Tag: I’m a Luddite

Farmlands and Paganism

On By Jennifer Mugrage1 Comment

Besides growing up around farms and reading a lot of literature set there, I’ve always kind of craved traditions, folk costumes, and folk practices. It’s not because I like being circumscribed in everything I do–I’m kind of a free spirit actually–but because I sensed these traditions and customs and bits of folk wisdom represented a thick culture, rooted in the distant past, that I as an American lacked. Traditional ways, whatever they were and wherever I read about them, seemed at the same time intriguingly exotic, and almost familiar.

In eastern Pennsylvania, where I spent my earliest years, many of the farmers were Pennsylvania Dutch–i.e., German immigrants. They had their own language, a dialect of German that my dad was able to pick up due to having majored in German. They had their own foods, like shoefly pie and scrapple. And they had a little, tiny bit of superstition: hex signs painted on barns. As a kid, I knew that these pretty little designs were called hex signs, but I had no idea of the connection between the word hex and spells or witches.

The Pennsylvania Dutch were nominally Christian, though I understand from my dad that they, like the Amish, often had a shallow and moralistic understanding of the Bible, and in fact sometimes didn’t have a Bible in a language they could read.

Despite their attractions, the Germans were to me among the least interesting of pagan farmers. I was more interested in British, Scots, and Irish folklore. It seemed warmer and more colorful somehow, and we had plenty of that around too, being in the Appalachians. It was also readily available in literature.

The connections between farming, weather-watching, astronomy, and European pagan religion are ancient and obvious. Here is Will Durant on Roman practices:

When [the Roman peasant] left the house he found himself again and everywhere in the presence of the gods. The earth itself was a deity: sometimes Tellus, or Terra Mater–Mother Earth; sometimes Mars as the very soil he trod, and its divine fertility; sometimes Bona Dea, the Good Goddess who gave rich wombs to women and fields. On the farm there was a helping god for every task or spot: Pomona for orchards, Faunus for cattle, Pales for pasturage, Sterculus for manure heaps, Saturn for sowing, Ceres for crops, Fornax for baking corn in the oven, Vulcan for making fire. Over the boundaries presided the great god Terminus, imaged and worshiped in the stones or trees that marked the limits of the farm. … Every December the Lares of the soil were worshiped in the joyful Feast of the Crossroads, or Compitalia; every January rich gifts sought the favor of Tellus for all planted things; every May the priests of the Arval (or Plowing) Brotherhood led a chanting procession along the boundaries of adjoining farms, garlanded the stones with flowers, sprinkled them with the blood of sacrificial victims, and prayed to Mars (the earth) to bear generous fruit.

Caesar and Christ, p. 59

Farming is so labor-intensive, so high-stakes, so heartbreaking, so subject to factors beyond human control, that it tends to produce nervous and conservative people. It would be impossible to engage in it for generations without coming to a profound humility before whatever entity you have been led to believe determines whether your whole year of work will be wiped out within a few days. For Christian farmers, that entity is the One who owns the cattle on a thousand hills. For post-Christian farmers, such as Wendell Berry, it’s the earth itself, I suppose, the environment. For pagans, it’s not hard to understand why they might be reluctant to let go of all the little rituals that stand between them and disaster.

Thus, paganism hangs on longer among country folk than in the city. If you want your eyeballs to be assaulted with an astonishing variety of pagan superstitions still proudly held by modern Americans, go get yourself a Farmer’s Almanac and look in the classifieds section.

“But modern Americans are returning to paganism!” you say. “It’s part of the New Age. It’s trendy, not traditional.”

Don’t I know it. I have met a few neopagans in my day. The one I knew best, was raised in a nominally Roman Catholic home. She was innovating with her paganism, part of the modern self-worshipping, I’ll-make-it-up-as-I-go ethos. The neopagans in the back pages of The Farmer’s Almanac don’t give me that vibe. I could be wrong, but it seems like they never left.

Where is the line between weather-watching, paying attention to the phases of the moon when you plant, following the zodiac along with the yearly calendar, hiring a water-witch, hanging a horseshoe over your door to protect your entryway with iron, and full-on pagan worship? How much of it is science, and how much is just doing things the way your mother did them? And how many “mindlessly followed” folk traditions turn out to have a sound scientific basis?

I’m guessing that Christian farmers in the modern age may have given up some valuable folk knowledge in an effort to avoid idolatry. Idolatry is a deadly poison, though, so no doubt, the sacrifice is worth it. If your eye cause you to sin, pluck it out. I hope that, as the generations roll by, we can build a culture that’s even richer than the pagan one we left behind.

I Like Farmlands

On By Jennifer Mugrage6 Comments

This is a view of my neighbor’s house on a smokey afternoon late last summer. It’s also part of the internal landscape of my mind.

Farmlands are one of my favorite biomes. (Yes, they are a biome. I will die on this hill. They are a part of Naure. They are what nature looks like when people live in it.)

Farms and I go way back. I didn’t grow up on one, but I grew up around farms and farmers.

My early years were spent in eastern Pennsylvania, which is a country of rolling green hills and low mountains. My dad was the pastor of a small country church, and most of its members were dairy farmers. Whenever we visited anybody, which was often, we would first be taken into the cow barn. These were black-and-white milk cows. As soon as you stepped into the barn, your senses would be filled with cow sensations: the chorus of moos, the smell. To this day, when I smell a cattle lot, it doesn’t smell bad to me, just like a clean farm smell.

And even cleaner farm smell was the “milk room,” a little brick building with a large stainless-steel tank of milk in the center, and a drain in the middle of the wet floor. It smelled like coolness, milk, and water.

These are memories from when I was very small. That same family that I have in mind, although they had indoor plumbing, also still had a working outhouse in their back yard. There were bees, and the smell wasn’t so nice, but it was raised up on several steps, not just thrown together but definitely constructed. My brother and I would torment this family’s chickens by pulling backwards on their tails so that they flapped. (Not recommended.) We would sit in corrugated buckets filled with water to cool down in the summer, and drink from the garden hose. This family had Dobermans, and I can remember a black bear hanging up in their barn after the father shot it while hunting. Later, it was stuffed in a scary pose and placed in their study.

The dairy farmers in our church also had fields of crops. Our own house had a yard of about an acre and a half. At the back of this yard was a line of poplar trees, and right beyond them, fields rolling away towards the creek. Beyond that, you could see a mountain. They must have rotated the crops in these fields, but I know that at least one year, they were soybeans. We were allowed to pick the pods, open them, and eat the tiny, hard beans out from inside. There was a lot of milkweed, which was fun to pull open and let the tufty parachutes out when it was ripe. There was a lot of ragweed, which my brother turned out to be allergic to, and one year a plague of tent caterpillars turned the mountainside brown.

My dad had a somewhat free schedule, and he would take my brother and me (and later, our sister) on walks in the countryside. These were probably short walks, given that we were little kids, but I remember them lasting hours. We could walk along the borders of the fields and find new fields, or the creek. This habit set “walking between farm fields” permanently in my mind as a normal thing to do. If it was nighttime during this walk, my dad would sing “Walking at Night,” which, in retrospect, is probably a German hiking song.

When I was eight, we moved to western Michigan. Worse, we moved to a city. I complained hard about this. It was the first remotely tragic thing that had ever happened to me, and I was determined to milk it. By this time, my crush on American Indians was well-developed, and I was keenly aware that it was tragic to be driven off your land.

However, despite that we technically lived in a city, our tiny church there was still about half farmers. There were still many opportunities, on prayer meeting and picnic and potluck nights, to run on vast grassy lawns while the adults sat and talked, to climb trees, walk between fields, and hide in the hay lofts and corn cribs.

The countryside in Michigan was flatter and dryer than it had been in Pennsylvania. Furthermore, my small denomination (the “Michiana Mennonites”) straddled the border between Michigan and its neighbor to the south, Indiana, which is really flat. The summer camp we went to served kids from both states, and we often found ourselves crossing the border for pulpit exchanges and things like that. I have attended church in what was literally a tiny, plain white chapel perched at the edge of a sea of fields with no other building nearby. I have tramped over Indiana farms, again with my brother and usually another farm boy, while the adults sat in the house and talked. And these Indiana farms are truly the farmland biome, because there is nothing there but farms, not even a hill to break up the monotony.

The farmland biome combines the best features of wilderness and human habitation. You can walk for as long as you like in solitude. There is wind, there is the changing sky, there are wildflowers, and flora and fauna on the windrows. You can get lost if you want, and if it’s winter, you can get cold and miserable too. But as the sun goes down, you can see in the distance the lights of houses. Coming back from the walk to the warmly glowing farmhouse provides all the romance that a kid with a big imagination and a copy of The Lord of the Rings could desire.

Farms have always been with us, and, though technology has changed somewhat, the logistics of having fields surrounding clusters of buildings mean that farmlands in every place and time look essentially the same. You have the wide horizon, the walls, canals or windrows carving the space up and giving some sense of distance, and the lights low to the ground. Perhaps one reason I like fantasy, as a genre, is that it naturally includes farms surrounding the town and castle.

Some of my favorite fantasy series start with, and often return to, the humble but honest farming community. O.K., actually I can only think of two, but they are good ones. The Belgariad starts off with Garion growing up on Faldor’s farm in Sendaria. Actually, it starts in one of my favorite parts of the farm, the kitchen. And, of course, The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo is not really a farmer, he’s more of a country squire, but the Shire is definitely a farming countryside. The four hobbits’ journey starts out hiking through the fields, as every journey should. Their first encounter with one of the Nine takes place on an otherwise ordinary country road. Farmer Maggot, a wholesome character, takes the four friends in, feeds them, and gets them safely to the river crossing in his wagon. And, when the journey is over, the four hobbits must come back and rescue from collectivization the ordinary, boring farms that they sacrificed to save. What would we do without ordinary, boring farms, after all? We’d starve, that’s what. And we would go insane, because the farming life, though hard, represents a very basic pattern for the way people were designed to live.

I like ’em.

Lard is the Best for Pie Crust

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

See how it puffs up a little? More so than with vegetable shortening.

In making this–though I say it myself–dazzling lattice raspberry pie, I am standing on the shoulders (metaphorically) of a long line of matriarchs. Here are three.

My mother-in-law (and actually my father-in-law too) always made pies with lard instead of with shortening. I can remember going to the grocery store and having to hunt around for lard for them to make their pies, because for many years it was not popular. Now, people are starting to realize that emulsified seed oils may actually be as bad or worse for us than animal fat, and so people like me are starting to use lard for the first time in our lives. It gives the pie crust dough a bit more of a taste than shortening, which is a tiny bit off-putting to someone who is used to shortening pies … but in the finished product, the taste is more buttery.

While I tell you about the matriarchs, here are the steps for making a lattice pie, learned long ago from the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook.

First, cut the lard into the flour and then slowly mix in cold water, enough to make a double-crust pie.

Roll out the bottom crust, transfer to the pie pan by loosely wrapping it around the rolling pin, patch cracks, and fill it with whatever fruit you are using. In my case, it’s raspberries picked from our patch, tossed with sugar, cornstarch and a dash of cinnamon.

Next matriarch: A cheerful saint at my church in Ohio, who had home schooled five children. Once I went to Sunday dinner at her house. She referred to her ability to get a full dinner on the table within an hour of getting home from church as “the forty-minute miracle.” She also told me this:

“When I first got married and started cooking meals, I thought that over time, I would become a gourmet cook. That didn’t happen, but what happened was that I got faster.”

Me too, Ruth. Me too. You get faster, which makes things easier, but unfortunately you only get faster at the things you actually practice.

On to the lattice.

Roll out the second half of the pie crust dough and cut it into strips, like this:

I don’t cut all my strips beforehand. I just make them as I go.

Take a shorter strip and put it across one side of the pie. Take another short strip and put it down at a right angle, so they cross.

And now, the magic happens.

As you add strips, you will need to gently fold back the ones that you want to go over the new strip. Here I am lifting one, to illustrate.

As you add new strips going at right angles to each other, keep folding back every other strip when you place a new one. Then put them back after the new strip has been placed. That’s how you get a weaving effect.

Like this.

The last matriarch I have to thank is whoever planted the large raspberry patch in the yard of the farmhouse we rent. It was probably the older farmer and his wife we rent from. By the time we got here, the bushes were already producing, keeping me busy picking throughout July.

All ready! Scatter small pieces of butter over the crust and put aluminum foil around the edge for the first 25 minutes of baking. Don’t forget to put a baking sheet on the rack underneath the pie. If you have done this right, molten raspberry juice will bubble out, and your smoke alarm will go off. You want the raspberry napalm to fall and burn onto the baking sheet, not the bottom of your oven.

Enjoy!

The Top Five Best-Smelling Trees

On By Jennifer Mugrage4 Comments

5. All other pines besides Ponderosa. Especially creosote.

4. Ponderosa pines. They have a sweet smell that’s natural and can’t be faked.

3. Trees in the aspen/poplar/cottonwood family. They have a slightly spicy smell that lets you know you are outside.

2. Sycamore trees. They have wide-spaced branches and flaky bark that make them terrible for climbing, and their foliage isn’t particularly beautiful, but their smell …? Amazing. Instantly calms me whenever I am near them.

  1. Russian olives trees. Just the perfect balance of sweet, fresh, and smelling like water. Most of the time, their smell is not as strong as the other trees on this list, but for the few weeks in the year that it is, I’m in heaven whenever I am outdoors.

Notice that none of the trees on this list grow in the tropics. Sorry, tropical jungle! I have lived there, and while the tropical jungle may have much to recommend it (it is certainly better than the tropical city!), I am sorry to say that it does not smell good. Its trees and bugs are generally weird-smelling or stinky. And don’t get me started on the odor of unprocessed rubber!

Wooly Mullein at Lava Hot Springs

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

A few hours’ drive from my house, in the mountains of southern Idaho, we have a hot springs attraction. The pools are tucked into a niche between the town on one side and the highway on the other.

The photograph above was taken from the east end of the little canyon. Behind me, as I took this photograph, was something called “The Grotto.” It consists of paths and small garden areas winding along the lava-rock hillside. The rocks are basalt, but covered with mineral deposits from the days when the springs gushed out over here.

My husband and I went to the town of Lava, which is very touristy and has a lot of old-timey, cowboy-themed restos and hotels, back in September. I had never walked in The Grotto before. (Usually, I’m just either going in the hot springs or not going in the hot springs.)

But on this particular September, The Grotto was simply alive with the most Wooly Mullein I had ever seen in one place! Wooly Mullein are those plants you see with broad, pale-green, pillowy-looking basal leaves and (in some cases, not all) a tall spike of a flower.

I blogged about these plants a few years ago, when I had photographed one growing in a farmer’s field near my house. According to Central Rocky Mountain Wildflowers, “They are biennial plants, growing the first year as a round cluster of large radiating basal leaves covered with thick, woolly hair. The second year, they rapidly grow a 1 – 6′ tall stalk, crowded with yellow flowers in a spike arrangement. Then, with all its energy expended, the plant dies.” (p. 157)

“This introduced weed colonizes disturbed places from the valleys and plains to montane forests.” (ibid) Look at how many of them there are! They must love the dry climate.

But Wooly Mullein is not just a weed. “Dioscorides, the Greek physician to the Roman armies in the first century, used mullein to treat coughs, scorpion stings, eye problems, tonsillitis, and toothache. Today, herbalists value it as a medicinal herb for asthma, bronchitis, coughs, throat inflammation, earache, and various other respiratory complaints.” (ibid) My copy of Prepper’s Natural Medicine confirms this.

Hence, Lava is really the place to come if you’re ill in apocalypse situation! The Shoshoni Indians would bathe in and drink the hot-spring water to cure illnesses, plus there is all this mullein here. Still, it might be better to plan ahead.

I walked down this path and sat on a bench set into the rock wall. Lo and behold, up in a niche was Spiderman watching over me! Lava truly does have everything you might need!

Mop Cap

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

Early this fall (or late this past summer), when I found out my class of schoolchildren was to have a Founding Fathers celebration, I knew I needed to make a mop cap (some people also call them mob caps) so I could dress as a colonial woman.

I already owned a number of full skirts, and I’d purchased a corset at the recent Fantasy Faire that could be adapted to appear 17th- or 18th-century.

I found this easy sewing pattern at Patti’s Place (thanks, Patti!) by searching on Pinterest, my one-stop shop for all things artistic, creative anachronistic, self-sufficient, and conspiratorial. The pattern was so simple I could sew it by hand, which was good because I don’t own a working sewing machine.

I’m delighted with how it turned out. It can be worn with any hairstyle. If you wear the hair up, it looks rather Martha Washington. If you wear the hair in braids, or loose, underneath it, you’re looking more Madame Defarge. I think you all know where my loyalties lie.

I created a mop cap craft for the little girls in my class based upon this pattern, and they looked darling. I’ll post pictures of my costume from the event if I ever get ahold of them. You need a tight-fitting bodice, a full skirt, ruffled cuffs at the elbows, and a shawl tied low on the shoulders to complete the look.

My costume wardrobe now includes 10,000 B.C., 1550 A.D. and 1776 A.D. There’s a rather large gap in there. I’ll update you further as the occasion arises.