Ultime grida dalla savana

Petroglyph, Wadi Mathendous, Libya

After the mandatory giggle, let's think what this image could represent?

Remember this? "We owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains".

My guess is that in places like Libya, where life depends on rain, life is created by Sky (Father) inseminating (raining on) Earth (Mother)...

I talked about this in several of my posts: "Riddle", "Living nature", "An Ki Ankh"

Srbska zagonetka: Visok otac, široka majka = nebo i zemlja 🙂

Serbian riddle: Tall (high) father, wide mother = sky and earth 🙂

Father Sky and Mother Earth creating Life, preserved in Serbian tradition.

Because of the above identification of Sky = Father = Male and Earth = Mother = female, in many cultures around the world we find symbolic and ritual linking between:

Male fertility (ability to produce semen), sky fertility (ability to produce rain), seed and sowing...

Female fertility (ability to conceive after being inseminated), earth fertility (ability to grow plants after them being sown), fruit and harvesting...

I talked about this in my post "Sowing", in which I discussed this strange Serbia custom: In Serbia in the past people lived in extended families called "zadruga". When grain needed to be sown, the family would choose one man to do all the sowing. He had to abstain from sex from that moment until all the seeds were sown...

This brings me to a great Italian documentary I saw years ago, "Ultime grida dalla savana" ( Final Cry of the Savanna) which was in 1975 directed by Antonio Climati and Mario Morra...

And in it, if my memory is serving me right, they showed men from some African tribe, ritually inseminating Mother Earth, by each digging a small hole in the ground, lying down over it and...

Basically ritually playing the role of the Sky Father...

Baba - Last sheaf of wheat

Among Slavs, the last sheaf of wheat was commonly called Baba. This word means grandmother, mother, midwife, birth giver...In some places the woman binding the last sheaf the last sheaf of wheat is also called Baba...

In the Balkans bаbičiti means to make, to tie grain sheaves. I wonder this is symbolically linked with the swaddling babies cause bаbičiti also means to deliver babies...From the meaning of the word Baba in diminutive form Babica which means midwife...

All kinds of rites and beliefs are connected to the Baba, the last sheaf of wheat, including the  dance of the oldest female reaper, accompanied by banter and jokes...

In Prussia, the woman binding the last sheaf represented the Corn-Mother; After she bound the last sheaf, she would lie down in the field and cry like a woman in labour, while an old woman acted as the midwife. Finally, the "midwife" would announce that a child was born...

In Northern Germany, the woman binding the last sheaf was told: "You are getting the child!" In Bohemia, people believed that the woman binding the last sheaf will have a child in the next year...

The Swabs called the one binding the last sheaf "the Old Woman" (basically Baba, Grandmother) and she was said to be married in the next year...

In East Prussia, the female reapers strove to be the one tying the last sheaf, called "the Grandmother". Whoever  got it, would be married in the next year, but her spouse would be old...

Baba (Grandmother) here is Mother Earth in her role as The Mother Of Grain...Talked about this originally in my post "Mother of grain"...

Mor articles about the Mother of grain in Neolithic Europe, Central Asia, Mesopotamia, Iran, Levant: "Altyn Tepe mother of grain", "Mother of grain from Yarim Tepe",  "A person in a little boat", "Sabi Abyad venus", "Hathor grain pendants"...

Sumerians knew here as Inanna. 

Inanna/Ishtar, was in "A song of Inanna and Dumuzid" described as: "Maiden, glossy mane, lovely beauty...colourful as a pile of grain, fit for the king, fit for Dumuzid! Maiden...a stack of...barley, fully developed in loveliness"...

This is Inanna speaking:

"Before my lord, Dumuzi,

I placed grain before him,

I poured out grain before him,

I poured out grain before my womb..."

I talked about this in my post "Inanna and dove"...

Greeks knew her as Demeter...

I talk about Demeter in my posts "Demeter with dove", "Demeter riding panther", "Sacred marriage on the threshing floor"...

Demeter, the goddess with beautiful golden hair...Here she is as Ceres emerging from the ground holding grain, opium poppies and snakes... 

I explain why in my post "Who are Persephone's parents"...

Hippolytus says that during Eleusinian harvest rituals, the priest raised a freshly cut ear of wheat with the loud cry: "The exalted goddess bore a holy boy, the strong one bore a strong child!" Sounds familiar? 🙂 I talked about this in my post "Iacchos"...

The reason why the last sheaf of wheat is called Grandmother is because all these people believed that last sheaf of wheat contained the "grain spirit", basically the spirit of The Mother of Grain...

The "grain spirit" is in European folklore usually preserved as female "corn dolly" made from the last harvested sheaf of wheat...I talked about this in my post "Corn dolly"...

In Romania the grain from the last sheaf of wheat was used to make the wreath that was then used to crown the most beautiful maiden reaper...

A living corn dolly from Romania. From my post "Wheat cross" about grain harvest rituals from Romania...

In Poland and Ukraine too...

Wheat wreath, worn by the "corn maidens" and made from the last sheaf of wheat, was the first batch of grain to be threshed on the threshing floor. This grain was then set aside for next year's sowing and was the fist grain to be sawn. 

I talked about this in my post "Wheat wreath"...

The same symbolic link between Old Woman (Grandmother), Last sheaf of wheat and mother earth is preserved in the Gaelic culture...

In Gaelic, the word Cailleach means both an old woman and the last sheaf of wheat and the corn dolly made from it. Corn dolly which represents Mother Earth, the life (grain) giving mother...

I talked about this in my post "The old woman of the mill dust"...

The symbolic linking of female reapers with The Mother of Grain and of tying the last sheaf of wheat with delivering and swaddling a baby is just another example of the believed link between female and earth fertility...Which we find in Europe since Neolithic...

A gynomorphic (woman like) figurine made of "soil mixed with chaff and grain seeds" from Grčac, Serbia. Proto-Starčevo culture, 6200-5500 BC. Direct symbolic link between earth, grain and female fertility. Basically, "Mother of Grain"... 

This symbolic link was still at the core of Slavic agricultural magic in the 20th century. As is shown by this Russian harvest custom:

In the past in Russia, after the last sheaf of grain was cut, women harvesters would lie down on the ground and roll around the field "to return the strength to the earth"...

In Ireland too we find this symbolic linking of land (grain sheaves) and female fertility (bride). These are Strawboys who used to call at the home of the bride on her wedding day. Co Sligo. Ireland. Early 1900s. (National Museums of Northern Ireland).

I talked about this in my post "Walking sheafs of wheat"...

This belief in the direct link between female and land fertility might have had some pretty dark implications in the past. There is an indication that in the past Serbs sacrificed girls to the Corn Spirit in exchange for good harvest...

At the end of the harvest, when only the last sheaf of wheat was left standing in the field, Sorbs would sacrifice a rooster by killing it with a flail...

I talked about this in my post "Cock bashing"...

There are actually many indications that sacrificing a cockerel was among Serbs a replacement for a human sacrifice...I talked about this in my post "Third death"...

Add to that that in some parts of the Balkans Serbs ritually "tied the housewife to the central pole of the threshing floor until she promised them roast cockerel for the end of harvest dinner"...Or the next harvest would be bad...

And you have to ask yourself a question: is this a ritual replacement for the real human sacrifice which once used to take place?

The beard of Osiris

Figurine of a bearded man by the Naqada I culture, 3800–3500 BC, from Upper Egypt. Pic by Rama.

Today I came across this article "Heliopolis and the Solar Cult in the Third Millennium BC"

In it I read about the "Souls of Heliopolis", "Souls of Hierakonpolis" and Pharaohs as great prophets, great seers, who received their sacred knowledge and legitimacy from their ancestors...all the way to the procreator god..."

And this got me thinking: Was ancestral worship at the core of the early Ancient Egyptian religion? Is this why Pharaohs wore false beards?

Apparently, Pharaohs (divine rulers) wore false beards to signify their status as a living gods. 

And not any god. Osiris. In ancient Egypt, Osiris was considered as being the perfect example for pharaohs...

Thus, in order to get closer to and bond with the perfect pharaoh Osiris, his pharaonic successors wore a false beard to imitate his appearance. But Osiris didn't actually have a real beard himself...

Osiris, wore a false beard in his role as ruler of underworld while he judged the dead. Apparently, he wore the false beard "as a symbol of his great wisdom"...

Why would a beard be a symbol of great wisdom? Cause beard is a symbol of an elder, an ancestor...Someone of a great age with great experience and hence knowledge, wisdom...

The older you were, the wiser you became...And longer your beard grew...

And then you died and went to the underworld. So the underworld was full of dead ancestors with long beards...

So Osiris wearing a false beard while judging the dead, was symbolically proclaiming the judgement of the ancestors...Cause it was really the ancestors who judged their descendants...And gave them what they deserved...

Remember this?

"...humiliation of the Hittite kingdom is the result of the fact that the Hittites have forgotten to respect the sacred bond with their dead..." - Last Hittite king Suppiluliuma II.  I talked about this in my post "House of bones"...

Statue of Suppiluliuma II, Hatay Archeology Museum, with a pretty depressed looking expression on his face...

In the above post, I proposed that what caused the demise of the Hittites was a severe multiyear drought, and that to understand why Suppiluliuma II talked about the dead, we need to look at the beliefs of Serbs and other Balkan Slavs. In the Balkans people believed that if the dead were not given water, they would drink it from the clouds, and would cause drought. You can read more about the eternal thirst of the dead in my post "Thirst"

Romans linked rain, and agriculture, with the will of the dead too...You can read more about this in my post "Lapis Manalis" about the Roman agricultural rituals which link the (thirsty) dead living under (holy) stones, rain and agricultural fertility...

It turns out, that I was right. According to this recent article from Nature, "Severe multi-year drought coincided with Hittite collapse around 1198–1196 BC"...

In Egypt, agriculture depended not on rain, but on the annual Nile flood. And who was the god directly linked to the annual Nile flood that created the black (fertile) soil? Osiris. 

Osiris with wheat growing from his body. From the coffin of Nespawershepi.

I talked about the link between annual Nile flood, fertile black soil and Osiris in my post "Holy carp"...

Osiris the Perfect Pharaoh. He who made the land fertile and who liked to wear a false beard, pretending to be symbolic ancestor...Did Ancient Egyptians also have in their religion the link between the dead and water and fertility? I think so...

Osiris, who was thus emulated by the Pharaohs who wore a false beard to pretend to be Osiris (who wore a false beard to pretend to be an ancestor 🙂)...

What was the most important role of a Pharaoh? To feed his people of course...

BTW, this is Diduch (Grandfather, Ancestor), depicted as a sheaf of grain, to symbolically show the link between the dead and the grain fertility...I talked about this in my post "Diduch"

This was fun 🙂 What do you think?

I want to thank my friend @another_barbara for this great insightful comment:

I've been thinking about the things you posted since last night. People "planted" their dead in the soil that fed them, scatter their ashes into life giving rivers or seas that provided for them...

Dead man loaf

In Bulgaria, a special loaf of bread was made immediately after a person died, during the washing of the body. It was a simple round loaf, sometimes with a cross. In northeastern Bulgaria it was baked from dough which was made with the water used to bathe the deceased...

Sources:

"Glasnik Etnografskog muzeja u Beogradu knjiga 19 godina 1956"

"Bread in the folk culture of the Serbs in its pan Slavic context"

The dough for the bread was kneaded in a wooden throw. Before the kneading of the bread started, a candle was lit and put next to the through. And the dough was kneaded until the candle burned out...

In some parts of Bulgaria, this bread had to be made by a "clean" woman who had no sexual intercourses, either a virgin girl, a widow or a grandmother...

The name of this bread was пътнина (patnina), meaning "(bread for the) journey". In some parts of Bulgaria, this bread was placed in the coffin with a bottle of water and a bottle of wine, so the deceased would have enough food and drink for his journey to the other world...

This is very interesting. Remember my articles about the pots and pans found in Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age graves all over the world. Like these Ghandara culture graves from Pakistan, dated to 1200-800BC...Were the drinking vessels placed in graves with drink "for the other world"...

 I talked about this in my post "One for the road"...Why would the living bother with making sure the dead had enough food and drink in the otherworld? 

Our ancestors believed that it was the dead ancestors that directly affected the life of the living and in particular the land/grain fertility. 

I talked about this in many of my posts like my post about Diduch (grandfather), symbolic representation of the ancestral spirit which governs the lives of the living.

The dead had to be remembered, and fed and watered by giving them regular food and drink (mostly water) sacrifices. Cause forgotten, hungry and thirsty dead ancestors will take revenge on their living descendants. And one of the ways they would do that is by causing droughts, storms, floods and other natural disasters that would cause grain crops to fail, and would result in famine and the death of the living...

I talked about this in my posts "Thirst", "White feast", "Soul breads". I talked about the link between the dead and rain and grain fertility in Roman mythology in my post "Lapis Manalis"....

Also, remember this? 

"...humiliation of the Hittite kingdom is the result of the fact that the Hittites have forgotten to respect the sacred bond with their dead..." - Last Hittite king Suppiluliuma II.  From my post "House of bones"...  

Statue of Suppiluliuma II, Hatay Archeology Museum with a pretty depressed expression on his face...

This is why people not just buried their dead with food and water, but also regularly feasted with the dead. 

Starting from the funeral feast. 

In some other parts of Bulgaria, the bread was, while still warm, broken over the deceased person's head, making sure that steam, representing the deceased person's soul, rose the broken bread...The bread was then ritually eaten by the people attending the bathing of the body...

BTW, in Herodotus 4:73 we read that when a Scythian man died his family would put the body on a cart and take it to all his friends houses. They would bring the body into each house where they would eat and drink together with the corpse...

Through the quarterly remembrance feasts. 

There is a custom among Serbs of "feasting with the dead". Four times a year, once per season, on a day called "Zadušnice" (Souls day) a family goes to the graveyard, spreads the tablecloth on the grave, lays food and drink on the grave and has a feast with the dead. 

And literally any other feast.

Serbs actually always feasted with the dead. Every family feast was symbolically eaten with the dead. This prompted some Serbian ethnographers to propose that the whole Serbian belief system was based around the cult of the dead...

Soul breads

As late as the mid 20th century, there was a custom in Poland to bake small loaves of bread for the dead on the All Souls day. Because the All Souls day is in Polish known as Dzien Zaduszki (the day for the souls), the bread was also called zaduszki, bread (for) souls...

Originally these were just a plain sourdough flatbreads...But the recipe gradually evolved into this:

Lublin All Souls' Day breads (powałki)

1 kg of cooked flour potatoes

2 eggs

400 g of wheat flour

100g of fresh yeast

1 teaspoon of sugar

2 flat teaspoons of salt

Press the previously cooked and cooled potatoes through a press, add eggs, flour, salt and yeast grated with sugar. Knead the mixture into a loose dough. Tear off pieces of dough, form thick flat patties and place them on oiled baking tray.

Decorate each patty with a grid pattern using a fork, and leave them to rise for 30 minutes. Bake for 20-30 minutes in an oven preheated to 160°C. 

That's the traditional recipe. If you want, you can add cheese, ham, spices or any other topping of filling to suit your taste...

The origin of this ritual in the old Slavic feast called Dziady, which in Polish means Grandfathers, Forefathers, when the souls of Forefathers would come back to our world to visit their descendants. And the little (soul) breads were made as food for the visiting ancestors.

The soul breads had to be prepared a few days in advance, as people did not want to light the fire on the hearth on All Saints' Day, as they believed that the visiting souls gathered around the house hearth, and they didn't want to disturb them...

Two interesting things here.

First: Slavs believed that it was the (happy) ancestors (satisfied with the way their descendants treated them) who were the source of all good that their descendants enjoyed. Including (and especially) good grain harvest...I talked about this in my post "Diduch" (grandfather), about the East Slavic symbolic representation of the ancestral spirit which governs the lives of the living. 

So a bread for the dead now makes a lot of sense, right? I talked about the ancestral cult root of Slavic agricultural rituals in many of my blog posts and twitter threads. This post, "Wheat cross", is a good jumping point for exploring this subject further. It talks about the ceremonial "wheat cross" from Romania, which was made on the last day of the wheat harvest to carry the "wheat wreath" from the fields to the village. And about the related Slavic harvest traditions and ritual.

Second: Hearth as the place where the dead gather when they visit the house of their descendants. I talked about the link between the dead and the hearth in my post about "Verige" (hearth chain). 

As you can see from the above picture, in the past, the hearth was the focal point of every house. So it is easy to imagine that the souls of the dead ancestors would also gather around the hearth to warm themselves up on the cold November night...

This is confirmed by the fact that in the past in Poland, on All Souls eve, people used to set up bonfires on the crossroads, in order to help the souls of the ancestors warm up a bit...Why on crossroads? Allegedly to show wandering souls their way home...

But interestingly:

In some parts of Serbia, on Christmas eve, a single man from a village would go to a crossroads and lay down a feast for wolves. He would then run home without turning...I talked about this in my post "Wolf feast", about the link between wolves and the ancestors in Serbian folklore. 

And also:

Diduch (Grandfather), the grain effigy representing "The Ancestor" made in Ukraine for Christmas, was in some areas, burned on New Year's eve, on crossroads, "one of the favorite hangouts of evil spirits and vampires"...

See how the souls of the ancestors ended up becoming evil spirits and vampires...With a little help of Christian priests...

Finally, some Serbian ethnographers proposed that the belief that the dead gather around the house hearth might also be a remnant of the ancient (really really ancient) practice of burying the dead under and around the hearth...

I am very important! 

Love this little guy 🙂 Neolithic Vinča culture anthropomorphic terracotta figurine, 5000 BC, Serbia.

"These figurines were found in houses, often near fireplace, sometimes carefully arranged, which indicates that they had ritual, cult value".

Did they represent the deceased, the ancestors?

Feeding the frost

Frost in spring can kill the crops flowers and cause famine...So, to prevent this, Russians fed the frost during the crops flowering period...

In the past, in some parts of Russia, people baked 40 buns from rye and oat flour on Spring Equinox for Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) the personification of frost and cold...

Drawing of Ded Moroz, Viktor Vasnetsov, 1885...

Then they threw one outside each morning for 40 days with the words: "Frost, tall and red-nosed! Here is your rye and oat! And now, get out of here while we are kind and you are well!" 

This custom was meant to prevent 40 morning frosts that follow Spring Equinox...