Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Mead Moon

July moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The moon is new! And I will be talking about my moon writings on the radio this weekend on a weekly program called The Food Chain hosted by Michael Olson. You can listen online (or on the radio if you get one of the stations). Find out how by clicking here. I would love to have you listening!

We have just entered the lunation known as The Mead Moon in 16th Century England. Mead was the Norse and Old English version of a drink fermented from honey, and though many modern Americans have heard of it, few have tasted it.

In researching mead for my book I learned that there have been many different cultural traditions of brewing honey-wine in diverse areas of the world. And all of these traditions are in danger of going the way of mead -- becoming a nostalgic but unfamiliar talisman of a bygone age. Honey-wine, in its various different geographical incarnations, tends to be a drink rich in ritual, mythical, and cultural resonances that rarely survives the transition into modern society. It doesn't seem to fit well in a society that has centralized governance and a commodity-based economy.

The traditional honey-wine of the Maya is called balche. Tamra Andrews, in her book Nectar and Ambrosia, writes:

Nevertheless, balche rituals are no longer widespread. One culture that has kept alive balche brewing and its religious significance is the Lacandon of Chiapas -- a people whose culture is threatened by every aspect of modern life. Once, when I was fifteen years old and was traveling in Chiapas with my family, we met a Lacandon man on the road near the ancient site of Palenque. He had come to town to sell some of his bows and arrows, and North American tourists such as us were good prospective customers. During the conversation between my stepfather and the man, my younger brother and I observed the man with awe. We had never in our lives encountered a person who seemed to step out of another era. With his bows and arrows, long un-brushed hair, and body clad only in a simple home-spun garment, he represented a way of life that we could not begin to imagine.

On that same trip, I had the opportunity to see many of the photographs of Trudi Blom, a European woman with socialist ideals who had left the continent during World War II and made a life with her husband in Chiapas. Over fifty years of life near the jungle there, she had become intimately acquainted with the Lacandon and had taken countless pictures of their struggle to preserve their way of life. You can see one of them by clicking here. And see more of them and learn more about Trudi and her life's work here.

Tamra Andrews describes a bit more about the Lacandon's balche rituals:

Europeans too had their gods of inebriation, and the most famous of these today is the Greek god Dionysus -- or the Roman Bacchus -- who was originally associated with mead and then later with wine. Dionysian rituals were once a part of Mediterranean spiritual life just as Bohrian rituals were a part of Mayan spiritual life. What is apparently exotic may be more universal than we think.

As balche was made not just from honey but also from the balche tree, which was considered sacred, the mead of the ancient picts was often brewed with the addition of heather, a plant that was also held to have great spiritual power. A kind of moss grows on the plants of heather that would have been included in heather meads because of two properties: it acted as a yeast that encouraged fermentation, and it had inebriating properties of its own. The honey used in these heather meads would have been heather honey, which is much higher in protein than other honeys. Stephen Harrod Buhner, in his fabulous book Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers, describes a tradition that is nearly lost to history:

Evidently, the 'secret' of brewing this ancient heather mead was fiercely protected by the Picts, and when they were defeated and assimilated by the Scots in the 9th Century they refused to give up the secret of their sacred traditional beverage. Robert Louis Stevenson has a wonderful poem that retells the legend of how the drink was protected from cooptation by a father who sacrificed his son. Here are a few of the stanzas:

You can read the whole poem here. It's worth it.

Mead and balche were more than just beverages to those who brewed them. They were traditions that reflected a people's sacred and ancestral relationship to the earth and to the landscape where they lived.

In the modern era, another traditional honey-wine is being lost: uki in East Africa. Scholar Robert Leonard has written about uki's fate in the modern context:

Like balche and heather mead, uki is made with honey, water, and the addition of a plant that is rich in natural yeasts. In the case of uki, it is a tree-pod called miatine. Leonard points out that like balche and mead, uki was part of the community's spiritual practice: "Uki honey-wine was the backbone of the ngoma celebrations I participated in when I lived in the Mua Hills of Kenya. When all the food and drink was ready, a few of the elders and I would receive full mugs of uki. The senior elder would toast the assembled company, and announce that he was about to pour some uki to secure blessings."

Already by the time Leonard was living in Kenya in the 1970s, uki was no longer made with honey but with sugar. Uki was eventually banned by the Kenyan government because it was too difficult to tax. The effect of the ban was that people began drinking expensive imported beers that could be heavily taxed. I am sure that the decline in indigenous brewing of uki inevitably led to the weakening of traditional ngoma celebrations. As Leonard puts it, "beer, as opposed to uki, meant urbanity and worldliness. Uki meant tradition and community."

I, for one, decry the loss of tradition and community, and hunger for both. I find I am a bit weary of urbanity and worldliness, and of technological changes that come so fast I can barely keep up with them. I find I don't want to have to keep up with knowing the name of the latest popular HBO series, or installing the latest operating system on my computer. I'd much rather hold in my hands the yeasty pods of the miatine tree and learn how much honey to add to the brew to get the flavor just right. And yet, if it weren't for the internet I would never have found Robert Leonard's paper on uki, and would never have known that such a tradition even existed. I wouldn't be able -- at the stroke of a few keys -- to find a few of Trudi Blom's beautiful photographs and be transported to the forest of the Lacandon.

The notion of progress strikes me as a dubious one, while change is an eternal truth that I can understand and accept. Would I even want to find pictures of the Lacandon rainforest on the internet if I had my own sense of being rooted in a place on Earth -- especially a place of extraordinary natural beauty and richness? Would I run searches for the traditions of East African honey-wine if I came from a culture that had its own mead, and its own rituals of gratitude, celebration, and worship?

This week we have celebrated American independence -- a historical development inseparable from the principle of religious freedom. But can't we find a way to have religious freedom without becoming hopelessly materialistic, soullessly secular? It seems to me more and more that modern society still needs something to worship, and so it worships money and worldly power.

To me, money and worldly power are the true false idols -- not Bohr or Bacchus. Bohr and Bacchus were ways that two ancient cultures expressed their yearning to be close to the divine, to experience transcendence beyond the material plane, and to feel united with Spirit. This yearning is ignored at our peril -- it is a universal part of the human experience, whether we wear homespun sack-cloth or jeans from the Gap, whether we kill with bows and arrows or in distant slaughterhouses, whether we travel in airplanes or dugout canoes. Amidst all the so-called progress, our hunger for connection is a constant -- no matter what time or place we find ourselves in.

On the Mead Moon, may your soul be nourished as well as your body, and may you be struck by the fact that honey -- like every natural thing on Earth -- is a miracle. May we experience wonder, awe, and praise for whatever force it is that gives us such a sweet gift.