Hi Friend,
A few years ago, I was part of a tour of a regenerative grain farm in the Hudson Valley on August 1st. When I mentioned to the farmer who was giving us the tour that it was quite auspicious that we were there that day, as it was Lammas/Lughnasadh - the half way mark between Summer Solstice and Fall equinox, he was quite curious. Unsurprisingly, he had never heard of this Celtic/northern European agricultural celebration. After I explained it, he said, oh! it's Grain Day! I laughed and said, yes, it is. Those of us gathered created a spontaneous ritual blessing his grains. It was all quite beautiful.
More recently, in my current ReMembering Course, someone asked, "Why did those kinds of agricultural festivals fade? Why do we honor agriculture so much less than we used to?" What a great question!
The short answer: colonization, industrialization, and larger spiritual-cultural shifts away from land-based cycles.
But it deserves a longer answer, one that I thought would interest many of you. Here is a bit of history about this particular festival from western Europe, and some of the ways in which those of us living in Western cultures and modern societies more generally have shifted our thinking about and honor agriculture and the land.
This is part article, part letter - if you like it, do feel free to share it!
The Sacred Season of The First Harvest
In the Celtic/Gaelic and Nordic circular calendar agricultural systems, August 1st roughly marks the mid-point (cross-holiday) between Summer Solstice and Fall Equinox. In those agricultural lands, it was the time of the first harvest - and also a time of a fair amount of unpredictable weather. Heavy rains could destroy the first crop.
In Celtic tradition, Lughnasadh (pronounced LOO-nah-sah), the celebration associated with this time, honored the skilled god Lugh and his foster mother Tailtiu, who died clearing land for agriculture. (There's a whole article just in the mythic relationship between sacrifice and the first harvest across different mytho-cultural traditions....) The festival included athletic competitions (the ancient Tailteann Games), feasting with fresh bread, matchmaking, trading, and gratitude rituals for the earth's abundance. In Nordic traditions, the same time period was associated with the god Freyr and a similar holiday focusing on fresh baked bread was celebrated (Freysblot).
As Christianity deepened into the Celtic Isles, the holiday shifted to Lammas, from the Anglo-Saxon "hlaf-maesse" (loaf mass), focused on blessing the first loaves baked from new grain. Farmers would bring these sacred loaves to church, where they served as communion bread, connecting the divine, the community, and the literal fruits of the peoples' labor.
Similar agricultural celebrations existed amongst Eastern Slavic peoples (modern day Russia, Belarus, Ukraine) and continue today. This includes celebratory times of harvesting honey, apples, and blessings of water springs and wells. As the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition grew in those areas, these folk holidays became the three Feasts of the Savior: the Honey Feast (Aug 1 Julian/Aug 16 Orthodox calendar), the Apple Feast, and the Nut Feast. These Feast Days continue today in various forms.
These traditions all recognize August 1st and the time around it as a kind of threshold—summer's peak has passed, the long work of harvest was beginning, and the cycle was turning toward the introspective darkness of winter. This wasn't just about food production; it was about humanity's place in the cosmic rhythm of seasons.
Side note: The Christianization of these festivals created subtle but possibly important shifts. Where Lughnasadh honored the earth itself and the community's relationship with agricultural cycles, the Christian Lammas redirected gratitude toward God (who was usually seen as transcendent and in Heaven, not in Earth) as the ultimate provider. The earth became a passive vessel rather than an active sacred partner. How much did the shift from worshipping outdoors to worshipping indoors change these dynamics? Over generations, it was likely very significant.
That said, I've seen many, many cases when some version of the theological distinction between Living Earth/God as Interior to All Beings and God as Transcendent does not stop coalition building across and within faith traditions towards ecological protection. Thankfully, we do not have to totally agree on these theological beliefs in order to take shared action together!
Back to the main thrust ....
Some Forces of Forgetting
1. Colonization: The Land Broken Apart and the People Taken from the Land
So: religious forces played different roles... And none of them as strong as colonization—what Edward C Valandra calls "the first harm" - a foundational violence that severed Indigenous peoples from their land-based relationships and replaced indigenous ecosystem cultivation with extractive agriculture.
Perhaps obviously, colonization disrupted the agricultural and other land and water cycles of celebrations in those areas colonized through various forms of displacement, violent severing of people from place, stealing people from their native lands, forced labor (often on colonial plantations), disease, and famine, amongst other reasons. So all of this disrupted local celebrations of land including harvests. This included ways of relating to land that was much bigger than what we think of today as 'agriculture' (food systems and food cultures often included relating to forests, oyster beds, entire river catchment systems, etc.) much more to say here (this is part of what I teach on afterall) ....
Amongst the farming settlers ("settler" was very linked to land and to growing crops) from Europe were many who celebrated the August 1st grain festivals. Not the Puritans mind you - they were actively trying to 'purify' the church of such 'pagan' remnants. But many farmers (and church leaders) brought with them traditions of celebrating the harvest .... of course they did.
But immediately, these colonial American rituals entailed a dark irony: they were celebrating harvests grown on land forcibly taken from peoples who had cultivated through various forms of reciprocal relationships those same soils and larger ecosystems for millennia. And many of them were neighbors and working side-by-side by people who were forced into working the land (and putting food on their tables). What does it mean to celebrate the fruits of the land if it is harvested by forced labor?
Even before the industrial revolution, many harvest celebrations throughout the Americas had been disrupted... and for those which were continuing or being brought here from elsewhere, it was already complicated. And then came increased mechanization.
2. Industrial Disruption: Scattered Communities; Lost Celebrations
The big blow to earth-honoring festivals came with increased industrialization. Which, as I keep saying, is completely linked to colonization.
In 1800, 83% of Americans worked in agriculture (mostly subsistance-based) and lived in largely rural spaces. Vast profits made through monocropped plantations (sugar, tobacco, etc.) were possible because of enslaved peoples. By 1920, more than half the population lived in cities. Plantations no longer ran on enslaved labor. Monocropping and machines vastly expanded. Today, 99% of America's meat comes from factory farms, not a village's own herds or from hunting. Its' hard to over-emphasize how big a shift this was in Europe and in America - and subsequently, much of the world.
The mechanics of agricultural disconnection/alienation were swift: Scythes replaced sickles, increasing individual productivity but reducing the need for community harvesting. Sheep were worth more than land laborers, contributing to the loss of the commons and its related communal festivals. Railroad transportation meant grain could be grown in one place and consumed hundreds of miles away, breaking the local connection between land and sustenance. Mechanization reduced agriculture from a community activity requiring many hands to an increasingly isolated, technical profession.
In England, the proportion of people living in cities jumped from 17% in 1801 to 72% in 1891. When people no longer lived where grain was grown, when their survival no longer depended on good harvests in their immediate landscape, the emotional and spiritual significance of harvest festivals simply evaporated.
The modern farmer on that Hudson Valley tour—actually growing grain, actually dependent on weather and soil health—could intuitively understand "Grain Day." But for most of us, disconnected from growing food, August 1st became just another day on the calendar.
3. Cultural-Spiritual Shifts: From Cyclical to Linear Time
Critically, colonization and then industrialization changed how we experience time itself. Traditional agricultural societies lived in cyclical time—seasons returning, crops planted and harvested, communities gathering and dispersing in rhythm with natural cycles.
Colonization interrupted that - big time. Industrial society quickly came to rely upon linear time—progress, efficiency, quarterly profits, and career advancement all went together. The factory ran year-round; the office operated independently of seasons. Success meant transcending natural limitations, not collaborating with them.
This shift from cyclical to linear time consciousness made seasonal festivals feel not just irrelevant but actively counterproductive. Why stop productive work to celebrate grain when you could buy bread at the store year-round? Why honor the earth's cycles when electric lights had "freed" us from dependence on daylight patterns?
All of these dynamics have significantly contributed over the last 150/200/400 years to loosing track of agricultural celebratory cycles.
Modern Complexities
That Hudson Valley farmer's immediate recognition and joyful celebration of "Grain Day" suggests something important: it's not that hard to revitalize earth-honoring cycles. They just seem to make sense.
Yes, there's layers here. Those layers are worth engaging in. The question of what does it mean to celebrate the earth on land that was (even if its many generations ago) stolen is an important one. So to is the question of what ceremonies are appropriate for a given ecosystem given a lot of complex histories.
Even just trying to think about contemporary food systems and agricultural systems can be overwhelming, each dynamic representing different forms of abstraction, alienation, dislocation and, often, exploitation.
Approximately 55% of the total crop harvested in the US today was grown with at least one GMO trait. Since white/American/settler farmers began tilling the soil in the midwest about 160 years ago it has has lost 57.6 billion metric tons of topsoil. Agricultural soils in the U.S. have lost up to 60% of their original organic carbon content over the last century. Obviously, the farming methods brought and (even more so) developed in the last 150 years just aren't working. this is unsustainable.
Here are some of the many complex socio-ecological-political-economic issues related to farming right now:
Most people's disconnection from agricultural cycles and all things related to growing food (especially in 'developed' countries/situations)
industrial monocropping, soil degredation, water pollution and the current slash on a wide range of environmental protections
farm labor realities (most U.S. farm labor is Hispanic, much by immigrants, some from (often Mexican based) indigenous communities, many undocumented—bringing terror over current ICE raids... and the subsequent food rotting in fields due to labor shortages due to fear of and actual deportations);
impacts of industrial agriculture on soil and biodiversity;
factory farms and the inhumane conditions many animals live in
climate change shifting what grows where when;
property systems
histories of enslaved labor
many forms of racism (including, especially in California, the histories of anti-Asian prejudices)
How food and nutrition is understood (calorie count vs nutrients; quantity or quality)
How hunger is understood and dealt with (Some say we produce waaaay more than enough food to feed the world.... but it is vastly unevenly available/accessible)
Who controls decision making
Who is investing in what - and what options investors are even presented in investor's portfolios (if you are looking for options for regenerative agricultural investments let me know)
questions of what spiritual-cultural practices are appropriate on stolen land.
Complex relationships to food in any given community (gluten-free grain day, anyone?)
True regenerative practice requires not just returning to seasonal festivals, but also fundamentally questioning the systems of land ownership, monoculture extraction, and disconnection from Indigenous wisdom that colonization imposed.
So - what does it mean to look towards revitalizing agricultural celebratory cycles?
Even in our modern world, most of our food comes from Earth. Food and water help keep us here: we remain earth-bound.
This offers ongoing hope, though it's a complex hope. As more people engage with local food systems and (I hope) bioregional awareness, we have the opportunity to develop land relationships that honor both place-based wisdom and the justice demands of decolonization.
Reclaiming Grain Day?
The beauty of that spontaneous blessing ritual in the Hudson Valley points toward what's possible. It also raises important questions.
Is it time for further revitalization of the cross holiday between summer solstice and fall equinox?
Maybe.
Certainly there's so much need for more gratidude, awareness, and appreciation of farmers and farm laborers... especially right now. I think that honoring this moment in the cycle of the seasons can point us towards that general direction. I do see evidence of this holiday being revitalized in a variety of eco-spiritual settings, especially because the Wheel of the Year is becoming more popular. If you are wanting to revitalize it in your home garden, your local regenerative community group, your church, your investment circle, your school, your kitchen... awesome. Link it with larger circular time/cyclical time understandings and movements.
And I'm interested in seeing a lot more interlinked conversations in diverse places about history and ecology and sacredness, to sense into what it might mean to honor the land. Wherever we may be, we can attend t what was here and what still is here as well as thinking through what can help us now and what could be. We need -desparately - bridge rituals to help us engage with the past, the present, and the future without moving too quickly into imposing "an answer".
Whatever names we use, this moment in the solar cycle can become yet another moment to honor harvests - and losses; the precariousness of life; that which has been stolen and that which can be returned, repaired, and restored. And the abundance of apples and honey and grain. I dare say, as someone who doesn't eat a lot grain... I myself lean towards apples... and they are not at their peak in early August where I live!
In my personal practice, this moment in the year is more about recognizing the shift in the season (which, after years of paying attention to this annual moment, I finally do experience the seasonal shift right around now) more than the agricultural grain cycle per se.
This past summer, we've been paying a lot of attention to the cycle of fruits. There was the first tiny wild strawberries all over our pastoral land. And then the black caps and the rasberries and the glorious blueberries. And now there are cherries and stone fruits (I am averaging a peach a day at the moment, which means my life is very delicious) and blackberries. And: tomatoes. I could go on and on about fresh tomato season. I am noticing and enjoying and eating and giving a lot of gratitude to all of these fruits with others. I love the idea of baking bread this weekend.
And I know we need more than familial/micro-rituals, we need bigger collective rituals, happening in the context in which these bigger questions can be engaged with.
Remembering seasonal cycles helps brings up back to cyclical time, disrupting that over-focus on linear cycles.
ReMembering diverse knowledges and food systems opens new pathways to relating to land and waters, property systems and institutions, differently. As well as helping open us towards the wisdom of our ancestors and multiple spiritual traditions.
Which is a lot!
Fortunately, we do not walk any of these paths alone.
The grain is golden in the fields. The bread is rising in our ovens. The cherry trees are bowing with dark red delight. The community is gathering to celebrate—and to reckon with how this abundance became possible. We gather where and as we can: in fields and sacred groves and around fires and over zoom calls and at kitchen tables. This is how we remember who we are, and whom we are called to become.
