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.