Pagan Godspell

Victoria Slind-Flor of Driving Audhumla has a great post up regarding Pottermania and Pagans. I agree wholeheartedly. Though I am a lover of the books like many people, and while I maintain, as Slind-Flor does as well, that the fantasy novel is a brilliant medium through which Pagans often receive inspiration, I’m a little baffled why folks would adopt the Harry Potter world in particular into their religiospiritual mythos. The books after all, while super fun, really have nothing to do with Paganism, contemporary Witchcraft or contemporary magical practice, aside from some fun references to historical alchemists such as Nicholas Flamel. Pointy hats and spangled robes certainly don’t register with me on the spiritual plane. But then, I’ve always secretly hungered after a crescent moon tattoo on my forehead a la The Mists of Avalon, so maybe I shouldn’t talk.

In addition to these points regarding Pottermania, however, Slind-Flor also has some brilliant commentary regarding what I call oldskool DIY ritual prep:

OK, this is my bias. I think the most magical things we do, the best rituals we create, the most empowering social actions we take come from the work of our own minds, hearts and hands. I cut my own wand from the pear tree in my garden, carved my own rune staves from my favorite alder tree, and evoke the Goddess through terra cotta images I made in pottery class. When I celebrate the first fruits of Lammas next week, it won’t be with store-bought Wonder Bread but with bread I’ve kneaded and baked myself.

Yes yes yes! There is a numinosity that becomes infused in our work when we spend time and effort in it. I am reminded of a lovely Beltane evening I spent in the home of a friend. She spent nearly 2 hours preparing the altar – arranging candles and ivy, laying out offerings, filling bowls with water, dancing in between the kitchen and the garden and the table heavy with these gifts. It became, before my eyes, one of the most exquisite Beltane altars I’d ever seen. When it was finished, she paused and we sat in the living room sipping red wine and letting the hauntingly gorgeously hot and sexy earth-beat music thrum through our bodies – and it occurred to us that at that point, we didn’t need to do a ritual at all. That we had already completed what was Necessary. That it was Finished and it was Good. So we drank more wine and laughed and talked and danced, and the evening slid gorgeously by and the moon rose. And that was Beltane that year.

Certainly there is a middle way here at times. There are artists and craftspeople whose work I cherish and that imbues my life with a bone-deep sense of the sacred. But the need to be involved in religion at the visceral, physical level cannot ever be ignored. Sweat-faith. To create is to share life, to suffuse your spiritual world with your own blood and tears and muscles. And to connect to the ancient legacies of your grandmothers and grandfathers, who beat out tough globes of bread on wooden boards long long before they drove to Safeway and bought it in shiny plastic sacks. All the layers of relationship rising up through the clay or the wood or the wheat – the milk poured at the root of the tree that gave you the branch, the intimate slick wet of the clay as you smoothed it into the shape of the Vessel that holds all the black sky, the song you sang in between loud breaths as you kneaded dough in your blistering kitchen (my kitchen is a freakin’ furnace)…your gut knows. This is the forge in which you are bound to the Mama. Blood and iron and sweat and riverwater. The smell of bread and loam.

Which then leads me to think about one of my favorite subjects. Bread. Oh yeah mama. Let’s talk about bread. Lammas, that most awesome of holidays (I know – I love them all with crazy abandon – they’re all my favorite), has its etymological root in the term “Loaf Mass,” being the holiday that is best signified by a table laden with the First Fruits of harvest and a warm loaf of bread fresh from the oven. The first of the harvest festivals, Lammas is about community, play, feasting, and work. The harvest may be a gloriously wonderful time – full of the joy of knowing your labor has paid off in the form of fat juicy zucchinis and ripe tomatoes, but it’s still a hell of a lot of work. Have you ever picked peas in the summer? There’s approximately a zillion of them, and it’s hot, and there are bugs cavorting around your ankles and your ears. And then you have to shell them (the peas, not the bugs). And then – oh man, peas. Peas rock. But they’re work. The Lammas loaf is a symbol of this brilliant process – the seed, the Mama, the rain, the threshing, the grinding, the stirring, the kneading, more kneading, more kneading (there’s lots of freakin’ kneading), the baking, the smelling, oh bread! Piece of the Mama, piece of yourself. A marriage of flesh and spirit – of Source (Mama) and Creation (You). With butter on it.

In this spirit, it’s difficult for me to grasp the Message in a loaf of pre-sliced, factory bread – even “whole wheat” store-bought bread, and even when it really is whole wheat and not just a pretty corporate lie*, isn’t the same. Wonder Bread is neither a wonder nor bread (though the now universally recognized packaging did make it possible for me to be a loaf of bread for Halloween one year when I was 10 – my mom slaved over painting a cardboard box in those creeptastic yellow/red/blue colors for weeks…it was a big hit in the neighborhood). Bread is made of wheat, water, salt and work, combined with the astonishing magic of yeastie beasties (whose miraculous properties are best observed in the making of traditional sourdough – I encourage you to capture your own local yeastie beastie and feed it well – after you’ve filled your home with the smell of fresh-baked sourdough bread made from sourdough starter you created via the alchemy of the Mama, you’ll never go back, my friends).

Bread has gotten a bad rap of late, what with all the fussing and puffing and blithering hysteria about carbs a few years ago (everybody scream it with me: CAAAAAAAAAAARRRRBS!!!!!!!), and even though that’s all thankfully kind of faded lately, I think the carb-scare has succeeded somewhat in settling into our lizard brains, making us all still a little jumpy at the sight of muffins and biscuits. But real bread is holy. Bread is alchemy and collaboration and relationship. When it takes time – when you sing songs to the yeastie-beasties and they respond in kind – when it is risen and crusty and warm, or flat and crispy and delicious, delivered to the tables of a thousand different cultures, bread is a sacrament. Deserving of reverence and respect. There is a difference between the holy sacrament of handmade bread and the squishy, styrofoamy blood-sugar-spiking horror of an IHOP pancake. For one nutritionally-related thing, you can’t eat as much of the former, but you can wolf down plates of the latter (oh, and I have – I am not a saint). This is the place where we begin to make connections between the food we eat and the prayers we make. There is a lesson in bread. I mean, there are a lot of lessons in bread. There is a reason why bread is the focus of so much religious symbolism (in a few different religions, of course, not just with us Pagani). The body of the Earth. The offering. The sacrifice. The transformation. The resurrection of life – rebirth. The firing of hidden life that riots into joy and expands in death to create sustenance. Lammas. Fire. The peak of summer tumbling oh so slightly into the miracle of autumn. Pure fierce joy. First Fruits. Darkness and starlight. And on and on into a night filled with drums and heat and voices and baskets of food tumbling out into the mouths of the hungry people. And they are fed not only by the Fruit of the vine and the tree, but by the Fruit of your sweat and your work.

Lammas comes, oh my people! May the savage, glorious rain in the garden inspire you to pea-picking in the clear mornings, and may the fresh wicks of summer’s secret light be lit in the bread you bake and the rituals you embody with your hands, your mouth, your eyes.  It is for these gifts that we are dancing.

*I wouldn’t normally link to any kind of diet site, but this is a wonderful explanation of the “100% whole wheat bread” scam