Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Corn Moon

August moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The moon is new! We are moving into the lunar cycle known as the Corn Moon in the old Celtic calendar as well as in many Native American calendars. I will be offering a celebration of corn and other culinary gifts of the Americas at the next Full Moon Feast. The first feast was packed to the gills and lots of fun! I would like to keep doing them, but need a little more help with clean-up to make it energetically sustainable. I've also slightly raised the recommended contribution (to $30) to make it more financially sustainable. Also, the Alewife class was so popular that I have scheduled a repeat of the class for September 11. I thought there would be no better way to observe this day of grief than to work with herbs, healing plants, and fermentation! If you are interested, please register (call 510-524-6946 or email me) as soon as you are able, since these classes are small and are filling up quickly.

For menu and details about the Full Corn Moon Feast and the Alewife class, check out the Wise Food Ways schedule.

Or to rsvp for the Feast, go to the evite.

Now, back to the Corn Moon... What Native American peoples meant by Corn Moon and what the Celts meant by Corn Moon were two different things. Native American calendars of course didn't use the English word 'corn', but they were referring to that plant that Americans of all colors have come to call 'corn,' the plant Zea mays. In some Native American calendars, the 'Corn Moon' was the 'extra' moon name that was added to the calendar once every four years to synchronize the lunar cycles with the solar cycle. It would have been added at this time of year, when the corn was ripening. Other cultures indigenous to this continent held corn so important to the community that many of the moon names reflected what was happening with the corn: "The Planting Corn Moon", "Green Corn Moon," "The Moon when Women Weed Corn," or the "Moon when the Corn is in Silk." The Celts used the term 'corn' in the old English sense, as 'grain.' The grain of the Celts would have been oats, barley, or wheat. This is also the time of year that these grains would ripen.

So while the Corn Moon of the Celts and the Corn Moon of indigenous peoples were two different things, they were actually all the same thing: The Corn Moon meant survival and sustenance. It meant that the sacred, staple grain, the agricultural foundation of the community, was ripening in the fields, readying for harvest. It meant that there would be food to last through the winter, that an important source of calories and carbohydrates could be relied on. It meant that a year's worth of planting and tending had been successful, and that the people would be prepared for the coming winter.

An interesting and powerful Mayan sacred story describes the holy origins of corn. The story is beautifully retold by Martín Prechtel (visit his site: floweringmountain.com) in his book, The Toe Bone and the Tooth. It takes up a whole long chapter, and I can hardly hope to do it justice, but in a nutshell it goes like this:

There was an orphan boy who lived in a village. No one loved Raggedy Boy or cared for him, until an old blind woman took him in and fed him. Soon he grew old enough to scavenge for himself in the compost piles of the village, bringing home scraps of food that they would share. Eventually, he reached the age when he began to envy the young men going off to hunt, because they brought home the meat that made them attractive to girls, and he was very lonely. He asked the men to take him hunting with them, but they refused, claiming that he would slow them down. He decided to take matters into his own hands and made himself a bow and arrow and set off to hunt. Unfortunately, the bow was so crooked, and the arrow only had one feather, so that when he would shoot, the arrow would turn around and fly back towards him. He set off into the woods anyway, confident in his ability to be able to bring home a deer or other prey.

But as much as he would shoot the arrow at the animals he found (none of them deer), he was unable to kill anything, and eventually found himself lost and alone in the woods. He began to play the bow like a musical instrument and to sing a long plaintive song about his troubles. Entranced by his singing, a beautiful deer approached him in the clearing and stared at him in wonder. He stared back, and they both stood there, unmoving, looking into each other's eyes, for an hour. Then the deer bounded off into the woods and he followed. When he finally caught up to the deer, it turned into a beautiful girl with a beautiful dress of shimmering blue. He instantly fell in love, and she with him.

She proposed to marry him, and to take him home to live with her family. He readily agreed. The girl, it turned out, was a Goddess, and her mother was Grandmother Growth and her father was the God of the Mountain. When the two lovers returned to her home, her parents were not impressed with their daughter's choice. Prechtel describes their conversation:

To make a long story short, Singing Boy and Water-Skirted Beauty do marry, but the unrelenting and violent anger of the parents makes continued life there impossible, and eventually they flee back to Singing Boy's village. En route, the Beauty and her mother do battle many times, and eventually, after many trials and tribulations, pregnant and exhausted, Water-Skirted Beauty takes a break. She gives birth to two twins who turn out to be two plants of corn, one ivory-colored and one amber-colored. She is too exhausted to continue the journey, but sends her husband and the two children on to the village, making him promise to come back for her and not to forget her. Distraught, Singing Boy returns to his village with the gift of the first corn. Prechtel goes on to describe what happened:

The story goes on, but I will stop there. Suffice it to say that when he does remember his beloved and goes back to find her, he is much too late. And I want to dwell on the above final passage, because I think it is so beautiful and poignant. It speaks to the very reason I write these articles, why I am drawn back to the moon and to the moon name month after month, and write e-letter after e-letter. It is because we, as human beings, have a tendency to forget. We have a tendency to get wrapped up in 'human concerns,' the day-to-day pressures of life, and forget from whence we came, and all that we depend upon every day for that very life and survival. I write in order to try to remember. But I find it very powerful to keep in mind that our amnesia is part of our human condition. Our religions, our rituals, our sacred stories, help us to remember in the midst of that amnesia. They don't cure us of it, however. Our forgetfulness is part of who we are.

It is our tendency to think we 'own the place.' All too often, we do end up tearing up the hills, enslaving the soil and the animals, consuming, burning, killing, and forgetting that which feeds us and gives us life through its very flesh and existence. Certain cultures, at certain times, do a better job than others of remembering, of honoring, of giving thanks, of worshipping. But it is always imperfect.

I find that when I look at the current state of corn (Zea mays) in America today, I am struck by how we humans, once again, in our human way, think we own the place and forget the sacred nature of this gift. In the past 60 years or so, we have made many decisions regarding corn that I think are very unwise. The financial subsidies our government gives to large corn-growing corporations is as good a place as any to start. Using our tax dollars, our government heavily subsidizes the growing of corn in the midwest, the 'Corn Belt.' We pay large-scale farms to grow more corn than we can eat, thereby creating a cheap, abundant supply of it. From this excess of corn came the practice of feeding cattle grain instead of grass. Under more natural circumstances, grass would be a more economical and practical diet for cattle, but where there is corn available to ranchers for less than the cost of growing it, a grass-based diet becomes a luxury.

In order to feed cows corn instead of grass, it is more practical to put them in a building rather than out on pasture. Now you not only have cows on an unnatural diet, you have them in an unnatural environment. Their manure, instead of naturally recycling back into the pasture where they are, becomes concentrated within this unnatural environment and becomes a breeding ground for disease. Now you have cows eating a diet they can't digest, living in crowded conditions, and unable to escape the presence of their own feces -- it is no wonder that the cows become ill. In order to prevent them from getting too sick too fast, you have to feed them antibiotics. These drugs are transmitted to the humans who eat their meat or milk, and eventually these people build up resistance to antibiotics. One of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the century is rendered useless through misuse and overuse.

But even after feeding copious amounts of excess corn to cows, you still have too much. So you sign a 'free trade' agreement with a country like Mexico, which has (since long before it even became Mexico) grown its own corn. Because U.S. corn is subsidized by our government, it is cheaper for Mexico to import it from us than it is to grow its own. Mexico now imports around 70% of its corn from the U.S. when it is more than capable of growing all that it needs itself. Meanwhile, Mexican citizens don't have enough work and so risk life and limb to cross the border to the U.S. and work in fields often sprayed with one of many pesticides widely used in agriculture -- pesticides that have been marketed to farmers as a way to get higher yields. And yet there is a huge glut of corn, as well as of other grains -- why should we want higher yields? People who work around pesticides have a high rate of birth defects and other problems, and pesticides travel through our food chain and have troubling consequences everywhere they go.

So here's our solution: we genetically engineer corn by splicing into its DNA the gene of a bacterium that will make it produce its own insecticide to kill bugs. Now, does this sound like a good idea to you? Breed a corn that produces its own poison?? One of the 'disadvantages' that even industry acknowledges about the Bt corn is that because the corn produces the insecticide for a longer period than a farmer would spray, the insects may become resistant to the insecticide, in which case even spraying will no longer be effective. Nothing could, in my opinion, be more unwise. And all of this for what? To make corn even cheaper and more abundant, less revered and more abused than it already is?? And what about the cows now unwittingly eating genetically poisonous corn?

Meanwhile, back in Mexico, a ban was passed on genetically modified corn in 1998. But between 30% and 50% of the corn imported from the US has been modified, and recent studies show that despite the ban, almost 10% of the corn grown in Mexico shows evidence of GMO gene transfer. Zea mays was bred in what is now Mexico between 6000 and 8000 years ago, and over 59 heirloom species of maize are indigenous to Mexico. But it is now cheaper and easier for Mexican women to buy factory processed "maseca" (dried corn meal) to make their tortillas rather than nixtamalizing -- soaking corn in lime to greatly improve its nutritional profile -- local heirloom corns. The tortillas don't taste as good, aren't as good for you, and an ancient culinary tradition is all but wiped out in a single generation. But that's progress.

No wonder the God of the Mountain and the Grandmother of all Growth weep at their daughter's choice of husband, despite her protestations that this one is different. Water-Skirted Beauty ends up dying for her love of the human. Sometimes one has to wonder if there is any hope for us, when we can be so very foolish. Let's go back to the Mayan story and see if it offers any possibility of redemption.

After the Singing Hunter realizes he has lost his beloved, he seeks to find out how he can bring her back again. It does seem that there may be some hope, but a great deal is required of him. Prechtel describes part of his herculean task:

It seems to me that we are called to do exactly what Raggedy Boy does here: learn neither to force what we want from the earth, nor to accept only what is presented to us by lazy fate, but to find a middle path of wise use, of deep stewardship. We are also called to raise the value of our prayers, orations, and petitions by learning the language of every thing, to step outside of ourselves and immerse ourselves in the miracle of creation. We are called to use our opposable thumbs, to create and to make things with our hands on a daily basis -- not just talk on phones or clatter away on a computer keyboard. There is a way of wisdom, of humility, of song, of beauty, of work and of worship that human beings can follow, if we can only begin to remember why it is so important to do so.

It would be lovely to offer a prayer of remembering and thanksgiving with you at the Full Corn Moon Feast.