GALLERIES of the CAVES

Fertility was the original practical science, and most of the traditional fertility rituals were aimed at increasing our livestock herds, controlling the weather, and improving the health of the land.

Small-scale agricultural cultures are not just 'close to the land,' they are part of it. Our ancestors understood that their family and their lives absolutely depended on the bounty of the earth. And the great fertility rites centered around the mystery of the animal cycles: impregnation, pregnancy, birth, fattening, and death.

In spring, these rituals aimed at ensuring the fertility and abundance of the various natural species that supported their herds. These “increase rituals” were held at the time of year when past experience showed that the feed in the pasture lands were about to become plentiful, and their aim was to cooperate with nature to make sure that their herds became is abundant.

The ancient Beltaine ritual fertility rites were practiced each year to ensure a successful harvest. It was celebrated after the last killing frost, when the fields were turned over and the seeds were ready to be planted into the ground. And it coincided with the traditional pastoral event of moving livestock to their summer grazing pastures.

While it’s become harder and harder for industrialized society to embrace this primal concept, in times not so long ago, fertility was a matter of life and death. When our flocks and fields were fertile, we were able to eat. But if the young seeds didn’t rise up from the soil or the rain didn’t come on time, we went hungry.

We never know with rain. Too little, too late, too much, too soon, too long, too hard.

Rain is the primal, life-giving fluid which flows down from the heavens to replenish the fertility of the Earth. And throughout our increasingly arid world— rain is life itself.

In small-scale society, the rain is full of magic and mysticism. And a variety of religious rites for ‘pulling-down-the-clouds’ is practiced in many cultures.

Chinese shaman would dance within a ring of fire, sweating profusely, until the falling drops of perspiration produced the desired rain. The Hopi people dance an intricate prayer ritual using live rattlesnakes clenched between their teeth, after which the snakes are sent out to the four directions as emissaries to the Rain Powers. In some West African tribes, people believe that when their ancestors died, they transformed into rain on their journey to the next world.

But I might ask: Does the Raindancer magically pull rain out of cloudless skies?

Perhaps if I lived as one with nature, I would know that when rain is coming, the earth smells like water, the dust in the air feels damp and the birds begin to start chipping excitedly. I may not know precisely the hour of the day the rain is going fall, but I would know that it’s coming soon. Because of all the natural signs, I would know that it may take a little time, perhaps even a week, but the rain will surely come as all the signs foretell. So I will take your hand, and we will dance the night away in celebration, because we all rely on the rain for our crops to grow and our people to thrive.

But if I am not in touch with the magic of nature and can’t see the signs right in front of me, I just might think the dancing is crazy and mad.

To keep our seed alive, we have to replant it each generation. And for thousands of year, we’ve selected and saved the best seed for planting the next year. The seeds of our grandmothers are replanted each year by us, and by our sons and daughters when we pass.

In the plant-supported village community, the individual loses a sense of self as a separate being, merging into the collective community of life. It’s the feeling of belonging to a timeless river that transcends the seasonal cycles of work and social life. And it allows us to experience a greater will that moves through all things, where nothing holds its form but all is in flux.

Starting from the earliest Neolithic plant-supported village communities, we discover a universal spring ritual — of calling on our ancestors in aid of the fertility of our seed and the abundance of the harvest this year. The ritual asks us to dive down into the depths of the Earth where the ancestors are waiting. And we walk between The Doorway of the Past and The Doorway to the Future.

The ripening of a mother is the rising tide of the river of life that connects us to our ancestors. And the kicking of a baby in the belly is the future itself knocking on our door.

In small-scale society, where the continued succession of the tribe is a primal consideration, the regenerative powers of women are sacred. The fertility of a tribe is linked to the fertility of its lands. And a child growing inside her is a woman’s connection to the divine.

Fruitfulness and the quickening of fertility remain a common joy and a shared celebration today. The urge to bring a child into the world is as strong as it has been since the beginning of humanity. It’s the foundation of our communities and helps guarantee the survival of us all.

“May the Sun and the Stars
Give me the voice
To ask for what my
Heart cries out for.”

When a people forget where their food comes from, they begin to starve from the inside out

As farming loses it’s magic and sacredness, it becomes just another business, with this year’s profitability as it’s primary consideration. And as we increase our cultural separation from our agriculture, our mournful eyes will observe more and more fertile food production lands lost in the war on agriculture by agribusiness.

Our common farmland suffers the loss of soil fertility from erosion and soil degradation, and the loss of biotic matter from bad irrigation policies. Rural lands endure the toxification of waterways and underground water tables from nitrogen input mismanagement. And a dramatic loss of biodiversity.

Have we completely lost our sense of place and relationship to The Land?

I believe that fertility is a win-win relationship, and we all win when we take back responsible for returning fertility back to the Earth. We embrace the dance of life when we compost. We bring back small joys by supporting small farmers.

Let us spiritually re-unite ourselves with the cycles of our homelands by purchasing our food locally and in-season. And when we plant a garden, we will satiate our own spiritual hunger for a connection to our place.

May all our gardens blossom this year.

I call upon the great Spirits of the Land,
To send me a dream to guide me into the land of the mountains,
To deliver safe passage to the high summer pastures,
Where the snow melts and the grass begins to poke up through the freshly-thawed ground.

I call upon the Gods of the High Mountain Passes,
To protect us from harm as we pass over your land,
To shield my herd from predators,
To tempt the wolves and eagles away,
To call in the herd at dusk,
And bring me courage on the cold, lonely nights.

May the Lady of the Fields and Flocks,
Smile on the fertile lands of the high pastures,
Bless us with enough food to make my herd happy to mate,
Filling their wombs with calves.
May you guide my hand as I coax a calf out of a cow,
Cut the umbilical cord and deliver the placenta.

Cast a circle of safety around us.
And may you stand in the middle,
Whispering its name into the wind.

A ‘Fertility Charm’ is about magic and passion. When you 'cast a charm’ you offer intention to interfere with the reality perception of the one encharmed.

So it begins in the high pastures.

At the first sight of grass in the spring, our daughters led the cows up the mountain valleys. Alone in the high hills all summer, the high country is alive with the charming tinkling of cow bells. The clip-clop of their hooves over rickety wooden bridges encharm the senses. The sweet calls of birds on the summer breeze encharm the heart

As their lives intertwined with the herd, and as they preserved and fermented their milk, our daughters learned vital lessons about responsibility and self-reliance.

They came back down in the early fall, arms filled with enough cheese and butter to keep us through the cold winter. And in their hearts, they came back filled with all the pride and confidence earned by doing an adult’s job.

A girl’s reality has shifted, as if by a magic charm.

Lady of the Mountain Herds
When I look into your eyes
I see the spirit of a woman
Who has stalked the high mountain passes,
Who startles the hawks among the peaks
And tip-toes with the mountain goats
Along stony little paths that are visible only to you.
Sing to me the songs you learned of the places in the clouds
And murmur in my ear
The secrets of rushing mountain streams.

I Call Up the Voice of the Land.
I speak well of This Place.
I speak out in Her Name.
Hear my voice.

I am The Land.
I am the Mountains and Forests.
I am two Rivers that meet.
And I have spun the Circle of Life,
That’s growing under our feet.

I am Fair and Equal.
I am the Animals and Wee Folk,
Who demand the right to be here.
We are a family of equals,
That human must learn not to fear.

And Together we Grow.
I am the fields that grow your food.
I am the streams that water this Land.
But You and I only stay fertile,
When you start by giving a hand.

When You Return My Share.
Return my fertility to me,
When Spring blossoms fresh and new.
Taste what The Land can give you.
Put back in my soil what is due.

The Beltaine full moon is now rising. Fertility is in the air. And the maternity wards are fully staffed. Nurses and midwives who deliver babies on a regular basis will attest to the power of the full moon.

And why not? We humans are more than 60% water. Why shouldn’t the forces that swing the tides influence a woman’s amniotic fluid in much the same way?

I propose that we raise up some energy in support. Let us dance a wild dance of celebration for all the mothers awaiting the arrival of a new child during this particularly fertile time of the year.

As the Australian aboriginal people say: “The souls of babies are resting in trees and need to be shaken loose from the branches.”

“I call down a child
From the other side.
Let your heart be open
To a place inside.”

Long before the Neolithic revolution, we hungry humans well knew what grass seed was good for. We knew where it grew and when it was ripe for harvest. We knew how to sprout it, mash it and even ferment it into a form of herbal- flavored beer. But ‘civilization’ only began when we first put these grass seeds deliberately into the ground and stayed around while they grew and ripened.

We first fell in love with two-row barley and einkorn wheat, ones that didn’t shatter when we cut their seeds from the stalk with our curved sticks, mounted with razor-sharp flint blades. And starting in the rolling hills of what we today call Kurdistan, we began to exchange our nomadic ‘portable culture’ for a life lived all-in-one-place.

As small-scale agriculture spouted up in fertile valleys around the world, we carved out of the local rock an iconic tool, one that was too heavy to pack around from place to place. It’s known as the ‘saddle quern,’ a large hand grindstone, and the women of our villages used it to grind the sprouted grains we raised in our gardens.

We can find an almost identically-designed saddle and quern grindstone in Neolithic cultures around the world. And on this saddle lies the altar of civilization, where for thousands of years, The Great Grain God dies between the millstones, to rise up as bread and beer.

So let us celebrate the fertility rising in the merry month of May, by honoring all the women throughout the ages who, with their strong hands and backs against the grindstones, gave us our First Meal.

When we sowed our seed in the spring, we danced in the fields with our mud-splashed feet to awaken the fertility of the land.

The trance-like state induced by ecstatic dancing is a powerful entry into the spirit world. Here, at this level, the ancient arts of dancing, mask-making and drumming connect us with the very deepest primal forces of our being. They inspire a divine madness, and intoxication with the great creative forces of life itself.

The most amazing thing, is that the old fertility dances still work. We still respond to the rhythmical beating of drums. Our ‘modern’ bodies involuntarily slip into a trance state, hip-hopping us into out-of-the-body journeys and speaking with tongues. Through dance, the collective human consciousness reaches out to the sacred, following the rhythm of an underground river, where it swings and sways with hidden unconscious power.

So when it is time to dance to the rites of spring this time of year, let us don our masks and beat our drums— chanting and dancing until dawn, in a crazy jukebox journey that leads us into the arms of the great fertility goddess herself. And in the process of drumming and dancing ourselves into the divine— we drum something divine back into ourselves.

Our ancestors didn’t view their land as wild or alien. Among small-scale societies who hunt and gather, the land was a life-giving fellow creature walking together beside them. Mountain, tree, fish and man were all one family.

Some indigenous farming peoples, like the Hopi, believed themselves the direct descendants of their crops. And indeed, the evolution of corn and meso-american culture go hand-in-hand.

The Hopi people lived corn, thought corn, dreamed corn and worshipped corn. And as part of this human-plant cosmological construct, Grandmother Corn was entitled to all the rights and respect due to human kin.

The Hopi woman tending her crops would naturally expect that her thoughts walked among the actual corn plant she was thinking about, and her thoughts then would leave some trace of itself with the plant in the field. If the thoughts she were having were good thoughts, one’s promoting health and growth, then they were good for the corn plant.

It was thus Grandmother Corn’s obligation to keep humans alive in order to propagate Herself.

For over 150,000 years, our hunter-gathering ancestors followed the cycles of fertility and lived by their rise and fall. We watched the animals in the spring cavorting in the fields and fed our children on the intimate knowledge of harvesting wild plant seeds. And when we first came to put those wild seeds in the ground with intent, we transferred that intimacy into a tool bearing the spirit of fertility itself.

The “planting stick” was the original magic wand.

In the Beltaine rites, we danced around a giant magical Maypole wand, raising our intent of impregnating the Earth in a sympathetic ritual of ‘marrying the land.’ We prayed to the fertility deities, consulted the calendars, then pressed our planting sticks into the dark, damp earth, opening the ground to insert the seed into the receptive womb of the Lady. And as we entered the earth with our magic wand:

“The Great Lady raises her legs to meet her lord who inserts into her waiting loins, accepting with a great heaving groan of pleasure the seed that she wraps unto herself.”

Fertility rites are considered religious rituals that symbolically reenact sexual and reproductive processes. It’s a variety of ‘sympathetic magic’ in which the forces of nature are to be influenced by examples acted out in ritual.

In the Beltaine rites, energy was raised by community dancing around the Beltaine Maypole. Borrowing a metaphor from acupuncture, the Maypole was a still-living 'needle of wood,' that must first be primed in order to work towards increasing fertility of the area. After the energy was primed and directed by the state of mind of the participants in the dancing, the men and the women would then lie out in the middle of their fields, and “Marry the Land.”

Sexual union with the land was a necessary part of a religious communion to the Earth that supported them. In sympathy with the rising fertility of the land and their herds, the entire community would join together, thrusting and sighing in sympathy with the Earth, who lay happy with pregnant pleasure beneath them.

The Beltaine ritual fertility rites were practiced each year to ensure a successful harvest. They were celebrated after the last killing frost, when the fields were turned over and the seeds were ready to be planted into the ground. And it coincided with the traditional pastoral event of moving livestock to their summer grazing pastures.

While it’s become harder and harder for industrialized society to embrace this primal concept, in times not so long ago, fertility was a matter of life and death.

When our flocks and fields were fertile, we were able to eat. But if the young seeds didn’t rise up from the soil or the rain didn’t come on time, we went hungry.

The origins of fertility reside in wild lands inhabited by elemental spirits, a place where the rational mind dares not tread.

Fertility was the original practical science, and most of the traditional fertility rituals were aimed at increasing our livestock herds, controlling the weather, and improving the health of the land.

Small-scale agricultural cultures are not just 'close to the land,' they are part of it. Our ancestors understood that their family and their lives absolutely depended on the bounty of the earth. And the great fertility rites centered around the mystery of the animal cycles: impregnation, pregnancy, birth, fattening, and death.

In spring, these rituals aimed at ensuring the fertility and abundance of the various natural species that supported their herds. These “increase rituals” were held at the time of year when past experience showed that the feed in the pasture lands were about to become plentiful, and their aim was to cooperate with nature to make sure that their herds became is abundant.

So have the old rites worked? There’s no doubt that we humans increased our numbers significantly, largely due to the Neolithic agricultural revolution.