The Harvest You Owe

I think we’re missing something in our practice of Lughnasadh. It’s mostly celebrated today as the festival of the first harvest, and it is that. But, what ancient sources we have to glean from suggest it was much more.

Also known as the Óenach Tailten, or the ‘Fair of Tailtiu’, it was a festival began by the Tuatha dé, Lugh, and named for his foster mother Tailtiu.  It was where contracts were concluded, disputes settled, truces declared, laws proclaimed, and marriages made, including the famous Teltown (Tailten) marriages, trial unions that could be dissolved at the next year's assembly. In short, Lughnasadh was the time when the community swore its vows. 

When I began exploring more deeply my cultural roots, that made perfect sense to me. The land has begun to give its gifts to the village, and it follows that it was also time for that community to promise their gifts in return. you obligated yourself to give back to natural world that sustains you.  There is a beautiful symmetry to simply widen that pattern and focus on promises of all kinds. 

But the third aspect of Lughnasadh initially confused me. To this day, the Festival at Teltown involves athletic games and a festival of arts. Athletes and creatives alike show off their prowess.  I puzzled over that for years. What does sports and a craft fair have to do with either the first harvest or making your vows to the land?   

I had yet to learn who Lugh was in the mythology.  Years of reading and practice later, I understand why Lughnasadh, can be better understood not only as the Assembly of Lugh, but the Fair of Tailtiu. This subtle shift braids together harvests, oaths, and feats of athletic and artistic skill into one celebration that our spotty historical record hints at. For our story today,

In my last essay I traced the boast as a form of ancient magical speech, that cosmological "I am" by which Amergin sang the Milesians into relationship with Ireland and shared tantalizing characteristics with its Indian and biblical cousins. 

I also left a gap open. Amergin's song was mostly credential. He proved his standing, the land consented, and the Milesians took Ireland from the Tuatha with the land’s consent through Eriu. Nowhere in the story do they swear the reciprocal oath, the binding promise of what they would do for the land in return. Relationships demand giving following taking. While Lughnasadh is the festival where that missing half of the relationship flowers, or at least begins to, it won’t reach full bloom until Samhain.

Because in this essay we won’t follow the cycle full to to Samhain, another example will show that a boast and an oath are two sides of the same coin, though not the same acts. 

A boast asserts what you are or what you have done, and the world as it stands can prove or disprove you. An oath binds what you will do with what you are, and nothing can prove it in the moment of speaking; you make it true by keeping it. The boast is the credential that earns you the right to be heard. The oath is the mortgage taken out against that credential, honor spent in advance so that it must be earned back.

The marriage of the two is exemplified in the epic poem, Beowulf. Before the climactic battle with the monster Grendel, Beowulf speaks to Hrothgar's assembly:

"Spoke he then some good boast words, Beowulf the Great, before he went to bed down: 

when compared to Grendel; as Grendel himself slays without sword, that thief of life, nevertheless I shall do all. He has not the advantage, that he shall slay me, though he hew away my shield, though he be vigorous in his evil deed: but we this night should forego the sword, if he seeks to dare a battle beyond weapons; and afterwards wise god shall decide which of us, oh holy Lord, is worthy of glory, as he deems proper.'" (Beowulf ll.675-687)

It's tempting to read this as Beowulf bragging about past deeds, but this is a simplification. He is simultaneously proving he can defeat Grendel and vowing to do so in a binding fashion in front of the entire community. It gives us the form of claiming what you are, what power you have, then a promise of great deeds in one speech that binds you to your heroics. To fail or not begin would be to live in eternal shame.

That is the structure on which Lughnasadh is built, and our task as we honor it.  At Lughnasadh, we make a downpayment on our debt to Lugh’s foster mother.

Tailtiu was the last Queen of the Fir Bolg, the race of people the Tuatha defeated in the First Battle of Moytura to take Ireland. Winter was coming, and Tailtiu did what all good rulers do, she ensured her people would live through hard times.  Single handedly she cleared the plains so that crops could be planted and stored, a task she would not survive.

Grief-stricken, Lugh instituted funeral games to honor her sacrifice. There is certainly that familiar element of the pagan god, John Barleycorn, sacrificing himself to feed the village, but we can go deeper than this.

So the gathering where humans swear their obligations to each other convenes, every August first on the grave of a being who spent herself making the land arable. The celebration is the payment of a vow, Lugh's vow to honor his foster mother. The harvest logic runs the same way: the planting in spring was the promise, the first fruits at Lughnasadh are the promise partially redeemed, the cut sheaf is the down payment on a debt to next year.

And the land was not the only one bringing first fruits. Those contests I mentioned, the feats of strength, the poets and artists sharing their work, were the people's half of the exchange. The land offers up the grain it has been growing since spring. The people offer up the fruits of their soul labors, the thing they have been growing in themselves for years, the craft or the skill or the art. Both are harvests. Both are given away rather than kept. A gift demands a gift.

And Lugh himself, enters into that mythology through an ‘I am’ boast as he comes to his people for the first time. 

It was a dark time for the Tuatha Dé. They had just deposed their half-Fomorian king, Breas, whose reign brought suffering and ruin to the people through forced labor, excessive taxes that lined the coffers of the wicked Fomorians, and overall massive tyranny. The children of Danu were a broken people. Nuada had recently retaken the throne, and the Tuatha Dé were still under the threat of the Fomorians, Breas having fled to raise an army to take back his throne by force.

As the Tuatha looked out from the castle at Tara they saw a bright light approaching as though the sun were rising from the west. When they squinted they could see it was a young man with a shining brow striding down the hillside straight toward the castle gates with a retinue of sidhe.

Approaching the gate door, Lugh knocked three times, and a guard answered from within. "No man can enter here but one who is the master of some craft. What can you do?"

Lugh answered. "I am a carpenter."

"We have a carpenter already, Luchtar son of Luachaid."

Lugh smiled. "I am an expert in smith craft."

"We have within our walls, Colum, a master of smith craft."

Undaunted, Lugh said with a flourish, "I am a wizard and physician."

"We have a great physician, Dian Cecht. And wizards we have by the score."

On and on this questioning went with Lugh naming more than 10 skills, and the guard answering they already had that skill represented by a resident.

Then Lugh called out: "Go ask your king if he has ONE man who is the master of all of these trades at once. If so, I will not enter."

The doorkeeper set off at once for an audience with the High King Nuada. His clicking footsteps added a dry beat to the sombre tone within the hall. When he reached the throne, he offered a hasty bow. "There is a wondrous man standing outside; he is the Ildanach, Master of all Arts, and he seeks admittance."

Nuada leaned forward. "Open then to him. I wish to meet this man."

And so Lugh, the Master of All Arts, gained admittance to Tara through an ‘I am’ boast claiming expertise in every skill. Stay at that door a moment, because the rule the guard states seems a strange one for a fortress under threat of war. He does not ask Lugh who his people are, or whether he comes in peace, or what he believes. He asks what he can do. No one enters Tara who doesn’t possess an art. Tara is the seat of the High King and the sacred center of Ireland, and the price of admission is having become good at something. In short, you must have cultivated something within yourself to give.

The  tale of the Coming of Lugh, does not end there, Lugh is tested by Nuada and other Tuatha dé. He bests their champion in strength, their King at stragegy games, and he was the only other Tuatha able to play the Dagdha’s magical harp. So impressed with Lugh, Nuada put him on the throne. 

For thirteen days Lugh replaced Nuada as High King, and in the time to follow the Tuatha mustered their power, their own unique arts to go to war with the Fomorians. It is the eve of that battle where Lugh and all the Tuatha swear their oaths to use their powers to defeat the tyrannical Fomorians.

Long before Amergin, Lugh gave us a powerful form of ‘I am’ boast.  One claiming our place in the world through what we have studied, practiced, and became. Sworn to use his arts to defend land and people. In short, the boast establishes who we are, but it is the vow which binds us to do right with it, or what we give back to the land and community.

Amergin’s boast of oneness with Ireland is a soaring love letter to the earth. And a true one. We actually are inseparable from the biome. I’d like to think, as the poet he was, he, himself, understood this was but half the bargain.  But in the remains of the story, the Milesians never said what they brought to the land, or what they would give back to it.

Amergin left the loop open, and his descendants never closed it. Which is to say we never closed it. Generation after generation of taking from a land we should call kin, with nothing sworn back. 

The story of Lugh's foster mother and the funeral games are a roadmap for how we might become a regenerative force in the biome rather than a wholly destructive one. Amergin gives us the framework of identifying ourselves as enmeshed in the natural world, while Arjuna and Job, as I explored last time, give us a glimpse of the vast, beautiful cosmic whole and the idea that the biome belongs to itself not to us.

But none of those boasts encompass the magic Lugh brings to this festival, which is death. Krishna shows Arjuna the deep time of the cosmos and whispers that he is already dead. Yes.  But he is also already alive again because the engine of the cosmos, the life-death-rebirth cycle, merely received his dharma, his art, and transformed him into the wind on the sea and the stag of seven fights. 

Nothing is already dead in that sense, but ever in a state of perpetual becoming. The caught salmon becomes the bear, which in its time becomes the cedar. Those deaths are simply a life bearing fruit to nourish more life. And we celebrate the life flowering from them at Lughnasadh.  We enter the first harvest in debt, and only our ‘arts’ can satisfy the loan.

This is why there are games, and a festival of the arts at the Fair of Tailtiu. We honor her sacrifice by using it to become something. If we are very wise, we take our Lughnasadh vow to become something the world desperately needs and then we gift our arts back to the land or use them to defend it as Lugh will ask us to do against the Fomorians at Samhain.

to take what they want and give nothing back. Theirs is a consumerist eye, and they stand in profound dissociation from the earth they live on. The Tuatha Dé are the Children of the Land, masters of arts, and because of that they know the shape of their own souls and can match their actions to the calling of the soul and to the Great Song, the biome. Takers on one side, and on the other a people who possess something and know what it is for. You will recognize which of the two our culture currently resembles.

There are times when I reread these stories when I feel a sense of sympathy for Breas, the half-Fomorian, half-Tuatha King. He was just 14 when the Tuatha placed him on the throne. A teenager with the powers of a mythic High King.  When I think of teens, I love their idealism and their sense of possibility.  There is a larger-than-life expansiveness about them, but also a fragility. Swagger without depth. Loud about what they are, tested at nothing. Reaching for what they want because they can.

You certainly don’t want them running the kingdom. It would be an unmitigated disaster. Poor Breas never had a chance. The psychologist Bill Plotkin has argued that in modern Western capitalist societies the vast majority of people don’t mature past early adolescence. 

Plotkin's model of the human life cycle holds that true adulthood is not conferred by age or crown but earned through initiation, a real death of the old self that only comes from discovering and offering one's soul-given ‘art’ to the community. Most people in our society, he argues, never undergo that initiation. Lacking elders who know the territory and rites that actually cost something, they get stalled in what he calls patterned adolescence, an identity built on borrowed power and untested self-image rather than a mastered art. Breas is that arrest given a throne. Our culture seems stuck there, and a people stuck there has nothing to give back, so it takes instead, and calls the taking growth.

Endless, extractive growth, the Fomorian gaze if there ever was one, benefits from our arrested development. Teens have endless wants.  Elders just aren’t the best consumers. The dominance of the capitalist uber-myth has severed us from our own indigenous stories of our place in the cosmos and our obligations to it. But the seeds are there.  Amergin and Lugh gave us the orientation and language to deepen our Lughnasadh practice.

Lugh may have arrived at Tara with a classic "I am" boast, but he soon maneuvers it into an oath to use all that he is to end the Fomorian oppression. Just as we must use our 'arts' to end the destruction of the biome.

We can use this time of harvest and binding oaths to come into greater relationship with the world.  Just as the land has kept its promise, bringing the seed to fruit, so must we return the favor and give back to the land that sustains us. Not just our thanks, but our arts, everything we are. We should swear our Lughnasadh oaths.

What does that look like in practice? Before anything else, the doorkeeper's question. What is your art? To say "I am" anything and mean it, you have to know yourself and know your level of mastery well enough to claim it. If you don’t yet, perhaps claim your relation to something in the natural world you love. Then commit yourself to listening to it, learning what it asks of you. Learn a skill for stewarding it.

Then the oath itself. The old assembly provided three things, and any modern oath needs the same three: a specific obligation, a witness, and a reckoning. Not a vague intention to honor the earth, but a named promise to the actual patch of biome that feeds you, the community that supports you, made with the art you actually have. 

Plant the hedgerow. Rebuild the soil in the back quarter acre. Create an art show that moves people to act. Volunteer. Learn. Do. Speak the promise out loud where someone, or something, can hear you, with the land itself standing as guarantor. Perhaps find an accountability partner to keep you on track through the turn of the wheel.

Next Lughnasadh, you return as the assembly did every year, and display your arts. Two questions will do it. Am I in good standing with my soul's purpose? Am I in good standing with the earth and my community? 

I must admit I have lapsed.  Covid did that to a lot of us by breaking so many patterns. In my past celebrations we swore our oaths at Lughnasadh in this way.

My Last Battle of Moytura book series is the fruit of those oaths, and, though they are fiction, I hope they kindle a fire in the heart to make our stand against our modern Fomorians. Because the stakes are no longer eternal shame in the mead hall. They are whether we can re-indigenize ourselves to heal the world for all our relations today and in the future, we’ll get fired up for that fight at Samhain.