Now we are in Alchemical Time, Last year I discussed Extraoridnary Time ,the Time of a Witch that did not intercede with anything Christian, that kept going once it was off the map of most western Litrugical calendars. Extraordinary Time wasa bit tongue and cheek, but it was also a bit long. After all, could everytning between the middle of Jude and december be one season? Or could that one season not have little seasons. And so, as we come toward August, as we approach Lammas it is time to enter into the Alchemical Season. The weather is changing as well as our reactions to it.. Summer and the way it is received alters. We come to the hottest, driest part of the year, bu scarcely know how to celebrate it. Everyone prepares for children, somehow or some way, to go back to school. The time of celebration, even in this year, rounds to an end. We no longer look forward to summer, though the weather will certainly be warm for months to come. Now they days are incrementally shorter and the work toward autumn is just beginning
I am rememberign learning about the seasons called the "little winters" that last until May, the seasons that Appalachian people amongst many others are ful laware of, but that we, in our continual discontent and searching for the future pretend to not exist until we strumble full into them. Much of the tension of our current life if from resisting or failing to pay attention to the way of things. Lammas, like Candlemas is that marker, that caution light that says now the big season will be a series or little seasons. In the same vein that we had little winters up until May, the height of Spring, it seems we will have little summers until the heigh of autumn. The fact that I cannot say when the height of autumn is underscores how little we pay attention to such things and how much I am a part of that we.
Lammas is the mystery of the Loaf Mass. Extraordinary Time began with Corpus Christi, the memory of the Divine Christ present in Bread and Wine,. Here the Bread and Wine is the share in immortality, it is our spiritual food. I am not sure Lammas is so much different--to a witchly mind--as a slighlty different perspective. Lammas is the celebration of the loaf, the celebration of the earth goods we have and the memory that these things we have, we are given, the basic bread that feeds us is a gift and this gift is divine. All the vety mundane things we have are not only gifts of divinity, but divinity. The focus from the Eucharist is different only because centuries of not understanding myth and relying on the words of priests have made it different.
In the Popul Vuh, the points is made that whenever the Gods create something or offer something, they made sacrifice, they shed their blood. They give themselves. The figure of Jack Barleycorn as well as Osiris, the saving of the last Sheaf all symbolize that the Divine Gift is not passive the way a very rich person write a check at a cause. We have lived, even thouse who deny it, in a Deistic way with a God removed from things. Christianity did begin this, this is why the Christian emphasis on the Eucharist was that it provided a heavenly and eternal hope. but Lammas is the loaf, not linking us to the eternal and everlasting--as important as they are--but to the eternal and everlasting in our common mortal lives. Lammas states not that God distantly sets thignsi nto motion, but that not a blade of grass grows without not simply the allowance of God, but the work of God. Lammas, in fact, insinuates that the blade of grass, the offered gift is God.
Of course, for the occultist, for the wiseworker this means even more. If the Eucharist is a sort of signing on to be united to the rising and dying of Christ--however we interpret it--then Lammas is a signing on to understanding that the Great Work is an offering, and our offering is one with the Mother of Grains, and the Harvest Lord. It is an offering where we give all. And that's all right, because in the course of things not only will we be revived and resurrected, there is not other way.
After two thousand years of Christianity one would htink the world would be ready for this, but it could be two thosuand years of Christianity that has been just the thing to stop this revelation of divine love and divine work. One only has to look a little to see the cruelty, the apathy and the coldness of heart that is in the world today. And yet the Mother of Grains is always giving and always hearing us even while so many systems in this world and so much coldness shuts her out. The Lord is still present even while so many who speak in his name keep him at bay. Let us keep the Holy Heart in mind, contemplate on it and live by it. Let us pray for its presence and ask it to make its place in this world and in the temples of our own hearts.
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