Folklore: Loaf Mass

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 04 Aug 10 - 05:16 AM

I'm always moved to sing this at this time of the year: Sedayne : M'Ginty's Meal-an-Ale : 3rd August 2010. A very rough rendering - rough sound too as the new camera seems to have an internal wax-cylinder!

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: GUEST,Chris
Date: 04 Aug 10 - 04:38 AM

"Otherwise, here's some contemporary neo-Pagan 'ritual dance' folk-revival fun for the all the fakelore fans out there: Lammas Festival / John Barleycorn."

Just a bit of info on this dance.

I wrote and put it together in 1992. Originaly, I used the Hymn tune 'We plough the fields and scatter' after hearing a version of John Barleycorn sung by Pete Castle on an old 'VFM Value for Money tape' purchased when I was a kid from Woolworths, in the 70's. The theme of dance follows the song...ish!!
Regards
Chris

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 03 Aug 10 - 08:11 AM

The early church was fairly explicit in their mission to appropriate existing feast-days and places of worship. Christmas Day is centred around the Winter Solstice, but as the venerable Mr Hutton pointed out on his appearance on The Victorian Farm, there has always been festivities during this period, which marks the shortest day / rebirth of the sun on one hand, and the onset of absolute winter on the other! To Roman Catholics however, Easter is the Big One - even if it is named after an Anglo-Saxon Goddess and celebrated to this day on the first Sunday after the first full-moon after the Spring Equinox. What lingers of the original festival? For sure, we hear mutterings of the pagan signifances with respect of Easter Bunnies and Egg Rolling, but this is very much in the remit of the folklorist to fantasise over such lost significances, much less their miraculous perseverance into modern times. Bunnies are bunnies, hares are hares, and eggs is eggs, just as Spring is Spring... It's not just folklorists though - the Jehovah's Witnesses take a great interest in establishing pagan origins in denying the festivals the rest of us take for granted.

I got a shock the other day when we went walking in the countryside and all my late summer / lammastide hedgerow signifiers were all in place - green haws, brambles, rowan berries, green elder berries etc. How quickly one loses touch with such things in moving from the country to the town, but how fundamental & potent such signifiers remain to a lapsed hedge-witch like myself. Time, I think, to open up the fireplace and get my mother's old stove in there - bearing in mind the Lammas moon isn't until the 24th, though some might have called it for the 26th of July which senms a tad sloppy given the calendar rule.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 03 Aug 10 - 07:58 AM

Actually it seems Ceres wasn't a Goddess of the harvest, but was instead considered 'cause' of the corn. Her festival was early in the year. Demeter was associated to the harvest. Ho hum!

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 03 Aug 10 - 07:41 AM

Think how much language has evolved in these islands in the last 2000 years. Although scholars can explore this evolution, few of us have any understanding of how speach today is related to speach at anytime in say the first 500 or 1000 years.

Scholars may have views on the evolution of religions during the same period but did the chain of working people through that same period have any understanding of evolving belief systems?

L in C

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 03 Aug 10 - 07:30 AM

I don't know, but the imagery described depicting Mary in a pose akin to that of Ceres sounds interesting - to me at least. It would be good to actually see it. As far as 'continuance' is concerned, I don't think anyone's asserting that Mary is secretly Ceres. Just that she became associated to the same festival period, religious role and agricultural imagery. It's not a great leap to suppose that it may have been a deliberate move on the part of the Church to ensure Ceres' agricultural and religious functions, was imitated and adopted by Mary.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 03 Aug 10 - 07:05 AM

The apocrypal story of the corn appears in versions of Herod and the Cock / The Miraculous Harvest, but does this prove a link to Ceres other than corn? Corn is just corn; whilst any symbolic & mystical significance is just so much made-up shit particular to each age. Thus whilst folklorists floric midst sheafs of speculation regarding continuity (which to the neo-pagan becomes rhetorical absolutes), the historian would, out of necessity, be more circumspect. File, therefore, under wacky...

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 03 Aug 10 - 06:41 AM

You might well be correct there McGrath, I really wouldn't know.
I hadn't heard of the Assumption myself til a couple of days ago though, so it means less than nothing to this common person.

Otherwise the relationship Jack cites between the Roman Ceres and the Christian Mary, and how the function of Ceres continued in Christianized form is quite intriguing:
Description of how Ceres' associations were transferred to Mary

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 03 Aug 10 - 06:28 AM

In his Life of Cuthbert (721) Bede gives us a telling episode in which stricken monks being swept out to sea on rafts are being laughed at by the locals on account of the monks having deprived them of the old ways of worship with no provision of support as to what was expected of them thereafter - see Chapter Three HERE. Note that is by a supernatural demonstration of the power of prayer over the forces of nature that said locals are at last convinced. Here too there is a touch of "rustic simplicity" - in the innocence of the source-teller, a quality which makes him incapable of any falsehood!

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 03 Aug 10 - 06:23 AM

It was a bit like saying that ordinary "common Celtic" people were so ignorant they didn't know that Christmas was about Jesus being born.
An insulting and stupid thing for anyone to write.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 03 Aug 10 - 05:50 AM

Yes, Wilby contrasts the efforts that later Protestant ministers took to provide the poor with a religious education, compared to the prior 'do as I say' approach of the early Catholic Church.

Regards mass indoctrination, I believe records are pretty scant to non-existent concerning how the peasantry felt about the new faith. But it would probably simply have filtered from the top down: if your King / local rulers convert, then you convert.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Jack Campin
Date: 03 Aug 10 - 05:30 AM

The early modern period is about 1000 years after the establishment of the Assumption as part of the calendar. In the early days of Christianity, the Church must have had a fight on its hands to get hold of material resources that had previously gone to support paganism or the pagan aristocracy. It would have had to tell people *why* it was taking tithes, so some sort of mass indoctrination would have been required.

By the Reformation, there were so many only-formally-Christian festivals in the calendar, costing so much to put on, that it's easy to see the people who ultimately had to pay for it all thinking "hold on, do we really need this?". Roll on the day when our current established cult gets the same treatment and the mobs start looting sports stadiums and throwing widescreen TVs out of pubs in iconoclastic fury.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 03 Aug 10 - 03:16 AM

Emma Wilby goes on at some length describing the general religious ignorance of the poor in Scotland and elsewhere. And describes the lack of will that the Catholic church in particular had, in educating the poor about the basics of their religion - expecting them instead to simply do as they were told:

"How far lay religiosity existed in the early modern period, and what form it took is a matter of ongoing debate among historians. Traditionally the latter have emphasised that since its emergence in Scotland in the sixth centuary the Christian church had, as in other parts of Europe, been primarily concerned with maintaining social stability through the establishment of outer conformity. In other words, it was less concerned with what people thought and believed so long as they behaved properly. In Catholic Europe, as John Arnold has recently claimed, the Church's primary consideration was 'the demand to do certain things, rather than the demand to know'.
[...]
in the early modern period ministers made more of an effort to encourage inner piety among their parishoners than had their Catholic predecessors. ...
University educated ministers laboured to make their abstract intellectual religion of the elite accessible to to a largely illiterate congregation."

That's not to say that as Jack says I imagine some kind of covert formal pagan worship of Ceres or some-such. I think the poor were too busy working and surviving, to care too much about the historic or symbolic meaning of their religious figures. But I can imagine a pretty pragmatic "This is the new boss, same as the old boss" type of Christianity among the rural poor as they got on with the business of working and surviving.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Jack Campin
Date: 02 Aug 10 - 06:20 PM

On googling round a bunch of German sites unsuccessfully looking for the image CS mentioned, I came across quite a few references to the idea that the Virgin was often identified with the harvest/grain goddess Ceres. The main festival of Ceres was the Eleusinian Mysteries, same sort of time of year as we're talking about here.

This doesn't mean in any way that mediaeval people celebrating the Assumption would have "really" been celebrating a harvest festival covertly, but it may explain why the Assumption got moved to its present date.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: brezhnev
Date: 02 Aug 10 - 04:49 PM

¡Guapa!

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 02 Aug 10 - 03:37 PM

The traditional story of The Assumption is an essential part of the traditional praying of the Rosary. Not an abstruse doctrine, but a story that would be known to any Catholic peasant of the time. Of any time.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Jack Campin
Date: 02 Aug 10 - 01:23 PM

According to the Catholic Encyclopaedia on the web, the idea of the Assumption of the Virgin derives from the Christians of Egypt and Arabia, and was Celtic before it was Roman - the Gallican church was celebrating it a few decades before Rome.

But all these early churches placed it in January at first. It started moving to August in the 6th century. Surprisingly, the doctrine of the Assumption only became Catholic dogma in 1950.

Like McGrath, I'd find it very hard to believe that anybody in Europe could have been unaware of the doctrine for most of the last 1500 years.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: brezhnev
Date: 02 Aug 10 - 01:07 PM

CS: is that 'mindless' as in 'mindless violence' or 'mindless' as in the no-mind path to pure consciousness?

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 02 Aug 10 - 12:09 PM

I'm not sure if it's supposed to be because someone is common or because they are "Celtic" that it is assumed they couldn't know the basics of their religion, or even be able to say the Rosary.

Actually, from what I've been reading recently ('Visions of Isobel Gowdie') it would seem that the bulk of people (the bulk of people being fairly poorly educated) and especially Scots in the highlands, wouldn't have had much if any appreciation of the complexities of theological doctrine. Which wouldn't surprise me all that much to be honest.

Where did it say in that article that the average Celt or Scot couldn't say their Rosary? Theological doctrine is one thing however, and I imagine anyone of whatever background can manage mindless repetition.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 02 Aug 10 - 10:53 AM

"Common Celtic people would not have been aware of the theological doctrine of the assumption"

That is breathtakingly arrogant and presumptuous. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be because someone is common or because they are "Celtic" that it is assumed they couldn't know the basics of their religion, or even be able to say the Rosary.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 01 Aug 10 - 11:43 AM

This probably sounds less wacky and it makes fewer leaps:

    "During the first millennium of the Christian era, the feast of the Assumption was of enormous importance to most people, since it marked the crowning point of the agricultural year. ... For many centuries before [farming produced two harvests a year], there was only one harvest a year, and this was reaped in July. The feasts of Lammas (the blessing of the first loaves at the beginning of August) and the Assumption (August 15) therefore marked out the period of harvest festivities, and continued to be celebrated as such even after the harvesting had been moved to slightly later in the year.

    "In Scotland, the Assumption – St. Mary's Day, or Marymass – was the most important of the Marian feasts, and the ritual Lammas bannock (the new bread) would be dedicated to Mary Mother. In some places people would make pilgrimages on August 15 to holy wells dedicated to Our Lady. Mary long retained her association with the crops, and one fifteenth-century German woodcut shows her wearing a robe which is patterned with ears of [wheat]. So the glorious culmination of the Virgin's life was celebrated at the culmination of the farming year." (Sarah Jane Boss, Marian Study Centre, Ushaw College, Durham) from here

I'd love to see that wheaty Mary woodcut.

And for good measure, here's a 'Lammas/Marymass' (or indeed any of the other quarters) Bannock recipe:

Bannock

"Marymas Bannock was originally known as Lammas Bannock.
Lammas Bannock eventually was assimilated into Christianity, and Marymas Bannock was made in honour of the Virgin Mary on the 15th August, the Feast Day of Mary ("Feill Moire" in Scottish.)
The Marymas Bannock would be made from grain gathered that day, and would be cooked over a fire.
The father would take the bannock, break it up, and give a piece to each of his family in order of age. The family would then sing a song to Mary, walking clockwise around the fire.
The ashes from the fire were then scattered in the fields." link

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 01 Aug 10 - 08:14 AM

Doesn't sound wacky to me. Early Celtic Christianity was pretty much a hybrid faith which existed prior to and independently of Rome on these isles, until eventually pressured to conform as Rome's influence grew.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 01 Aug 10 - 08:02 AM

Sounds bit wacky, CS! It's this sort of folklore that encourages Pagans, and vice-versa. Must check it up in my trusty copy of Stations of the Sun...

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 01 Aug 10 - 07:34 AM

Hmm, a later festival held in mid-August was celebrated by Celtic Christians as early on as AD 900. This harvest festival was pragmatically located later in the month than Lughnasadh for the cool Northern climate. It sez all about Marymass 'ere.:

"Very early on, the Church chose August 15th to honor the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. August 15 would be the full moon of August if the new moon fell on the first of the month as it did during the time of the lunar calendar. It was proclaimed a holiday throughout the Roman Empire by Emperor Maurice around 600 in the East, and about 50 years later in the West. Common Celtic people would not have been aware of the theological doctrine of the assumption—that Mary did not die but was taken bodily up into heaven at the end of her earthly life. However, Celts would have associated Mary with the fruitfulness of the earth at the time of harvest, and celebrations connected to other harvest goddesses were transferred to Mary as the pagan Celtic lands were converted to Christianity. Representations of Mary often resembled the ancient depictions of harvest goddesses wearing robes decorated with ears of corn.

Marymass was the primary harvest festival in the northern Celtic regions where the harvest was later. It replaced the southern harvest festival Lughnasa which was normally celebrated anytime from late July to early August. The offering of the first fruits, first grains, or first loaf of bread, or Lammas (loaf-mass) which usually occurred during Lughnasa in the south, was transferred to Marymass in the north. The Lammas bannock (a traditional Scottish loaf) would be made from the new corn, dedicated to Mary the Mother of God, and used in Eucharistic celebrations. Some other traditional Marymass activities, such as elaborate flower displays, well dressing, torchlight and candlelight processions, and the offering of the first bread, were preserved intact for centuries because of the isolation of the Scottish islands and highlands."

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 01 Aug 10 - 07:34 AM

Soppy old folk-sot that I am, my favourite version of Corn Riggs was always Ossian's, as sung by the late, great Tony Cuffe. Listen to it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU6f21Bdsbg. I could add that one to the Songs that Make Me Weep thread were it for the ghastly mawk-fest that one turned out to be. The late, great, Paul Giovanni subverts the idiom rather, as with the entire WM soundtrack, but away from the film the song itself is best left un-paganised. That's the trouble with pagans, show them a song with Lammas in it and they'll be dancing sky-clad to it around the nearest crop circle.

The relationship between Folklore and Paganism is a symbiotic one, founded on the Frazerian notion that seasonal ceremony and custom must be survivals of pre-Christian ceremony unwittingly perpetuated by an ill-educated peasantry who had no understanding of the true significance of their seasonal usage. If one gets rid of such condescending inhumane paternalism (as one must) and applies a more considered historical & ethnological methodology to the subject, there is revealed a vibrant human necessity far removed from the insubstantial rhetoric of neo-paganism.

(Me - from HERE)

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Geoff the Duck
Date: 01 Aug 10 - 06:24 AM

Clever bloke that Burns fellow...
Very appropriate though - Robert Burns and Woodward burns.
A bit of nominative determinism...
Quack!
GtD.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 01 Aug 10 - 06:24 AM

Following the crop circle reference above, it's been interesting to note that this year's latest crop of crop circles, have been more like crop squaricles: Crop Squaricles at 'Temporary Temples' (scroll down)

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 01 Aug 10 - 06:03 AM

Eh, my crumby sentence construction makes that read as though Burns composed The Rigs O Barley for the Wicker Man soundtrack..

Subject: Lyr Add: CORN RIGS AN' BARLEY RIGS (Robert Burns)
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 01 Aug 10 - 06:00 AM

Repost here if you like.

'Corn Rigs' - Paul Giovanni's setting of Burn's 'The Rigs O' Barley' from the Wicker Man film soundtrack - is rather fitting today, though I note Giovanni omits Burn's last verse:

It was upon a Lammas night..

It was upon a Lammas night,
When corn rigs are bonie,
Beneath the moon's unclouded light,
I held awa' to Annie;
The time flew by, wi' tentless heed;
Till, 'tween the late and early,
Wi' sma' persuasion she agreed
To see me thro' the barley.

Chorus:
Corn rigs, an' barley rigs,
An' corn rigs are bonie;
I'll ne'er forget that happy night,
Among the rigs wi' Annie.

The sky was blue, the wind was still,
The moon was shining clearly;
I set her down, wi' right good will,
Amang the rigs o' barley:
I ken't her heart was a' my ain;
I lov'd her most sincerely;
I kiss'd her owre and owre again,
Amang the rigs o' barley.

I lock'd her in my fond embrace;
Her heart was beating rarely:
My blessings on that happy place,
Amang the rigs o' barley!
But by the moon and stars so bright,
That shone that hour so clearly!
She ay shall bless that happy night
Amang the rigs o' barley.

I hae been blythe wi' comrades dear;
I hae been merry drinking;
I hae been joyfu' gath'rin' gear;
I hae been happy thinking:
But a' the pleasures e'er I saw,
Tho' three times doubl'd fairly ---
That happy night was worth them a',
Amang the rigs o' barley.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 01 Aug 10 - 04:57 AM

A bit of a cross-post here with the Re-Imagined Village thread; if I'd seen this first I'd have bunged it here instead..

Subject: Folklore: Loaf Mass
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 01 Aug 10 - 04:49 AM

Just realised that it's 1st August and Loaf Mass today, Lammas, Lughnasadh, Lá Lúnasa, first harvest etc.

A quick Google shows that it's virtually impossible to find anything about this festival period, without the words 'wicca' or 'pagan' attached - this was the best I could find on the history several pages deep.. Unearthing the seeds of harvest festival

Otherwise, here's some contemporary neo-Pagan 'ritual dance' folk-revival fun for the all the fakelore fans out there: Lammas Festival / John Barleycorn

And a charming little blog describing ways in which the festival is being observed today by one member of the neo-Pagan community. I particularly liked the reference to crop-circle making and hunting, representing as it does a modern phenomenon very naturally intimately connected to this time, full of it's own contemporary folk-lore about orbs and aliens and earth energies: Lammas for Hedge Druids

Anyone feel like adding anything?

Think I'll bake a loaf of bread..