, Old Woman,
Queen, and was honored in many different ways.
Sometimes, She was left in the fields; in other places.
She was taken to dances and promenaded through the
town. In one place she might be kept for good luck for
one year, while in others She was ceremonially cremated
on a funeral pyre to be resurrected in the spring.
Bread, too, was traditionally offered. Teutonic women,
who had once made offerings of their own hair to the
goddess, developed the braided loaves that are popular
in Germany. These were called Berchisbrod, or bread
offered to the Goddess Berchta. German Jews called the
braided Sabbath Challah, Berches. A Swedish custom is to bake bread from the last sheaf of grain into the shape of a young girl. This recalls a much earlier sacrifice
to the Great Goddess of the fields of grain.
Bread represented and revered as the body of the deity
whose gift it was. The Egyptians were among the first
to eat their god in the form of bread; wheat was
cultivated on the mummy case of Osiris with which
communion cakes were made. Worshippers could, by
eating them, partake of the divinity of the god, and like
him, become immortal. The flesh of Adonis and Dionysus
was likewise consumed as wheaten cakes. In Aztec
Mexico, effigies of the god Huitzilopochtli were molded
from dough made of roasted maize with beet seeds and
honey twice a year in May and December; these were
broken into pieces and shared by his devotes. The
Catholic ritual of the Eucharist is a direct descendant of
this ancient Pagan practice; and in fact, the question of
the exact nature of that ritual was one of the primaty causes of the Protestant Reformation.
The Summer Cross-Quarter day was celebrated by the Saxons as Hlaf Mass, "Feast of Bread." and by the Celts
as Lughnasadh, "Commemoration of Lugh."
Lugh was the grain god, son of Mother Earth. Every
August he was sacrificed with the reaping of the corn
only to be born again in the new shoots of spring exactly
as the Egyptian god Osiris had been. At the moment of
death, according to Egyptian scriptures, a person is also
a kernel of grain, "which falls into the earth in order to
draw from Her bosom a new Druid corn feast, one of the
four cornerstone festivals around which their year revolved.

Now Lammas comes in
Our harvest begins.
We have now to endeavor to get the corn in.
We reap and we mow,
And stoutly we blow
And cut down the corn that sweetly did grow.
--Traditional English Song

So how can we, separated from the agricultural process
by city and century, appreciate the miracle of the fruits of the earth? We, who buy our grain in bags, in boxes,
premixed, premeasured, prepackaged, prepared; sown,
grown, harvested, hulled, milled, by someone else,
somewhere else.
How can we identify with the earth values taught by
Terre Mater?
Dutiful and dependent, daughters that we are, we might consider offering grains, the fruits of life, on our
altars and at our rituals in reverent and grateful
recognition of the generosity of our mutual Mother Earth.
We can rally in Her support and come to Her defense in
these troubled times when She needs us the most.
We can hone our skills as the tenders of the planet.
We can plant the energy seeds of consciousness, of
conscience. We can weed out the strangling, destructive
tendrils of negativity, apathy, and pessimism. We can hoe our row. We can carry our load. We can harvest a
life of hearty health, honor, and happiness. We can break bread together in the spirit of peace and sisterhood/brotherhood. We can feed the hungry.
We can remember that we reap what we sow--that
what we seed is what we get.