Harvest Festival

I feel we did enough Harvest and lickle animaws last week, particularly the ickle bunnie wabbits.
But Church Mouse has been bringing the issue up and he's reminded me of the towering, oh-so-Victorian figure that was Robert Hawker, vicar of Morwenstow.
In those days before the Diocese of Truro and resurgent pseudo-Celtic nationalism, Hawker was also able to hold the living of Welcombe, the other side of a little brook that does the job that the Tamar does for the other 99% of the border between Devon and Cornwall.
To hold both livings, in the days before they invented cars, shows the hardiness (pun intended) of the average Victorian. The drive from Welcombe to Morwenstow church is about 10 miles by car. The walk is a couple of miles, but this is serious walker's country. It's also the sort of terrain to make a good Beaker Person spit, with a holy well dedicated to the so-called "Celtic" saint "Nectan" at Welcombe.

Hawker could have defined the term "eccentric" - although I doubt that modern-day bishops would tolerate a vicar who smoked opium while sitting on the cliffs looking out for shipwrecks in case there were any sailors he could bury or - in extreme cases - help to save. He is said to have excommunicated his cat for mousing on Sundays. He wrote the Cornish national anthem, a song of rebellion against the English (indeed, British) Crown. On his deathbed he converted to Roman Catholicism.

And how do we remember Hawker?

As the inventor of the Harvest Festival.

The English people (and the Cornish, our noble cousin-race) had been celebrating Harvest Home since time immemorial. But the Victorian clergy couldn't be having that, could they? People celebrating the blessings of the harvest with John Barleycorn's finest and a few rowdy ballads. They had to be tamed, calmed - made safer.
And so the Harvest Festival came about. A sanitised, sanctified equivalent to the Harvest Home. Where the Harvest Loaf could be raised on high in place of the ale of the Harvest Home. Where the Good Health of the Barleymow would be replaced by some polite words from the vicar.  Who was the only person in the parish allowed to be off his face of a Wednesday lunchtime - all the peasants were supposed to be sober and hard at work.

If you're interested, the Harvest image here is a bunch of alpacas (I've no idea what the collective term is) grazing oblivious to the cloud of chaff being kicked up by the combine at the top of the page. When a South American mammal is grazing quietly in the dust of a mechanized harvesting machine the size of Dunstable, you know you can only be in England.

We burn the fields and scarper

Not a bad Harvest Celebration, all round.

Even the random direness of the music group was overcome by our tradition of using ordinary hymns, songs and choruses, and then just changing the words to be all about food.

Our adaptation of the old Martin Joseph song, "When I peel an onion it makes me cry" has always been my favourite. Although "My Pizza I give unto you" was quite nice as well.  While the perennial "Give thanks with a grapefruit tart" is always spoiled for me by the conviction that the tune is really "Go West" of Village People and Pet Shop Boys fame, and Hnaef will insist on doing the actions.
"He's got a Caramel Swirl in his hands" was a nod to those people who think the 1960s are still modern. And we finished with  the rousing "Did you feel the Sherbert Fountains Tremble?"


And this is not really related to the Celebration, just a footnote. But the person who found their way to this site by entering the words "nigella forklift" into Google - what did you think you were looking for?

Praying with Pumpkins

Now that the universe is still here, we can look forward to tonight's Harvest Moon Pumpkin Ritual.

Symbol is very important to the Beaker Folk of Husborne Crawley.  In Symbol we can come close to touching the divine.  And the great thing about the use of Symbol is that it means we can avoid all that tedious reading and studying books that so many other religions such as Christianity, Islam and Dawkinism are into.  

Symbols have the benefit of being both powerful and ambiguous.  So if we spend half an hour looking at, for example, a sea-shell or a collection of rose-hips, or if we are feeling particularly post-modern and meditate on that burnt-out speed camera that Drogin brought back from the A5 last week, or if we are feeling particularly worshipful and use a nice big picture of Stephen Fry - then our meditations are our own.  We don't have to waste weeks in late-night, Diamond White-fuelled discussion-forum abuse with other like-minded obsessives, rowing about whether that last semi-colon in Isaiah was inspired by God, or whether we were designed by hyper-intelligent aliens.  No, instead we get what we need from our worship and then we head off to the pub, or the woods in the case of the Fertility Folk, or a spot of late-night moon-gazing if it's clear, and get on with our lives.

Among the powerful symbols of our faith, the Pumpkin is important.  Although the Pumpkin is generally regarded as an American import, we believe that they were grown in England in Beaker times, but were ritually smashed by the so-called "Celtic" invaders as the Bronze turned to the Iron age.  In celebration of which, most Celtic races seem to be ritually smashed most days of the week.  That there is no evidence of this Beaker Pumpkin culture does not prove anything.  Pumpkins are edible and rot easily.  Where would you look for this evidence?  Inside a beaker?  Precisely.

Pumpkins as a symbol of the sun are a central point to this time of year. As we watch the dying sun sink earlier and more to the south each day - fleeing to the warm regions - we light our tea-lights inside our hollowed-out pumpkins to encourage him to return.  Glowing warmly on our Worship Focus Table in the Moot House tonight, our pumpkins will remind us that, though the wind may blow over Husborne Crawley, the warm days will return, bringing times of hay-making, harvesting, fruit-picking and other things that we subsidise the farmers to do for us.

The nice and oh-so trendy white pumpkins, representing the moon, will be brought into the Moot House tonight, as we remember that it is the time of full moon.  Not just any moon, either, but Harvest Moon.  But at this time of month and year, when the moon rises as the sun sets, we will remove the orange pumpkins as the whites enter.  It's gonna be so moving, I can't wait.

New Harvest Moon

The New before the Harvest Moon is upon us.  Please can all Beaker Folk appear in appropriate ceremonial smocks at  6am tomorrow morning, ready to call on the Lunar Sprites to revive the lost moon.  Gibbon Moon folk are excused as they are already running around the Orchard gibbering, and will probably do so for the next two or three days.