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The Religion of Harvest
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As October creeps upon us most modern society in the Northern Hemisphere is buckling down for an annual harvest celebration. Some may know this as being ?Thanksgiving?, others may call it ?Harvest Home?, some call it ?Samhain? and still others ?Harvest Festival?. Nearly every culture celebrates it in one form another and almost every culture has always done so.
The significance of harvest is intricately woven into our identity as a civilization. Modern images of squash, pumpkins, harvest baskets and hay are only regional representations of something that Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, Africans, East Indians, Classical Greek and Romans, Ancient Egyptians, and Mesopotamians have been doing for thousands of years. Celebrating the result of a year?s crop had a twofold purpose: one was to pat each other on the back for growing such delicious food, but the other was to buckle down and prepare for the winter.
Harvest is a time to celebrate, but it is also a time for prudence. The sort of fervor of spring festivals is absent here. People are solemn, stoic and, while drinking, do so only as a last feeble hurrah. Before the modern era, winter wasn?t a picnic. Usually there would be a lot of death, certainly sickness and the harvest?s food was the one thing that kept everyone going. It was a prelude to the ?dark months?. Dark, not only because the sun poked its rays further away, but also because they sort of sucked to live through. A bad harvest meant a bad winter and a good harvest meant a not-so-bad winter.
In the modern world we complain about the dark months in the same sentence we complain about traffic. Some of us look forward to the dark months because of the festive season, ski resorts and bank holidays. Some of us even dread spring for knowledge that the heat will be back soon to make our lives miserable. But, when celebrating the time of Harvest during the autumn, it is good to look at the cycle that this civilization-long tradition represents.
It is a time of prudence, reverence and calm. Where we pack our things and carefully plan for the unknown road ahead. It is a time of celebration and it is a time of reflection. The Religion of Harvest is there to remind us that with the seasons come times to let loose and times to buckle down. It may not matter to us that our forefathers depended upon the harvest to survive, but in our world we produce our own harvest. This is the time of year to fall into the ancient current and reflect upon what we?ve produced and how it will get us through the next year.
Mark Havenner
This work by http://www.waythingsare.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Photo by matze_ott at flickr.com
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