At the beginning of August the first corn is cut. Lammas is the feast of the first loaf: a harvest festival with a shadow in it, for what feeds us has first to fall.
The festival has two names, one English and one Irish, and both are old. Lammas is from the Old English for loaf-mass. Lughnasadh, pronounced LOO-nuh-suh, means the assembly of Lugh, a god of the early Irish. Our coven, working in England within sight of Wales, uses the English name.
History and folklore
The first of August was the beginning of the harvest throughout these islands. In Anglo-Saxon England it was the day on which a loaf baked from the first of the new wheat was brought to church and blessed, and the name loaf-mass appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Lammas became one of the fixed points of the farming year: rents fell due, fairs were held, and common pastures that had been closed for hay were thrown open again.
In Ireland the festival was Lughnasadh. Tradition said that the god Lugh had founded it as a funeral feast for his foster-mother, who had died of exhaustion after clearing the plains of Ireland for tillage. It was kept with gatherings on hilltops and beside lakes, with games, horse races, matchmaking and the first meal of the new crop. In Wales the day is Calan Awst, the first of August.
The harvest itself was surrounded by custom. The last sheaf to be cut was treated with ceremony, plaited into a figure and carried home in triumph, and kept in the farmhouse until the next year's sowing. The figure is what we now call a corn dolly. And there is the old ballad of John Barleycorn, who is ploughed under, springs up, is cut down, beaten and ground, and proves in the end the strongest man of all:
There were three men came out of the west,
Traditional ballad
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow,
John Barleycorn must die.
Lammas in the Craft
The ballad says nearly everything the Craft has to say about this festival. In the story of the year, the God who was the sun is now the corn. His strength has gone into the grain, and when the grain is cut, he falls with it. He dies so that the people may eat, and what is eaten becomes their life.
Lammas is therefore a harvest festival with a shadow across it. It gives thanks for the bread and it acknowledges the cost of the bread. It is the first of the three festivals of the dying year, and the first reminder, in the middle of the hot weather, of where the Wheel is going.
It is a time to reckon up one's own harvest: what has come of the things begun at Candlemas and sown at the equinox. And it is a time to consider what must be given up if anything is to be gained.
How our coven keeps it
Lammas is the second of the Sabbats that we keep out of doors when we can.
- A loaf is baked for the rite with flour from a water mill a few miles down the valley: the first of the new crop if the harvest is early, and the last of the old if it is not. It is made in the shape of a sheaf.
- The loaf is broken by hand and never cut, and everyone eats of it.
- A corn dolly is plaited, from the new straw if any has been cut, and hung in the covenstead. Last year's is burned in the fire.
- Each of us says aloud one thing that the year has brought and one thing it has cost.
- We sing John Barleycorn, all the verses, as well as we are able.
Keeping it yourself
- Bake a loaf of bread, even if you have never done so. Share it while it is warm.
- Go and look at a field of standing corn before it is cut.
- Learn to tell wheat from barley and barley from oats.
- Count your own harvest for the year so far, honestly.
- Give something away.