New Milk Moon from Stirring the Cauldron

The Moon is new! We've entered the lunar cycle known as the Milk Moon, when fresh green grass is growing in the fields after the spring rains, the cows (or goats, or sheep) are eating their fill, and are producing plenty of rich milk. The milk at this time of year is full of vitamins as ruminant, milk-giving animals eat the very best diet of anytime out of the year: a cornucopia of young leaves from a wide array of grasses, herbs, and weeds that grow in native pastures. Wild plants take the energy of the sun and rain and turn it into pasture. Cows take the energy of those growing plants and turn it into food humans can eat. We can't eat the sun, we can't eat the grass, but the milk and the meat of ruminant animals have sustained human beings for millennia.

Milk is, obviously, the original comfort food. If we were lucky, we had the opportunity to suckle the milk of our mothers for the first moons of our lives. When we cried, we were taken to the breast and comforted, with sweet milk. Having just read all the books of Martín Prechtel about his life among the Tzutujil Maya in Guatemala, the stories of their rituals are fresh in my mind. The last book I read, Long Life, Honey in the Heart, is all about the initiations that went on to facilitate the various stages of life, particularly the initiation into adulthood, but also the rituals of birth in the village.

Martín lived, married, and had a child in the Tzutujil village where he was trained and worked as a shaman. He describes the ritual after his first son was born to his wife, Ya Lur:

At the midwife's bidding and Ya Lur's command, I placed the little bound up nestling into the arms of Ya Tzimai, Corn Silk Woman, my first client as a shaman. She had been unable to have a baby, but after our ceremonies she was nursing my own boy, who suckled milk from her breasts brought down by the birth of her own child two months before.

Then he was passed to the next woman, and the next and the next and the next. Every woman who was lactating, who wanted to bless the new mother, my wife, came to let the newborn suckle so that he would never feel like a stranger in any compound of the village. In the minds of the Tzutujil, having suckled from the breasts of women from every clan in the village, my son would now be related to the whole village in the deepest way possible. This was the beginning of initiation because the Tzutujil knew that the smell of one's mother was strong, and that the sweet animal smell of all the village mothers huddled together lived in your memory like the house in the village where you were born. Once more this made you feel even more intensely received and at home in your village and welcome to come through every doorway.

Adults sometimes had to stop quarrels among their peers by reminding them how they had suckled from the other's mother or grandmother. This milk-giving was a peacemaking thing. Women were proud to come sit and talk to the mother, breast-feed the new child, then get to work fixing up something in the compound. Every first-time mother knew she should visit each successful birthing mother, bringing with her a particular birthing soup. This would give good luck to the soup bringer when her own birth-giving day came around. Women went to get meat for the soup from the "cattle walker." Meat was rare and expensive, but it was an indispensable part of the delicious rich soup in which cabbage, stone-ground tomatoes, dried yellow corn and other plants were also ritually prepared.

At the bidding of their knowledgeable mothers, lines of red clay pots full of these soups were brought on the heads of excited expectant mothers. Besides, the Goddess demanded it...

The interweaving of ritual and practicality, of spirituality and culinary wisdom are fascinating to me. Meat-based soups are valued throughout the world for lactating mothers, the gelatinous broth being the richest source of accessible minerals and iron for a woman who has just expended so much energy (and iron) in the birthing process and will continue to do so through nursing her baby. No wonder the Goddess demanded it.

Just as fresh growing grasses are the ideal food for lactating ruminants (ie. cows on pasture), meat broth soups are the ideal food for lactating humans (new mothers in the village).

But what comes through most clearly in the above passage is the deep intimacy of mother's milk. Milk is one of those things the contemplation of which makes us feel vulnerable. On a spiritual level, it is symbolic of so much that we are uncomfortable with: our animal nature, our dependence on and love for women, our birth and thus our death and mortality. In the Asian system of Yin and Yang, milk is a very Yin food. Yin energy is the energy of the moon, of the earth, of the divine feminine, of darkness, of water, of receptivity, of emotion. Milk is like these things. But our culture is much more comfortable with what is Yang than what is Yin. Yang energy is the energy of the sun, of heaven, of the divine masculine, of light, of fire, of action, of reason.

I think this is part of why we have such a love-hate relationship with milk. Historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto writes, in his scholarly history of food Near a Thousand Tables, "I find the very idea of drinking unmodified milk disgusting." While he writes at length and with neutrality about cannibalism, not to mention appetites for all manner of creatures such as worms, snails, bugs and dogs, it is for 'unmodified milk' that he retains his disgust. He is not alone in this -- many with sophisticated palates turn up their noses at milk. Why are our feelings for this first food so laced with repugnance? Is it because milk belongs to the realm of that earthbound femininity that we seek to either control and dominate, or 'rise above' and escape from? Is it this desire for control over the sacred feminine that causes us to over-breed our cows, treating them not as creatures but as units of production? We take them off the grass when the one greatest gift they offer us is turning that inedible grass into eminently edible fat and protein. We milk them in factories where we no longer have to hold and touch the teats. Then we boil the milk and homogenize it to make it less distinctively itself, to kill its life-giving and digestive enzymes. We bottle it in plastic and ship it across the country, we label it a 'commodity' so that we can control its price, ensuring that it will be cheap and expendable. We make certain that it is as little like the precious mother's milk that it once was. We make sure that its profound relationship to an animal, to the earth, to open space, to the season and the rain and the growing of wild, natural grass is severed and/or controlled.

We do this with all that is Yin. We see the moon and then we must get into a rocket and go there and walk on it so we can say: "Ha! Moon, I've got you! I've put my flag on you -- you're not so special." We look at milk and we say "Ha! Milk, I've got you! I've boiled you and bottled you and stuck a low price on you -- you're not so special." We look at women and we say "Ha! Women, I've got you! I've devalued your gifts and skills and stuck a low wage on you -- you're not so special." We look at water and we say: "Ha! Water, I've got you! I've dammed you and pushed you through pipes to where I want you to go and treated you with chemicals -- you're not so special."

But these things are special. They are, in fact, sacred -- they each hold part of what is divine and mysterious in life. The moon pulls the tides, makes them rise and fall as she waxes and wanes and pulls on the cycles of women, who bleed and ovulate and then get pregnant and give birth and then lactate and give milk. All these things are connected through the mystery of nature.

Once upon a time, I too had a low opinion of milk. I went back to reread the book that most convinced me that I should give up milk, to try to find the argument that so influenced me. The book was Food and Healing by Annemarie Colbin. There were lots of scientific analyses of the problems of milk -- most of which had to do with the modern mode of production. But there was also a spiritual argument, and those are the ones that really get me in the end. Colbin writes: "I find that on the spiritual level, milk reunites us with the Mother energy, and supports all the feelings associated with childhood: emotions close to the surface, easy laughter, easy tears, contentedness, dependency. It keeps us in innocent bliss and lacking in conscious awareness. In effect, as long as we consume milk or milk products regularly, we have not been fully weaned -- thus, regardless of chronological age, we remain unable to attain our full potential as adults..."

I read this so differently now than I did ten years ago when I swore off milk in the effort to become a full adult. Now I read it and think: is it so bad to be reunited with Mother energy? Is it so bad to have emotions close to the surface, easy laughter, easy tears, contentedness, even dependency? Are we ever 'fully weaned' from our mother the earth? Interestingly, when Martín Prechtel describes the ornate ritual that turns boys into men in Tzutujil culture he describes a process that takes many moons, and serves to wean the boy from his earthly mother, and to 'marry' him to the Earth Mother. As the young men go through the ritual, they do indeed bring their emotions close to the surface: "They wept and wept for life, for the grief of being a person destined to die, a person whose friends and relatives died, a person who suffered in so many ways. They wept for any of the many griefs that men and women knew and began to speak it all out loud in a way that began to sound holy."

The initiation ritual took boys through a series of tasks that involve rescuing the Goddess of the Flowering Earth from the Underworld, from Death, and thus making the Earth live again. Initiation was considered a process of 'cooking.' Uninitiated people are considered 'uncooked,' and once they pass their initiation they have been 'cooked' into adults. After being 'cooked' by the rituals, a boy became an "Acha," an initiated man. Prechtel described how important it was to go through this before marrying:

Only an initiated man or Acha could marry a woman and not be miserable and disappointed. An uninitiated man was one who didn't know that his first love was a divine being, a being that lived and kissed him in nature, as a village, in the landscape of the world. If he tried to find her first in a human woman, he would become angry or depressed because she could not be that Goddess. It was the same for the girls, since the husband of an uninitiated woman would have to be a God or he would be trivialized and discarded as a failure, or, worse yet, start believing that he was one!

Uninitiated men beat women for not being Goddesses. They left women behind who turned out to have thoughts and opinions of their own, or they allowed themselves to be ground to dust, year by year, by women whom they wanted and hoped would miraculously turn into a Goddess later on. Women had the same experiences with their husbands, men who disappointed them when they refused to be the Gods the women longed to be loved by....

The madness of youth was enormously useful and was honored as the necessary magical consciousness needed by the culture to save its existence from disintegrating into a flat nothing. It kept the world flowering, but it needed the spiritual intelligence left by the ancestors and directed by the elders. The by-product, of course, was that each man got his own heart back. When his hollowness had been filled with the small Goddess of his own heart, then when he married a woman, she could see that he could see her seeing him seeing her, and both looking at the little piece of God and Goddess that resided in the other's "Heart Throne" and they were free to love each other properly, as themselves. Having understood and risked one's life for the delicate survival of the divine, one would not readily or willingly destroy it, especially in the heart of the human being who can really love you.

I fear we are lacking in such spiritual intelligence. We have the madness of youth, but without that sacred wisdom that can guide it we remain disappointed and miserable. We lash out at all we don't understand, instead of embracing, saving and defending the mystery. True heroism is not about killing and destroying, nor is it about 'rising above' or maturing beyond the messiness of existence. It is about having the courage to love and rescue and defend all that is sacred in this earthly life. To weep and laugh and dance and worship and believe, and to know that there is no such thing as weaning from the Great Mother. We are dependent, but if we find a few moments of contentedness in that dependence, it is nothing to run from, but rather something to soak up with every cell of our being. We can drink that milk of comfort.

I've been listening to a song from an album that came out about 10 years ago, by the Scottish group Mouth Music. The song is called "Milking the Cow," and the lyrics are based on a Xhosa chant, "ah senginkomo." The Xhosa are a people of South Africa who hold their cows as sacred, and for whom the cattle pen, or Kraal, is the center of village politics and life. The cattle are killed for meat on rare ceremonial occasions, but their milk is a staple in the diet, drunk raw and slightly soured. Nelson Mandela, that great peacemaker, is Xhosa. I don't know how true these words are to the original chant, but I've always loved this song:

To milk the cow is to praise the hand of God that moves before us
To feed the cow is to worship the spirit that breathes within us
To kill the cow is to accept the darkness deep within us
To spurn the cow is to spurn the gift of God that gives us life
Milk the cow and feel the rhythm that beats inside us
Touch the cow and feel the spirit that breathes within us
Kill the cow and feel the sorrow that lies before us
In blood we are born... blood of the cow redeems us

There is a way to live that is in love with life, that is truly heroic. Everyday we have the opportunity to live out this love, to drink in the milk of the earth and her cows, to eat of her flesh. Prechtel again:

Anciently, the Tzutujil had discovered that if humans were forced to steal within the ritual context of initiation, then, after they completed their initiations, men wouldn't be inclined to steal. They would understand that all thieveries are against the Great Mother and that all survival is a direct thieving from she who births and bears all fruit, corn, meat, fiber, and warmth from wood. These were all her children that we humans cut, kill, harvest, butcher, and consume, some of us with no consciousness of where any of it really comes from.

All ritual has to do with this understanding and with making things good again with the Old Woman. The reality of this ran through all Mayan thinking. It didn't cause any shame but only awareness of the shame in it.

Stirring the Cauldron

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