editorial
by Melanie Fire Salamander
Now, at Lammas, our harvests begin to come in, and we give our first fruits to the gods. So have pagans from the beginning of agrarian spirituality given the first-ripened grain, squash, berries, the whole cornucopia, to the beneficent deities in hopes the rest of the harvest will come in well.
It's understandable that this first-fruits time, the season for a basic ritual of hope -- the hope that we may feed ourselves through winter -- gave rise to ritual. A basic first-chakra need, food, but one that doesn't go away. Earlier peoples, who lived with hunger at their door, never forgot that need. Anthropologists posit that some of their first rituals were to appease the deities so that the people might continue to eat.
Thus, for our Lammas Widdershins, we celebrate the joy of ritual, offering you two different Lammas rites for your delectation. These rituals ring some traditional Lammas themes, harvest and sacrifice, the latter also the topic of the issue's lead article, by the well-known ritualist Blacksun. Praise of the deity also feeds into ritual, and we offer you too a litany to the Great Mother, who among other attributes is the harvest goddess. We offer up as well some of our traditional fare, humor and reviews and astrology, the Raven's Call and the slugs. A veritable harvest feast.
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