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The Farmer's Lament

You know that little statue of the god Frey—the famous one with the beard and the boner and the funny little pointed cap?

My son found that. Digging potatoes, if you can believe it.

Down in the south field, it was. There he was, digging potatoes one day—1904, I think it was, that was a good year for potatoes—and suddenly, there he is, boner and all. Wipes the dirt off him, sticks him in his pocket, shows him to me later that night.

Worst thing that ever happened to this farm, that was.

Early one Spring morning, I open the back door and burst into sudden laughter.

Overnight, my yet-to-be-planted vegetable garden has sprouted a fine crop of several dozen life-sized—and life-like—phalli.

In the early light, they thrust up through the dark, fertile soil like mushrooms after a storm.

Several days previously, one of my crazy pagan friends had given me a latex ice-mold in the shape of an erect penis: just the thing for the Beltane punch-bowl, we agreed. Of course, we'd made the obligatory jokes about cocksicles.

Clearly, my friend had bought a mold or two for herself as well.

Good old plaster of Paris.

Needless to say, my Baptist next-door neighbor was not pleased.

It’s Midsummer, a day of feasting, bonfires, and dance. It’s a celebration of solar powers at their greatest, of warmth and bursting fruits and the year’s longest light. Like other holidays, it has gone by different names throughout its long history, and various spirits and gods are honored and receive sacrifices at this time. In Southern Slavic countries like Bulgaria, Midsummer Rusalia is celebrated at this time to honor the rusalki, female spirits of water and fertility. According to the folklore, these spirits are the souls of dead young women of the community who never spent their fertile powers during their young lives and therefore have the power to confer that fertility to the earth and their living community in death. Feasting and dances entice them, invoke their powers, and channel those powers into the fields and the bodies of those who wish to have children (Barber 17).

I'm learning how to flatfoot.

I tell you, it's the damnedest thing.

Every few years, the witches get together up on the ridge for one of their big shindigs.

Every few years, without any rhyme or reason to it.

Harvest time coming on, and suddenly they'll be up there, hooting and hollering and carrying on. All night they'll be at it, sun-down to sun-up.

Eeriest thing you ever heard. Hear the drums for miles, you can.

Funny, those are always bumper years: corn, apples, hay. Hens laying like crazy, and the cows! Seems like you never stop milking.

There's always good hunting, too, the falls of those years. Those are good venison years.

And here's something else: after the last one, in the spring, that's when Martha had the Twins. Nobody else in her family, or mine, ever had twins before.

Now, ain't that just the damnedest thing?

Well gentlemen, it's that time of year again: time to spill that seed on the ground.

Call it a religious obligation. Good old paganism.

Making love in the fields at the sowing to make the crops grow has probably been around for as long as we've been agricultural animals. It's sympathetic magic of the most basic kind, no explanation needed. I sure do hope that there are places in the world where they still do it. According to folklorist Vance Randolph, they did in the Ozarks during the 1950s.

I'm reminded of a scene from the jaw-dropping BBC series Rome. The newly-ennobled Senator Lucius Vorenus has acquired a new country property. To take official legal possession, he and his wife process out to a newly-plowed field along with a priest and their tenant farmers. After the priest makes offerings, Vorenus and Niobe go out into the field. She lays down, and he lays on top of her.

It's a curse word. It's the ultimate bad comparison: “Smells like....” “Tastes like....” To the poisoning of our waters and the impoverishment of our fields, we flush it away so we can pretend it doesn't exist. Frequently enough our collective aversion seems to take on a moral tone. Bad shit.

I think we've got it wrong. The opprobrium in which we hold shit is a mistaken opprobrium. I don't think this is how pagans think.

Old English scîtan, “to defecate.” We didn't have fancy Latinisms back then to describe an everyday bodily function and its product. Same with Old Norse skíta and Old High German skîzzan. We've been talking shit for a long time, it would seem. All the offspring of Common Germanic *skîtan, “to separate, defecate.” Separate and defecate. Where's the opprobrium?

The Kalasha of Pakistan are the last remaining pagans of the Hindu Kush. The greatest festival of their year is Chaumos, the winter solstice. To decorate their houses and temples for the holiday, the children whitewash the walls and cover them with good luck paintings for the coming year: sun-wheels, trees, pastures, hunters, and goats, goats, goats. (The goat is central to the Kalasha economy.)

An anthropologist observing while the children painted these designs noticed that many of them were surrounded by dots; in many of the paintings, the lines of dots actually served to unify the compositions visually. She asked the kids what the dots were.

“Oh, that's dung,” the kids explained. To the Kalasha, dung is a valuable commodity because it fertilizes the fields. Lots of dung is a desideratum because it means lots of herds to drop it, and lots of crops to be nourished by it. Dung = fertility.